affiliate

A Google-branded shopping cart absorbing scattered coupon codes while faded coupon-site storefronts dissolve behind a broken affiliate link chain

Google's Universal Cart Finds the Deal Before You Reach a Coupon Site

Google's Universal Cart, unveiled at I/O on May 19, 2026, lets shoppers add products to one Google-managed cart from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, then hunts for deals and price drops automatically before checkout. The threat to coupon and deal sites is structural, not competitive. If the

Amazon Cut Affiliate Commissions Up to 50% and Killed the Milestone Bonus

Amazon cut Associates commissions by as much as 50% between late 2025 and March 2026 without announcing the change publicly, and eliminated the milestone bonuses that rewarded top publishers. Adweek confirmed the cuts with seven publishers and partners who learned about them in private account-manager conversations. The audit worth running

Photo collage of a creator video podcast mic, broken measurement ruler and scattered attribution charts marking Amazon Wondery's TV-upfront measurement gap

Wondery's Revenue Lead Walked Back Amazon's TV-Replacement Podcast Pitch

Amazon pitched creator video podcasts like New Heights and Armchair Expert as the next TV network at its 2026 Upfront on May 11. Four days later, Wondery's head of revenue Angie More told Digiday that fixing measurement is a multi-year project, naming attribution across non-owned platforms as the

Target Forked Its Creator Program Because Reach and Sales Won't Share a Brief

Target shut down its 2023 affiliate program in early May 2026 and replaced it with two separate creator programs on staggered launch dates. Club Target opened May 1 as a gamified, six-tier program for nano-creators with a 500-follower minimum, and Target Ambassadors followed May 6 as an invite-only LTK partnership

Beast Industries Wants $44B of Programmatic Creator Buys, Not Influencer Slots

Beast Industries presented to advertisers on May 12, 2026, pitching a two-sided creator marketplace built on Vyro, the October-2025 distribution engine routing branded content across 100,000+ vetted microcreators on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. CEO Jeff Housenbold framed it as solving three things the creator economy has missed: attribution, predictability,

GitHub repo, extension permissions, affiliate redirect chain diagram, and Rakuten and Honey logos overlapping at center, illustrating the open-source standdown SDK release.

Honey Is Back on Rakuten the Same Day Rakuten Shipped an SDK to Police It

Rakuten Rewards published an open-source TypeScript SDK on GitHub in May 2026 that lets browser extensions detect prior affiliate referrals and stand down before claiming commission. The same day, PayPal's Honey was confirmed back live on Rakuten Advertising's network, four months after a January 12 termination

Colin Rocker Took Equity in Favikon Because 80% of Creator Deals Pay Under $300

Colin Rocker, a 420,000-follower career creator whose income runs 85 to 90 percent brand sponsorships (Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Ally Bank), took his first equity stake in May 2026 with creator-marketing platform Favikon. The trigger is structural. About 80 percent of US influencer deals close under $300, and total US