Kasspian’s honest read
Affiliate marketing is doable if you can build genuine audience or rank for buyer-intent searches, but a brutal grind without either — you don't own the product, the traffic, or the commission terms.
Who actually pays
You're not paid by readers; you're paid by merchants on a cut of sales you refer. That means your real customer is the affiliate program, and they can change rates or kill the program whenever they like.
Riskiest assumption
That you can get cheap, durable traffic to high-intent content. SEO can vanish in an algorithm update and paid traffic rarely clears thin commissions, so a single channel is a single point of failure.
Cheapest test first
Publish a handful of genuinely useful buyer-intent pieces in a niche you know, and watch whether any rank or convert before scaling — if you can't earn one commission from real content, volume won't save you.
The appeal is obvious: no product, no support, no inventory — just recommend things and take a cut. The catch is that everything that matters is borrowed. Google owns your traffic and can de-rank you overnight; the merchant owns the commission and routinely cuts rates or shutters programs; and the reader's trust, the one asset you actually build, takes years and dies fast if you shill. You're stacking three dependencies you don't control.
It becomes a real business when you flip it: build the audience first — a niche site, a newsletter, a channel people genuinely trust — and let affiliate links be a way to monetise attention you already earned. People who lead with the audience and recommend honestly do well. People who lead with the commission, chasing whatever pays most, build thin content that the algorithms and readers both eventually punish. Pick a niche you'd write about for free, then monetise it.
This is the read on the category. Your version isn’t the average — get the honest call on your exact idea, with live market data, in about 90 seconds.