Marketing War: Affiliate World vs. Brand World. Who Will Win?
In 2010 the performance crowd and the brand crowd were fighting over the same budget. The money already knew who was winning.
The question in early 2010 sounded like a culture war, and it was one. On one side sat the affiliate and performance world: CPA networks, lead generators, media buyers who got paid only when somebody bought, signed up or handed over an email address. On the other sat the brand world: agencies, CPMs, reach and frequency, and the comfortable belief that you could build a company without ever proving a single ad worked.
The numbers that year settled more of the argument than either side liked to admit. When the IAB and PwC tallied 2010, US online ad revenue came to about $26 billion, up 15% after a 3.4% drop in 2009. The split that mattered was in how it was priced: 62% performance-based, 33% CPM, 5% hybrid. Brand marketers talked about awareness. They paid for results.
The fight that was really happening
The brand world won the vocabulary. The performance world won the invoice. Search alone was about $12 billion, roughly 46% of the total, and search is performance advertising wearing a suit. Display grew faster, up about 24% to roughly $9.9 billion, and that growth was the first sign of what came next: brand money moving online through exchanges, automated buying and the machinery we now call programmatic.
What nobody in 2010 said out loud was that the two worlds were converging on the same problem. Performance marketers could fake a conversion. Brand marketers could fake an impression. Both sides were buying measurement from the people selling them the media.
How it aged
The war ended in a merger. Programmatic absorbed both sides: brand budgets bought through performance plumbing, and performance budgets judged on brand-style metrics nobody could audit. The affiliate world's oldest fight, who gets credit for the sale, never went away. It came back in 2024 and 2025 when PayPal's Honey extension was accused of swapping in its own affiliate links at checkout, a fight that would have looked very familiar in 2010.
So who won? The intermediaries. They always do.
This page rebuilds a February 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Figures come from the IAB/PwC 2010 Internet Advertising Revenue Report as reported by MediaPost, and from public reporting on the PayPal Honey litigation. The author co-founded LeadsCon and ran an ad network in this period, and so worked on one side of this fight.