Affiliate and referral programmes

Affiliate income is the most oversold second stream in this industry. It is real, it is genuinely passive once it is running, and for most creators it will never come close to what an hour of streaming pays. The people telling you otherwise are, almost without exception, being paid to tell you.

It is worth doing when it is a natural extension of what you already recommend — a toy you actually use, a platform you actually stream on, a site your audience is already asking about. It is worth very little when it is a link dump on a page nobody reads.

How to read an affiliate offer

Six terms decide what an offer is worth. The percentage is only the first.

• Revshare or CPA. Revshare pays a percentage of what your referral spends, potentially forever. CPA pays a fixed amount once, when they sign up or make a first purchase. Revshare rewards a small, loyal, spending audience; CPA rewards volume.
• Of gross or of net. Chaturbate's 20%, for example, is calculated on the platform's net revenue after payment processing fees, not on the sticker price the user paid. Processing typically runs 5–10%, so a "20%" revshare is nearer 18% of what your referral actually handed over.
• The attribution window. "Lifetime" means you keep earning from that user indefinitely and is the standard on the cam programmes. A 30-day cookie means you earn from what they spend this month and nothing after. This single term can be worth more than the percentage.
• The minimum payout. $50 is forgiving. $100 is normal. If your realistic monthly commission is $20, a $100 minimum means being paid every five months, which is a materially different product.
• The payment terms. Weekly, bi-weekly, Net-15, Net-30 — plus the hold period on top. Money earned today can easily be money received in six weeks.
• The payment methods, and whether they work where you live. Paxum, ePayService, wire, crypto and PayPal all have country restrictions, and the list that works for adult payouts is short and changes.

What the major programmes pay

Publicly stated terms, checked September 2026. Ranges are tier ladders or offer-dependent rates, not negotiating positions — assume the bottom until your dashboard says otherwise.

The programme names above are referral links, tagged so we are credited if you sign up through one. They cost you nothing and change nothing about the terms you get. The rows without links are ones we have no relationship with — they are in the table because leaving them out would make it a worse table.

Candy.ai is the one row you can reach two ways: directly through its own programme, or as an offer inside CrakRevenue, which is itself a row above. The commission is broadly the same either way; the payment terms are not, because through a network you are on the network's schedule and minimums rather than the advertiser's. If you are already running CrakRevenue offers, consolidating there can mean hitting one payout threshold instead of two — which, on the numbers most creators are working with, matters more than a couple of points of commission.

Note how differently the last two rows attribute. The cam programmes are lifetime: refer someone once and you earn from them indefinitely. OurDream has no cookie window at all — attribution is last-touch and fixed the moment the user creates an account, so a click that doesn't convert into a signup in that session is worth nothing later. Neither is better; they reward completely different work. Lifetime rewards trust, signup-attribution rewards being the last thing someone read before they decided.

Watch the minimums on that row too. $100 is ordinary, but the $1,000 crypto threshold is very high — if crypto is your only workable payout method, that is the number that decides whether the programme is worth your time, not the commission rate. Payment methods there are also tier-gated: PayPal at every level, crypto and bank transfer only higher up.

Which model suits which creator

You have a small, devoted audience

Take revshare with lifetime attribution, every time. Two hundred regulars who trust you and spend consistently are worth far more on a lifetime percentage than on a one-off bounty, and the income compounds instead of resetting each month.

You push large volumes of cold traffic

CPA usually wins. A fixed payment per signup converts volume into money immediately, and it does not depend on strangers becoming spenders. This is a different job from camming, and it is where most of the "make money with adult affiliate links" advice is actually aimed — at media buyers, not at creators.

You are recommending physical products

Toy and hardware programmes pay a one-off commission on a purchase, which behaves like CPA. Feeliate — which runs Kiiroo alongside Feelme AI and Islive — pays 10–25% depending on the product, with a $100 minimum payout. It does not publish its cookie window, which you should ask about before you send traffic rather than after.

Run that $100 floor against your own numbers first. At 15% on a $150 toy you are earning roughly $22 a sale, so the threshold is four or five sales — comfortable if your audience buys hardware, and the exact trap described in minimums you will never reach if it doesn't.

Either way, recommend only what you genuinely use. This audience detects a paid recommendation faster than any other, and the reputational cost of one bad one outlasts the commission by years.

You are just starting

Do almost none of this. One or two links to platforms you already stream on, in your link-in-bio, and nothing else. Affiliate income before you have an audience is a way of spending attention you do not yet have.

The five traps

• Minimums you will never reach. A $100 threshold on $15 a month means the money exists on a dashboard and not in your account. Check the minimum against a realistic estimate, not a hopeful one.
• Negative carryover. Some networks carry a negative balance from chargebacks or refunds into the next period, so a bad month follows you. Ask whether the balance resets. It is a fair question and the answer tells you a lot.
• "Lifetime" that is not lifetime. Read what ends attribution. Some programmes end it if the user clears cookies and returns direct; some end it if the user is inactive for a set period; some end it if you are inactive.
• Payment methods you cannot use. Sort this out before you send a single click. Being owed $400 you cannot receive is a specific and avoidable misery.
• Terms that let them not pay you. Every network reserves the right to withhold for fraud, which is reasonable. Look at how broadly it is defined and whether there is any appeal, because with no leverage and no contract of your own, the terms are the only protection you have.

Why the rate you are offered isn't the rate that exists

Public rates are the default, not the ceiling. On most programmes — Chaturbate's flat 20% is the notable exception — revshare percentages, CPA amounts and payment terms all move at volume, because affiliate managers are budgeted to win volume and a single creator brings none.

That is not a trick, it is just how the market prices. It does mean a solo creator applying cold gets the public rate more or less permanently, and that the difference between the public rate and the negotiated one is often larger than the difference between two programmes.

It is also, transparently, the argument for what we do: we negotiate once for several hundred creators and everyone gets the negotiated rate. You still apply directly and are still paid directly by the programme — we never sit between you and your money.

What we earn, specifically

So you can weigh everything above properly:

• We are paid referral commission by the programmes we introduce members to, out of their marketing budgets. It is never deducted from anything you earn.
• We are not paid by you, in any circumstance. No fee, no commission, no revenue share, no upsell.
• You can use everything else and take no deal at all. The marketing pack, the weekly promo slot, the buddy system and the founders' room do not depend on you signing up to anything in this table.
• We have left programmes out of this page where we thought the terms were bad for creators, including ones that pay us.

The full version of how the money works is on the how we earn section of the homepage, and it is deliberately the least flattering page on the site.

Related reading: cam site payouts, agency contract red flags and accounts & payments.