Kajabi's latest industry report points to a structural shift: creator commerce (selling products and services directly to your own audience) is rising while dependency on third-party platforms declines.

For performance marketers, that's a story about attribution and traffic quality. When creators move off social platforms toward owned channels — email lists, paid communities, direct-to-consumer courses — the familiar affiliate plumbing changes with them.

The report, covered by Net Influencer, frames the trend as a rebalancing rather than a collapse. Platforms still matter for reach. What's changing is where the transaction happens and who controls the customer relationship.

What does this change for affiliate and rev-share deals?

If you're running CPA or rev-share (a split of ongoing customer revenue) offers in the creator economy vertical, this shift matters in three ways:

• Owned-audience monetization grows. Creators selling through their own funnels means fewer platform-mediated conversions and more direct checkout flows — often better EPC (earnings per click) for partners who plug in early.
• Attribution moves to first-party. Cookie windows and platform attribution models matter less when the sale happens inside a creator's own site or community.
• Platform-side payouts get squeezed. Ad-revenue-share style income, where the platform controls both rate and eligibility, is exactly the dependency creators are trying to reduce.

One caveat worth flagging: Kajabi sells the tooling creators use to go independent, so read its findings as vendor-backed data, not a neutral market audit. The direction is plausible and echoed elsewhere in the industry, but treat specific claims accordingly.

Compliance angle

As creators take commerce into owned channels, disclosure obligations don't disappear. FTC rules on material connections still apply to paid promotions in email, podcasts and communities — and enforcement attention on undisclosed affiliate relationships in those formats has been rising.

Program terms can also conflict here. Some platform affiliate agreements restrict off-platform promotion methods, so partners running hybrid deals (flat fee plus rev-share) should check where conversions are actually allowed to originate.

The read for practitioners

The underlying signal is straightforward: creators are building balance sheets on owned audiences, and the money follows. Networks and brands that make their offers work inside creator-owned funnels — clean tracking, honest attribution, terms written for direct checkout — will capture that shift.

Expect more reporting like this as creator-commerce tooling vendors compete to quantify the migration; the next round of numbers will show whether the trend holds at scale.