Sub-affiliate income calculator

What these numbers mean

A sub-affiliate tier is the closest thing this industry has to passive income, which is exactly why it gets sold badly. The headline is a percentage — five percent, for life — and the arithmetic people do in their heads is that percentage multiplied by an impressive-sounding number of referrals. The arithmetic that matters is the one that asks how many of those referrals are still earning in month nine.

The default example is deliberately unglamorous: ten referred affiliates, EUR 800 each per month, a 5% override, 8% of them dropping out each month. That is EUR 400 in month one and about EUR 3,160 over the year. Real money, and a genuinely nice thing to have attached to work you were doing anyway. Not a living, and not something to build a business plan on.

A worked example

Say you write one honest guide about getting approved and it brings in twenty new affiliates over a year. Half of them never get a site live. Of the ten that do, the average earns EUR 300 a month within six months. A 5% override on that group is EUR 150 a month — against a guide that took you two days to write and will keep working. Judge it as a slow compounding return on content you already wanted to publish, not as a channel you can force.

Now change one input: set churn to zero. The same ten affiliates now pay EUR 4,800 over twelve months instead of EUR 3,160. That EUR 1,640 gap is the entire difference between a referral-tier pitch and a referral-tier reality, and nobody selling you on one will put churn in the model.

The two mistakes people make here

Averaging only the affiliates who earn. If eight of your ten referrals earn nothing, the average monthly commission across the group is a fifth of what you would get by averaging the two who do. The number to put in the field is the one across everybody.

Promoting the tier instead of the program. A referral link that leads people into a program with a bad deal earns you five percent of a bad deal, and costs you the trust of every person who took your advice. We run a sub-affiliate model on this site and say so on the page explaining how we earn — the test we hold ourselves to is whether we would recommend the same program with no override attached.

What we would do this week

• Check whether the programs you already promote have a referral tier at all, and whether it is lifetime or windowed. Many do and never mention it.
• Put your real numbers in above with churn set honestly, then decide whether the total justifies a single dedicated page — or whether one paragraph in an existing guide is the right size of effort.
• If you do promote a tier, write the disclosure first. It takes ten minutes and it is the thing that makes the recommendation worth reading.