If your top three affiliates drive most of your sales, one of them going quiet can sink your launch. If they only drive 15 to 20 percent, you will barely notice. On Michael Hyatt’s biggest leaderboard, with Jeff Walker and Stu McLaren both promoting, the top three never cracked 14 percent of sales.
By Matt McWilliams, four-time Affiliate Manager of the Year and founder of AffiliateHQ. More about Matt.
I’ve heard the claim for years. Ninety percent of your sales come from your top three to five affiliates. I heard someone say it from stage at a conference, stated as fact, not opinion. Then I looked at my own launches, and the math didn’t come close to holding up.
That claim matters more if you’re the business owner than if you’re the affiliate manager running the day to day. A manager who believes it builds a launch plan around three or four relationships and calls it strategy. An owner who believes it signs off on that plan without asking what happens the week one of those three stops answering emails.
Is it true that 90 percent of sales come from your top affiliates?
No. On my biggest leaderboards, the top names never got near that share, and a dropout barely moved the final number.
I ran Michael Hyatt’s launch for 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever with a leaderboard full of names most marketers would recognize. Jeff Walker. Pat Flynn. Stu McLaren. John Lee Dumas. Ray Edwards. Sally Hogshead. Every one of them had run a seven figure launch of their own. And yet the top three affiliates accounted for only 14 percent of sales. The top 10 accounted for 27 percent. More than 500 affiliates made at least one sale.
The 90 percent line is a cop out. It lets a manager skip the hard work of recruiting broadly, then blame a bad launch on luck instead of a thin bench.
I laid out the full breakdown of these leaderboard numbers on the podcast, including why the 90 percent rule doesn’t match what I’ve seen run through a tracking dashboard. The episode, 7 Affiliate Management Lies That Will Kill Your Program, covers six more assumptions that cost programs real money.
What happened when Hyatt lost four of his top affiliates?
Nothing, as far as revenue was concerned. The program grew anyway.
The next year, we lost four of the original top seven: numbers two, three, five, and seven. Those four affiliates had combined for only about 11 percent of total sales the year before, and the affiliates we’d recruited in the meantime more than covered the gap. We didn’t lose ground. We gained it.
That’s the part the 90 percent claim gets backward. The risk isn’t losing a top affiliate. The risk is never recruiting enough new ones to make their absence a rounding error instead of a crisis.
Does this hold for every launch, or only Hyatt’s?
It held for Ray Edwards too, with almost identical numbers.
His leaderboard carried Jeff Walker, Jeff Bullas, Don Miller, Michael Hyatt, Dan Miller, Craig Ballantyne, Chandler Bolt, and John Nemo, another lineup of recognizable names. The top three drove 19 percent of sales. The top 10 drove 34 percent, just over a third.
Mike Kim won that contest. The year before, he’d made five sales on a similar launch. This time he made 50, enough to pass Jeff Walker on the leaderboard. He didn’t have the biggest list in the room. He kept promoting after the bigger names had sent their one email and moved on.
The Hyatt and Ray Edwards numbers both come from the same conversation, where I walked through how we built both of those leaderboards from a handful of affiliates into hundreds. The Affiliate Army Playbook covers the recruiting decisions behind both launches, year by year.
How did Hyatt build a leaderboard deep enough to survive a dropout?
By recruiting hard before the depth was visible, not after.
Hyatt’s program grew from a $300,000 launch to $1.25 million in a year. The affiliate count went from about 40 to well over 1,000 in that same stretch. The 500-plus affiliates making a sale and the 14 percent top three share didn’t show up by accident. They showed up because recruiting happened every month, not only in the weeks before cart close.
The resilience came from the depth. The depth came from recruiting on a schedule, long before anyone needed to find out what would happen if a top affiliate went quiet.
How do you measure your own concentration risk?
Pull your last launch or your last 90 days of affiliate revenue, rank every affiliate by sales, then add up the share from your top three and your top 10.
If your top three account for more than 30 to 40 percent of revenue, you’re carrying real risk. One affiliate leaving, getting sick, or signing with a competitor takes a visible chunk of your number with them. If your top three sit under 20 percent, you’ve already built the kind of depth that absorbs a dropout without a scramble.
Say your launch does $200,000 in total affiliate sales. If your top three affiliates account for $70,000 of that, you’re sitting at 35 percent, solidly in the risk zone. If they account for $30,000, you’re at 15 percent, closer to where Hyatt’s launch sat. Run the same division for your top 10, and you’ll know in about ten minutes whether your program looks more like Hyatt’s or more like the setup that worried me enough to write this post.
Hyatt’s and Ray Edwards’ launches both sat in the 14 to 19 percent range on the top three, and 27 to 34 percent on the top 10. That’s a useful benchmark, not a hard rule, since product price and list size change the math. How much of your total company revenue should come from affiliates in the first place is a related question worth answering separately.
What do you do if your numbers come back top heavy?
Keep your biggest affiliates close, and start recruiting broader immediately.
Don’t pull back from your top affiliates or make them feel like you’re hedging against them. Add depth instead. Setting a monthly recruiting target builds a bench over months instead of leaving you dependent on three relationships.
Screen new affiliates for signs they’ll actually promote, not only sign up and disappear. Knowing what to look for before handing someone a link saves you from counting affiliates who were never going to send traffic anyway. And building the recruiting habits that keep affiliates active matters more than any single recruiting push.
Building the kind of depth that survives a dropout starts with recruiting more broadly than most programs bother to. Your First 100 Affiliates is my free report on recruiting 604 affiliates and building a $1.1 million a month program in 18 months, recruiting email templates included.
Track your concentration number the same way you track total revenue, not as a one-time check before a launch. Reporting it to leadership as a standing line item means a drop shows up in a monthly number instead of as a surprise during your next big promotion.
If your concentration numbers came back top heavy and you need a bench built fast, don’t wait for your next launch to start fixing it. Find Affiliates Now is a five-day intensive on finding and recruiting affiliates, built for exactly this situation.
A thousand-affiliate roster concentrated in three big names carries the same risk as a roster of three. Scaling a program from seven figures into eight only reduces that risk when the growth spreads across the roster, not only the top of it.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of sales from your top affiliates is too much?
Treat 30 to 40 percent from your top three as a warning sign. On Hyatt’s and Ray Edwards’ launches, the top three never passed 19 percent, and both programs absorbed affiliates dropping out without missing a goal. If your top three carry more than a third of your launch revenue, one dropout can cost you the launch instead of a few points off the total.
Can a launch still hit its goal if a top affiliate drops out?
Yes, if the base underneath them is deep enough. When Hyatt lost four of his original top seven affiliates the next year, including numbers two, three, five, and seven, total sales didn’t drop. Those four had driven only about 11 percent of revenue between them, and affiliates recruited since then more than covered the gap. The program grew instead of shrinking.
How many affiliates do you need for a launch to be this safe?
There’s no fixed number, but Hyatt’s program had more than 500 affiliates make at least one sale on the launch where the top three drove only 14 percent. The full roster had grown past 1,000 affiliates by then. A roster concentrated in a handful of names carries the same risk whether it has three affiliates or three hundred.
Does this concentration risk apply to ongoing affiliate revenue, or only launches?
It applies year round, and it’s often worse outside launches, since a quiet drop in one affiliate’s evergreen sales can go unnoticed for months. Track your top three and top 10 affiliates’ share of monthly revenue the same way you’d track it during a launch. A slow decline from one partner is easier to miss than a dropout you can see on a live leaderboard.
Should you still prioritize your biggest affiliates if depth matters more?
Yes. Depth protects you from risk, but your biggest affiliates still drive a real share of revenue, and losing their goodwill costs you more than losing a few sales. Keep investing in those relationships. Stop building your launch plan as if they’re the only affiliates who matter, since the numbers above show they rarely carry that much weight alone.
Pull your last launch’s numbers today. Add up what your top three affiliates drove, then your top 10. If the top three carry more than 30 percent, start recruiting now, before your next launch, not during it. Keep treating your biggest affiliates well either way. Depth is what protects the number, not a reason to stop paying attention to the names already driving it.
