Full Disclosure

Why affiliate links make us squirm - and why they shouldn't.

Full disclosure: when you clicked the link and bought the coat on my Instagram stories, there’s a chance I made money. Not a lot. Enough for a coffee, occasionally enough for the good croissant as well. But money, nonetheless - and I’d like to talk about why that sentence just made both of us slightly uncomfortable.

Because it did. There’s a specific wince reserved for the phrase ‘link in bio’ or the dreaded ‘comment SHOP to receive the link’. Nobody flinches at a billboard. Nobody feels betrayed by a perfume ad in a magazine or over on TikTok, despite the fact that it cost more than my first car. But the moment a woman you like says ‘this is the tote I’ve been loving’ and attaches an affiliate link, something curdles. Suddenly she’s not your stylish friend. She’s a saleswoman who was pretending to be your stylish friend.

Before I dismantle that feeling (and I intend to) I should probably introduce myself properly.

Sales Fairy was a content series started on Instagram, specifically Instagram stories, when I had roughly 2000 followers - a community made up almost entirely of friends, colleagues, my Mum (loyal, biased, still my most reliable engagement to this day) and nice girls I’d presumably met in club bathrooms when I was 18. I was not, in any sense of the word, a creator. I did not aspire to be a creator. (For the record, I still don’t. I remain, at my core, an oversharer with a strong love for sharing things I like, including a good bargain) I was simply the friend who found things: the coat at 40% off, the sold-out boots restocked in your size, the bargain t-shirt you could throw in the dryer 42 times. Each Sunday I would upload an Instagram story with a comment box, asking people what they wanted help shopping for. Sharing LTK links wasn’t a business strategy. It was an efficiency measure, because sending the same link individually to eleven people is a part-time job, and I already had a full-time one.

What happened next is the entire thesis of this Substack. Friends became friends of friends, friends of friends became strangers, and the links kept converting - slowly but steadily, from 1 to 10, 10 to 15 and so on. Not because I had reach, but because I was slowly building some sense of trust. Which, it turns out, is the only currency this whole model actually runs on.

I should admit, though, before you read any further: the guilt arrived before the commissions did. For a long time the links felt vaguely shameful. Why should I make money for finding something? Finding things isn’t work. Finding things was something I’d always been relied on for in friendship group chats and office lunch breaks. Then someone gently pointed out what my Sunday nights actually looked like, a question box open on stories, and me, hours deep, sourcing a black-tie wedding dress for under $200, or the perfect white shirt for the office - wide cuff, obviously - all of it unpaid and unprompted. Nonetheless, I’d convinced myself that hours spent with a laptop and phone in hand should have no price attached. Because that’s the quiet truth of it, whether we like it or not, time carries a monetary value in almost every corner of life. Nobody expects the tailor to hem for free out of enthusiasm.

A colleague reminded me I was offering a service. I’ve typed and deleted that sentence three times. It’s staying, but I want it on record that it still makes me squirm to say, and I suspect it always will. I’ve simply stopped treating the squirm as evidence of anything, beyond the fact that we’re all somewhat trained to file anything that feels like a hobby far, far away from profit.

So let me put my far more comfortable day-job hat on. (Full time brand strategy and marketing) The fashion and beauty finds are merely a chronic condition I dress up as a hobby.

Here’s what the wince is really about. Affiliate collapses two categories we’ve worked hard to keep separate in the brand world: 1) the recommendation, and 2) the advertisement. A recommendation comes from a friend and is priceless. An advertisement comes from a company and is priced. When someone you follow links her boots and earns a cut, the recommendation suddenly has a receipt attached, and we don’t like seeing those.

But here’s the thing… the receipt was always there. We just weren’t shown it. The glossy magazines we grew up trusting were never a church-and-state operation. Advertisers bought pages, and editorial warmth had a funny way of finding the brands that bought the most of them. The glowing fragrance review sitting opposite the full-page fragrance ad was we had always presumed, a coincidence. The department store ‘edit’ was a real-estate, pay-to-play negotiation. We were, and still are, being sold to constantly. The selling was simply invisible, which we mistook for its absence. Affiliate didn’t invent the transaction. It put the transaction on the table, in writing, with a disclosure attached. What we’re punishing is the visibility - which is a strange thing to punish, given visibility is the thing we consistently claim to want.

Now, the part nobody says out loud; brands love affiliate for a reason creators find slightly confronting. It keeps creators answerable.

Almost every other format of paid advertisement is paid on hope. A billboard hopes you drive past. A pop-up ad simply prays you click through. A flat-fee sponsored post gets paid whether the product is wonderful or woefully crummy. Affiliate is the one model where the brand pays after the value is delivered. No purchase, no payment, and if you return the coat, in most programs the commission is quietly clawed back too. The creator only earns if you, the consumer, keeps it. A level of accountability I deeply admire in the current brand world.

From the brand side, this changes everything, because influence has historically been measured in vibes. In any decent creator strategy, different people are hired for different jobs across the funnel: the megaphones at the top, whose scale makes a launch feel like a cultural event; the explainers in the middle, who compare the five viral blushes so you don’t have to and guide you from I’ve seen it to I want it; the closers - smaller, fiercely trusted, the ‘if she says buy it, I buy it’ accounts; and finally, the loyalists at the bottom, still wearing the thing eight months later, which reads as proof rather than promotion. All valuable. All, until recently, measured in impressions, sentiment, and the dark art of EMV (earned media value) a metric that can feel grey at the best of times. Affiliate marketing closed the loop. For the first time, a brand can see a creator’s influence not as a mood but as receipts, this person, this audience, this many carts. It is the difference between believing in influence and being able to point at it.

Which brings me to the puppeteers - the platforms between creators and brands, whose backstage antics currently outshine the show itself.

LTK is the incumbent, and credit where it’s due, founded in 2011, it invented this entire industry, and it’s been operating in Australia long enough that I was linking sale finds on it back when my audience was 80% people I went to high school with. It remains a giant - $4.1 billion in trackable annual sales, 40 million people opening the app every month. But my eyes can’t help but dart over the fence to ShopMy.

ShopMy is the challenger. Founded in 2020 and already valued at $1.5 billion, with revenue roughly tripling year on year. And its out-of-the-gate win is for the exact reason this Substack exists = transparency. On ShopMy, from inception, brands could see precisely which creators drove which sales - the receipts, itemised; where LTK historically kept a lot of that data to itself. If affiliate’s superpower is making influence measurable, the platform that shows brands the receipts will beat the platform that guards them. Every time. For now, it hasn’t properly landed in Australia (although my LinkedIn sleuthing shows they’re hiring a local team). It’s a matter of when, not if - and when it does, expect the local landscape to reshuffle quickly, because Australian brands are no less addicted to proof than anyone else.

Is the model corruptible? Obviously. The commission doesn’t care about taste! It pays just as happily for the fourteenth identical haul as for one considered link. Which is why my rules are boring and non-negotiable. I only link what I own, use, or would buy if my dog didn’t insist on regular vet checks and I didn’t have a penchant for wine bars, and I will always tell you when something isn’t worth your money. This year alone I have talked multiple people out of items they’ve requested I find for them - objectively terrible business, and that’s exactly the point. Recommend rubbish and people stop clicking. Recommend rubbish and people stop clicking. In affiliate, trust isn't just the currency. It's the credit limit.

So the next time a link makes you wince, remember, you were always being advertised to. The only new development is that you can finally see the receipt. I’d rather show you mine.

If you feel like hearing more about the world of affiliate marketing, I also discussed this with my co-host Rhiannon Joyce on the Style-ish podcast - you can listen here:

and if you feel like checking out the Sales Fairy finds and my personal favourite wardrobe items they’re all linked below:
https://www.shopltk.com/explore/MaddisonSullivanThorpe https://shopmy.us/shop/maddisonsullivanthorpe