Prior to 2010, a “link in bio” would have referred to a brief history of the 16th president of the United States. Now, it’s a full-fledged industry.
Affiliate marketing has been around for decades, and the influencer as we know it was largely built on the back of the 2000s blogging era. However, it wasn’t until Instagram became the platform du jour for creators in the mid-2010s that a cottage industry of social-specific affiliate companies really took off, with the aim of solving for the fact that Instagram posts, unlike blog posts, had no click-through or tracking capabilities. All of a sudden, “link in bio” was not just a follower directive for creators—it was a revenue opportunity for third-party platforms hoping to break down the platform’s walled garden to make it more shoppable and trackable.
But while the walled garden was a business opportunity to start, it’s posed a threat to the continued growth of affiliate companies and creators. Platforms that are friendlier to direct linking, like YouTube and Substack, meanwhile, seem to be on the rise and signal a new era beyond the link in bio.
Where it all began
Affiliate marketing and Instagram have coexisted since nearly Day 1. In 2011, one year after Instagram was released, Amber Venz Box, who started her career as ablogger, co-founded the affiliate platform LTK (which at the time was known as LiketoKnow.it and RewardStyle), which is now regarded as one of the original social commerce platforms.
“As we started rolling through the social media era, we realized that the risk of audience fragmentation was so real for our creators that maybe had started as a blog and expanded through social,” Venz Box told Marketing Brew; that risk, she said, threatened to create a “less commercially viable” creator economy.
In 2013, Venz Box told Into the Gloss that Instagram was providing the company with so much engagement and follower growth that it decided to create an additional feature that would send emails to people informing them of the products featured in the posts they liked. By 2014, it was working with brands like Vogue, BCBG, and Michael Kors on its emailing feature, which drove more than $1 million in sales in the first half of the year, per WWD. Eventually, the platform became known for re-creating the grid-style look of social media sites so users could shop specific posts more easily.
In 2017, the company released its own app that allowed users to upload screenshots of Instagram posts in order to automatically identify featured products. Today, that app largely serves a different purpose and in some ways, is competing more directly with Instagram with a scrollable feed and creator profile pages. The app aims to be a post-social social platform for creators in the face of platform volatility, Venz Box previously told Marketing Brew.
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“If you look at [Instagram] today versus 2017 and then really rewind it back to 2013, it’s not the same platform at all,” she said. “It goes by the same name. It doesn’t function the same way. It’s not engineered the same way.”
The one thing that’s remained consistent? “It does still have the same business model,” she said, “and we did know that ultimately that model would be a losing model for creators.”
Link to success?
The majority of today’s LTK transactions are happening directly on its own platform, according to Venz Box, and more than half of the company’s revenue comes from brand deals with creators, not through affiliate marketing. That’s partially because of the walled-garden effect that opened the door for third-party platforms in the first place.
“Pure affiliate play is no longer viable,” Venz Box said. “And it’s mainly because new platforms are not allowing linking out.”
Even with product tagging on Instagram, the link-in-bio trend has continued, not just on Instagram but on newer platforms like TikTok. Over the years, other affiliate platforms like ShopMy and Collective Voice (formerly known as ShopStyle Collective) have emerged, offering creators additional options when it comes to the links in their Instagram bios. ShopMy, which was released in 2020 and allows creators to curate closets, link products in social posts, and generate commissionable links, sees the greatest volume of links shared on Instagram, founder Tiffany Lopinsky told us, but link sharing on sites like Substack and YouTube is on the rise.
“Instagram makes it hard for you to leave Instagram,” she said, “whereas on YouTube and on Substack, being able to hyperlink just makes it easier.”
Instagram has slowly rolled out some tools and innovations that mirror some of the functionality of third-party affiliate platforms, to varying degrees of success. It first began testing direct product links in brand posts in 2016, years after Liketoknow.it and RewardStyle began sending product information in emails, and now allows select business and public Instagram accounts to add shopping tags on products for purchase. In 2021, Instagram tested a native affiliate marketing program, in which creators could earn a commission from sales on tagged products. It wasn’t to last: Instagram shut that program down a year later.
Overall, Lopinsky previously told us she isn’t concerned about social platforms’ efforts to emulate features from link-in-bio companies because it helps further legitimize the affiliate space.
LTK tested a partnership with TikTok that allows for direct linking from creator posts last year and is now partnering with Pinterest to cross-post top content. Whether Instagram is the next platform to embrace the “can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality? We’ll have to wait and see.
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
