Market Overview

From 2024 to 2025, major affiliate marketing service providers experienced slower growth than before. This was due to budget cuts by some advertisers because of their sluggish performance, and a lower return on investment, as well as stricter assessments of key performance indicators (KPIs). Additionally, the prevalence of generative AI and changes in the search environment altered the way users obtain information, which reduced dependency on affiliate sites.
Meanwhile, robust demand continues for ecommerce mall models and specific areas, which stabilizes the entire market. These factors have resulted in the domestic affiliate marketing market reaching 437.9 billion yen in FY2024, a 6.5% increase from the previous year. It is estimated to reach 459.8 billion yen in FY2025, a 5.0% increase.

Noteworthy Topics

Impacts of AI Advancements on the Affiliate Marketing Market and ASP Sales

■ The Impact of AI Advancements on the Affiliate Marketing Market
AI technology has had a multifaceted impact on the affiliate marketing market. One positive impact is the increased efficiency in advertising creatives, sales support, and data analysis. AI reduces the time and cost of creating advertising content, thereby improving the efficiency of advertisers, media owners, and ASPs. Traditional methods required a significant amount of work and often necessitated outsourcing. Additionally, since AI improves analytical accuracy, affiliate companies' evaluations can be reevaluated, which could lead to changes in budget allocations.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of AI-powered summarization features is reducing the traffic from search results, thereby decreasing the traffic for search engine optimization (SEO) media. Looking ahead, AI will create both market opportunities and risks. 

Limited Impact on Current ASP Sales
According to interviews with affiliate companies, advancements in AI have not yet had a significant negative impact on their sales. Although the deployment of AI Overviews has reduced some traffic figures, such as organic searches and clicks, few cases of sales decline can currently be directly attributed to them.
This is because affiliate media are included in the sources for the AI summary, which is ensuring a certain level of outcome, and because the impact of AI has concentrated on SEO media, which is supplemented by other search routes, such as social media and videos.
However, some media and specific genres that rely heavily on SEO are experiencing a decline in outcomes. Therefore, the impact on these media may become more evident in the medium to long term.  

Future Outlook

The future affiliate marketing market is projected to grow moderately, as it transitions from growth to maturity and restructuring. Despite the current slowdown in growth among major affiliate service providers, Yano forecasts distinct differences in performance based on their business strategies and focus areas.
In the intensifying competition in the existing market going forward, Yano suggests that responsiveness to AI and building a leading media network are the most important areas for major ASPs to secure their competitive edge.
Nevertheless, the shopping mall model is projected to grow robustly, supported by increased e-commerce usage and conversion rates.
Based on these projections, the affiliate marketing market is expected to grow steadily in the medium term, reaching a market size of around 588.3 billion yen by FY2029, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 6%, although its previous annual growth rate of over 10% will be unlikely.  

Research Outline