Amazon cuts affiliate revenue in some categories and eliminates volume pricing in favor of a flat rate of commission
Amazon is a powerful partner, but as book publishers have learned, it can also be a fickle one. — When digital advertising rates are falling and e-commerce is rising …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 move fits a long arc of Amazon resetting partner economics unilaterally. Publishers had already learned how little leverage they hold: after Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster won the right to set ebook prices in their deal with Amazon, all three still reported declining ebook revenues in the settlement's aftermath.
The affiliate program is the same dependency expressed in advertising terms — with digital ad rates falling and e-commerce rising, publishers route commerce revenue through Amazon, and Amazon sets the take rate. Two years later it was reportedly in talks to pay big US publishers to expand internationally to widen its affiliate reach, showing the program is both a squeeze and a subsidy depending on what Amazon needs.
First-order effects
- Affiliate publishers in the affected categories take an immediate revenue cut, and high-volume sites lose the tiered rates that rewarded scale — their per-sale economics flatten overnight with no renegotiation.
- For Amazon, the change simplifies its cost structure and removes an incentive it no longer needs: at its scale, top affiliates will keep sending traffic regardless of the volume bonus.
Second-order effects
- Content sites dependent on affiliate income are pushed to diversify monetization — more display ads or rival commerce programs — just as the related coverage shows Amazon separately pressuring vendors on ad placement and wholesale prices by blocking ads for unprofitable products.
- The precedent compounds: when Amazon cut affiliate commissions again by category in April 2020 with grocery rates dropping from 5% to 1%, it confirmed these resets are repeatable, making affiliate revenue a structurally unreliable line item for publishers.
Third-order effects
- Unilateral, category-by-category repricing of partners is exactly the seller-leverage pattern antitrust experts flagged when Amazon made items harder to find if priced lower elsewhere drawing scrutiny of its seller influence — partner-economics control becomes a regulatory question, not just a commercial one.
- If the pattern holds, commerce-linked publishing consolidates around whoever owns demand: publishers become traffic suppliers negotiating from weakness, while the platform captures margin migration on both the retail and the referral side.
The trend: As e-commerce displaces falling display-ad rates, platforms like Amazon are repeatedly and unilaterally resetting the take rates paid to the publishers and sellers who feed them demand.