PI LIVE Panel: 10x Growth Means 26% Annual Expansion

Tenfold growth of the affiliate industry means compounding at roughly 26% year on year — a benchmark no platform has hit consistently, Todd Crawford told a rare leaders panel at PI LIVE 2026. That number framed the whole session: the mechanics that built this channel won't carry it to 10x.

The panel gathered Adam Ross, Santi Pierini, Sean Sewell, Todd Crawford and moderator Jennifer Goodwin, who pushed them past diplomacy onto the sector's existential question. Consumer discovery is shifting into automated assistants, journeys are fragmenting across unowned surfaces, and attribution is getting harder to defend to financial controllers.

Santi Pierini set the tone: "I see us as partners. We can keep battling over crumbs, or we can make this industry larger. We're at a renaissance point in affiliate marketing."

What's wrong with last-click CPA?

Everything structural, according to the panel. Adam Ross didn't mince words: "We built the industry on last-click CPA, and it is a prison." Last-click CPA (paying only the partner credited with the final click before conversion) gave the sector accountability, Ross conceded, but it caps the budgets brands will allocate and ignores value delivered higher up the funnel.

Sean Sewell added that rewarding only the last observable action was already flawed, and AI is widening the crack into a chasm. When intelligent agents guide consumers long before a transaction, a single final click no longer reflects commercial reality.

Crawford went further, calling the last-click winner fundamentally arbitrary. In most affiliate programs only one partner gets paid, leaving every other contributor uncompensated. The real constraint, he argued, is a structural inability to spend brand budgets quickly and flexibly.

Why isn't the market actually growing?

Crawford's math anchored the 10x premise. Unlike search or social, which sit behind centralised gatekeepers like Google and Meta, partnerships split across distinct networks. When a hundred-million-dollar program migrates between networks, market share shifts but the sector doesn't expand by a pound.

Pierini has watched platforms spend two years "swapping logos" while their collective share of enterprise marketing budgets shrinks. Billions flow into digital advertising annually; affiliate fights over the residual. His advice: look outward at where consumers actually spend time — brand-led, social-led and AI-led channels.

Ross put it bluntly: the genuine competitor in 2026 is big tech. For enlightened marketers, partnerships are a lifeline outside the walled gardens, offering the transparent control monopolies refuse to give.

How does the channel win CFO budgets?

By satisfying the CFO. Crawford noted CFOs increasingly run MMMs (marketing mix models, statistical analyses of channel contribution) and incrementality testing, where affiliate sits at a data disadvantage. His fix: capture 100% of impressions alongside conversions, so the channel can be compared apples-to-apples with programmatic, display and paid social.

Ross flagged publisher data as the underused asset. Publishers hold rich audience and engagement insights, but reporting hasn't evolved at the necessary pace. Package that data in an executive-ready format and enterprise brand budgets unlock.

Is the click dead?

Not dead, but demoted, the panel agreed. Sewell said influence has migrated decisively upstream, demanding verification and governance; the click stays as a functional interaction point without its historical privilege. Pierini proposed fusing transactional clicks with layers of identity, audience and loyalty data for a fuller picture of the journey.

Ross summarised: "The last click doesn't die, it becomes part of a suite of new measurement tools."

On standards, the consensus showed fissures. Ross cautioned that formal standards move too slowly across international jurisdictions to wait for. Crawford recalled the early-2000s browser extension battles, arguing brands should set baseline rules and lean on independent infrastructure for enforcement. Pierini countered that the marketplace penalises bad actors naturally.

The panel's verdict: the mechanisms that secured the industry's first twenty-five years won't carry it through the next five. Scaling from ancillary performance tactic to dominant digital pillar means abandoning the last-click safety net for a multi-layered ecosystem of influence — a shift the leaders say must start now.