Across Singapore, rising media costs are forcing brands to interrogate which channels truly move the needle. Affiliate marketing – powered by creators, content publishers, comparison sites and brand advocates – is no longer a side experiment but a serious growth engine for a wide range of startups, SMEs and enterprises. The latest industry data shows that affiliates now contribute a meaningful share of revenue for many Singaporean brands and are set to command even larger slices of the marketing budget in the coming years.

Creators move to the heart of the affiliate mix

The most striking shift is how quickly creators have moved from “nice-to-have” to “priority partner.” Close to half of Singaporean brands now rank creators among their top affiliate partners and expect to devote a substantial share of their affiliate budgets to influencer-led activity over the next year. Rather than treating influencers purely as an awareness play, marketers are asking them to do double duty: tell compelling stories, and drive measurable performance across clicks, conversions and revenue.

That change in expectations is reshaping compensation models. Simple last-click commission structures are giving way to hybrid deals that blend flat fees with performance-based payouts, reflecting the fact that a creator might drive both upper-funnel brand impact and lower-funnel sales in the same campaign. For some brands, this has required a mindset shift: creator partnerships are now managed with the same commercial discipline as any other performance channel, with clear KPIs, test-and-learn frameworks and regular optimisation cycles.

Why this matters for Singapore’s channel strategy

For Singapore-based marketers, this evolution comes at a pivotal moment. Customer acquisition costs in paid search and paid social continue to climb, while privacy changes make deterministic tracking harder and volatile auction dynamics increase risk. Against that backdrop, affiliate and partnership programmes offer a way to tie spend more closely to outcomes: many brands already see more than a fifth of their total revenue coming through this channel, alongside improved return on ad spend and year-on-year revenue growth attributed to affiliates.

Strategically, this gives brands another lever when rebalancing channel mixes. Instead of pouring incremental budget into ever-more-expensive clicks, they can expand carefully curated partner portfolios: creators, media publishers, loyalty platforms, comparison sites and communities that already command trust with target audiences. On the publisher side, many affiliate partners still drive traffic from content and coupon sites built on WordPress and similar CMS platforms, which lowers the barrier to entry and keeps the ecosystem vibrant for both large and small players.​

How brands should plan their next phase of affiliate growth

If affiliate marketing is going to sit alongside search, social and CRM as a core growth pillar in Singapore, brands will need to professionalise how they run these programmes. The first step is clarity: define what “success” looks like across the funnel, from assisted conversions and incremental revenue to lifetime value, and align partners on those metrics. With budgets under pressure and consumer behaviour shifting, marketers also need stronger measurement frameworks that account for longer consideration cycles, multi-touch journeys and the fact that not every valuable interaction ends with a last-click conversion.

Operationally, the focus should move from one-off deals to durable ecosystems. That means investing in partner discovery and vetting, building structured onboarding and enablement (creative guidelines, product education, compliance training), and putting in place reliable tracking and data-sharing practices that respect privacy constraints. For creator-heavy strategies in particular, regular communication, transparent reporting and flexible hybrid compensation models will be crucial to retaining top partners in a competitive market. Brands that make those investments now are likely to find that affiliate marketing does more than just “add sales” – it can become a resilient, cost-efficient engine that underpins international expansion and long-term brand equity.