How transparency works
A marketplace that claims to be transparent has to be transparent about its own rules. This page is the whole of them.
Who sees a program’s terms
A public program’s commission type, rate, cookie window, payout schedule and content requirements are visible to anyone — logged out, logged in, or a search crawler.
A brand can also run a private program. It stays out of the directory, the brand’s page and search, and its terms go only to the creators the brand invites or accepts — always before they post anything, and frozen onto their partnership like any other terms.
One field on a program is not public: the secret used to sign server-to-server conversion callbacks. Publishing it would let anyone fabricate conversions against that brand.
Self-reported vs. tracked
Creator audience numbers — followers, average views, engagement rate, demographics — are entered by the creator. We label them as self-reported next to the number itself, not in a footnote, and a creator cannot mark their own numbers verified.
Numbers Affily measured — clicks, conversions, commissions, completed partnerships — are shown separately and marked as tracked. Profile numbers are never imported from social platforms, so we do not claim numbers we did not check. The one place we read a platform is a competition video, through the creator’s own connected account.
The transparency score
A score out of 100 measuring how much checkable information a profile carries. It is a flat weighted sum — no model, no smoothing, no manual adjustment. It measures disclosure, not quality or performance, and nothing about it is for sale.
| Criterion | Points |
|---|---|
| Display name and headlineAdd your name and a one-line description of what you make. | 5 |
| Bio (60+ characters)Write at least a couple of sentences about your work. | 5 |
| Profile photoUpload a profile photo. | 5 |
| At least one nicheTag the categories you create in. | 5 |
| At least one platform linkedLink a public profile URL so anyone can check your numbers themselves. | 12 |
| Every listed platform has a public URLAdd a public URL to each platform you list — unlinked stats can’t be checked. | 8 |
| Follower counts on every platformReport follower counts for each platform you list. | 8 |
| Avg views and engagement rateReport average views and engagement rate — the numbers brands actually price against. | 10 |
| Top audience countriesAdd your top audience countries and their share. | 8 |
| Audience age splitAdd your audience age breakdown. | 7 |
| Public starting ratesPublish your starting rates. This is the whole point of Affily — no “DM for pricing”. | 12 |
| UGC portfolio (2+ examples)Upload at least two examples of your work. | 8 |
| Past collaborations listedList brands you’ve worked with. | 4 |
| A completed partnership on AffilyComplete a partnership on Affily — its tracked numbers are verified, not self-reported. | 3 |
| Total | 100 |
Tiers
- Exemplary — 90 and above
- High — 70 and above
- Moderate — 45 and above
- Low — 0 and above
The creator directory is sorted by this score by default. That is the only ranking signal that is on by default, and the single way to move up it is to publish more that a brand can independently check.
Affily Boost, and what it can’t do
Boost buys a labelled featured slot above the directory results. It is returned by the API in a separate list and is never merged into the organic results — a boosted program cannot move a single organic row, and there is a test asserting the organic ordering is byte-identical with a boost applied.
See what Boost costs →How the numbers are counted
- Unique clicks
- Repeat visits from the same address and browser within 24 hours count once. Duplicate clicks are still recorded and shown as total clicks, so you can see both.
- Attribution
- Last click, inside the cookie window the partnership was accepted under. A conversion we can’t attribute is recorded, counted and shown to the brand with the reason — never silently dropped, because dropping it would flatter every conversion rate on the platform.
- Frozen terms
- A partnership copies the program’s terms at acceptance. Editing the program later changes nothing about commissions already being earned.
- Empty denominators
- A partnership with no clicks has an unknown EPC, not an EPC of zero. Those render as a dash. We would rather show you nothing than a number we can’t stand behind.
- The fee
- A share of each commission, split between the brand and the creator, taken once when it accrues and shown on the commission line. Each side sees its rate in its account. Never applied twice, never applied to a commission we didn’t track.