impact.com today announced substantial growth across its commerce partnership marketing platform, powered by accelerating adoption of creator, affiliate, and B2B channels as brands abandon traditional advertising in favor of relationship-driven commerce. The company projects annual recurring revenue exceeding $270 million as it closes its fiscal year ending January 31, 2026, representing approximately 20% year-over-year growth.
The New York-based platform processed close to $120 billion in partner-referred gross merchandise value and over $5 billion in gross transactional value during 2025, according to the company's announcement on January 20, 2026. Nearly 350,000 active partnerships operated through the platform during the year, with more than 3,500 new customers joining including New Balance, Hydrojug, Udemy, and Upside.
"People no longer trust ads - they trust communities," said David A. Yovanno, CEO of impact.com. "And the brands that win today are reimagining performance marketing by showing up where that trust already lives, by partnering with the creators, advocates, and other commerce content publishers shaping what people see, share, and buy."
The performance reflects structural shifts affecting the $600 billion global performance marketing industry. Brands spent over $1 trillion on advertising globally in 2025, with more than $600 billion flowing into performance channels including paid search, paid social, and programmatic display. Marketing costs have surged while consumer trust in traditional advertising channels continues declining, creating conditions for partnership-driven approaches to gain substantial market share.
Cyber Week research from impact.com documented how shoppers concentrated 31% of total spending on Black Friday while reserving Cyber Monday for final purchases. Creator-driven revenue surged 51% year over year during the shopping period, while technology partners supporting price comparison and validation saw 79% increases in transaction volume.
The data demonstrates the growing importance of trusted voices in guiding consumer decisions. Traditional advertising effectiveness continues declining as AI-powered search features reduce publisher traffic and advertising opportunities. Publishers facing mounting pressure from AI-generated search summaries are diversifying revenue streams, with creator partnerships and affiliate relationships emerging as critical alternatives.
The shopping behavior patterns revealed selective, value-driven consumers increasingly reliant on recommendations from sources they trust rather than brand messaging. This shift has profound implications for marketing budget allocation, forcing brands to reconsider traditional paid media investments in favor of partnerships with creators and commerce content publishers who maintain authentic audience relationships.
The company deepened AI investments through multiple initiatives during 2025. Ask impact, a conversational intelligence chatbot embedded within the platform, delivers high-performance partnership recommendations and analytics in real time. Built on impact.com's commerce dataset spanning billions of e-commerce transactions, the platform's AI models gain scale, diversity, and precision needed to reliably surface predictive insights tied to incremental revenue, lifetime value, and ROI.
This data advantage extends into impact.com's strategic investment in Evertune, a pioneer in Generative Engine Optimization and AI marketing. The partnership helps brands shape how they appear in AI-powered search results. Evertune analyzes millions of AI model responses to understand how large language models interpret, rank, and recommend brands, then provides actionable guidance to improve visibility and performance through integration with impact.com.
"Large, high-quality data sets are the foundation of trustworthy, high-impact LLM outputs - and impact.com's data scale is a critical competitive edge," according to the company's statement. The emphasis on data quality reflects broader industry recognition that AI capabilities depend fundamentally on underlying training data scope and accuracy.
impact.com unified its product ecosystem during 2025 by launching base versions of Creator and Advocate solutions integrated with its core Performance offering at no additional cost to customers. This expansion provides seamless management of all partnership types - from creators to affiliates to customer advocates - on a single platform.
Performance Campaigns launched within the Performance product, enabling brands to hire partners for content creation and posting in placement or media buy formats. Social Listening capabilities expanded in Creator, with each listener now tracking up to 10 keywords, hashtags, or mentions, up from the previous limit of three. Earned Media Value became available in Creator reports, enabling brands to assign custom dollar values to impressions and engagements.
The Advocate product added the Shopify Post-Checkout Widget, allowing Shopify brands to promote referral programs immediately after checkout - identified as one of the most effective moments to drive engagement. The platform also added features to automatically sync discount codes to Shopify.
Publisher experience improvements included the "Brands to Work With Instantly" section of the partner dashboard. Partners now see more brands on the list, curated based on impact.com's expansive dataset. Partners can more easily discover top products without leaving the brand slide-out, accelerating high-performing product discovery.
The partnership marketing ecosystem experienced significant disruption during late 2025 and early 2026, with the Honey browser extension facing termination from multiple major affiliate networks. impact.com suspended Honey from its Discovery Marketplace following investigation into standdown violations that concealed attribution manipulation from testers.
According to a letter sent to impact.com partners from Yovanno, the action followed "a thorough investigation" that determined Honey violated platform policies regarding attribution practices and compliance testing. The suspension occurred days after Rakuten Advertising terminated Honey, cutting the extension's access to approximately 2,000 retail merchants including Walmart.
The enforcement actions demonstrated industry willingness to remove high-volume publishers for compliance violations, even when such removals create substantial short-term revenue impacts. IAB Australia released an affiliate program compliance framework on November 27, 2025, establishing standards for program integrity, fraud prevention, and transaction validation across partnership marketing programs.
impact.com invested in strengthening global presence during 2025. The company welcomed Jessica Breslav as its first Chief Customer Officer and promoted Justin Morrison to Chief Revenue Officer, moves that fueled a 20% increase in new logo bookings and 23% expansion in sales headcount.
Anthony Clements joined as UK country manager, while the company expanded with a new Madrid office including the hiring of Head of Sales Spain Phillip Danielopol. Planned upgraded spaces in six major cities will strengthen collaboration across the company's 1,400-plus employees in 20 countries.
The investments reflect confidence in sustained market expansion for partnership-driven commerce approaches. As traditional paid advertising channels face mounting challenges, companies are reallocating budgets toward partnerships that provide measurable returns and authentic audience engagement.
The company's Partnerships Experience Academy - the first and largest free partnerships certification program - surpassed 45,000 learners worldwide. The Academy Coaching Program expanded to over 100 participating agencies, with a new Agency Partner Portal launched to support collaboration and growth.
impact.com earned more than 30 industry awards in 2025. Highlights included winning Best Affiliate Marketing Program at the Digiday Technology Awards for its partnership with Carhartt, being named Best Overall Martech Company by the Martech Breakthrough Awards, and receiving top recognition by the AVA Digital Awards, Marcom Awards, and Signal Awards for branded storytelling for its Partnership Economy podcast.
The podcast approaches 475,000 downloads in its sixth season. Additional client and agency campaign recognition came through work with Tombras and LaserAway, Virgin Australia and Silverbean, Skyscanner and Layla, Acceleration Partners and TikTok, Hamilton Beach, and others, as part of the US Partnership Awards, Performance Marketing Awards, and Global Performance Marketing Awards.
impact.com published influential research throughout 2025 including its Global State of Affiliate Marketing report, which surveyed marketers, publishers, and creators worldwide revealing key shifts in partnership evolution. The 2025 Mid-Year Industry Benchmark report provided research-driven consumer behavior insights, while the Global Creator Shopping Survey produced in partnership with eMarketer documented creator influence on purchase decisions.
The Prime Day 2025 performance report and 2025 eCommerce Influencer Marketing in Southeast Asia report provided data-driven insights helping brands navigate partnership-led growth. These research initiatives position impact.com as thought leader in the partnership economy while providing customers with strategic intelligence for program optimization.
Semrush achieved a 400% increase in new affiliate partner registrations within six months of migrating from its proprietary system to impact.com's partnership management platform, demonstrating the platform's ability to address technical limitations and attribution challenges that hinder growth under legacy infrastructure.
Flagship Partnerships Experience events reached record scale in 2025, bringing together over 2,000 attendees and 140 speakers across events in Austin, London, Sydney, and Shanghai. The events connected participants across the partnership ecosystem, facilitating knowledge exchange and business development opportunities.
The event expansion reflects growing recognition of partnerships as essential marketing channel. As creator-driven content displaces professionally produced media and consumers increasingly seek authentic recommendations, brands require venues for connecting with potential partners and learning partnership marketing best practices.
Trackonomics Essentials launched for partners, allowing publishers to connect accounts from any of the top 25 affiliate networks, grab tracking links, and view program-wide reporting without logging into multiple platforms one at a time. This consolidation addresses publisher pain points around managing partnerships across fragmented network infrastructure.
The publisher-focused improvements recognize that partnership success depends on both brand and publisher experience. Publishers operating multiple partnerships gravitate toward platforms offering superior interfaces and reporting capabilities. Enhanced discovery features and streamlined workflows reduce friction in partnership formation and management.
impact.com serves over 5,000 global brands including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L'Oréal, and Fanatics, powering more than 350,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results. The platform's scale provides network effects where brands and publishers both benefit from expanded partnership opportunities and refined matching algorithms.
The company positions itself as the leading commerce partnership marketing platform transforming how businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships.
Award-winning products - Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral) - unify every partner type into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands appear where trust already exists rather than attempting to build it through traditional advertising.
The partnership economy continues expanding as traditional advertising faces mounting challenges. Newsletter advertising adoption reached 64% of marketers in 2025, with spending surging 40% as brands seek alternatives to walled gardens. Podcast advertising spending surged 26% as gaming advertisers led growth in the channel.
These patterns reflect broader movement toward partnership-based approaches across marketing channels. Brands facing rising acquisition costs, declining referral traffic from AI search features, and intensified media scrutiny are reallocating budgets toward partnerships that provide measurable outcomes and authentic audience connections.
YouTube expanded its affiliate program with agency partnerships across nine global markets on June 9, 2025, enabling creators to earn commissions when viewers purchase tagged products. The expansion signals platform recognition that commerce-driven content monetization requires specialized support for effective product integration and audience engagement.
impact.com's 2025 performance demonstrates that partnership marketing has transitioned from experimental channel to core component of marketing strategy. The 20% revenue growth, 51% increase in creator-driven holiday transactions, and addition of 3,500 new customers validate the partnership economy's sustainability as marketing channel rather than temporary trend.
The company's investments in AI capabilities, global expansion, product unification, and education infrastructure position it for continued growth as brands increasingly recognize that consumer trust resides in communities and relationships rather than advertising messages. As marketing costs continue rising and traditional channels face structural challenges, partnership approaches offer brands measurable, scalable alternatives for reaching audiences where trust already exists.
Who: impact.com, the world's leading commerce partnership marketing platform serving over 5,000 global brands including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L'Oréal, and Fanatics, announced the results with CEO David A. Yovanno leading the company's expansion across its 1,400-plus employees in 20 countries.
What: The company reported substantial growth across financial and operational metrics including projected annual recurring revenue exceeding $270 million (up approximately 20% year-over-year), close to $120 billion in partner-referred gross merchandise value, over $5 billion in gross transactional value, nearly 350,000 active partnerships, more than 3,500 new customers, 51% year-over-year increase in creator-driven revenue during Cyber Week, unified product ecosystem integrating Creator and Advocate solutions with Performance offering, AI investments including ask impact conversational intelligence chatbot and strategic investment in Evertune for generative engine optimization, global expansion with new leadership appointments including first Chief Customer Officer Jessica Breslav and Chief Revenue Officer Justin Morrison, and more than 30 industry awards recognizing technology leadership and client success.
When: The announcement occurred on January 20, 2026, covering the company's 2025 fiscal year performance as it approaches January 31, 2026, fiscal year end, with specific product launches, partnerships, research publications, and events occurring throughout 2025.
Where: New York-based impact.com operates globally with expanded presence including new Madrid office, planned upgraded spaces in six major cities, and flagship Partnerships Experience events in Austin, London, Sydney, and Shanghai reaching over 2,000 attendees and 140 speakers across locations.
Why: The results demonstrate fundamental marketing transformation from transactional performance to relationship-driven growth as consumers increasingly distrust traditional advertising while trusting communities and creator recommendations, with brands allocating more of the $600 billion global performance marketing budget toward partnership channels that provide measurable outcomes and authentic audience connections amid rising marketing costs, declining consumer trust in traditional channels, AI-driven traffic reductions for publishers, and mounting evidence that creator-driven commerce approaches drive superior engagement and conversion compared to paid advertising.
