As an affiliate marketer, webmaster, or media buyer, you might wonder which vertical is the most effective for your efforts. What will bring you the maximum profit, a high conversion rate, and a relatively easy workflow? This article compares different niches, from Dating to Crypto to mVAS, and analyzes their pros and cons for an affiliate.
If you’re a beginner affiliate or CPA marketer, read on! After checking out this piece, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on whichever vertical to work with. Even if you already have experience in affiliate marketing, this article will help you consider a different niche that you’ve never experimented with.
Verticals for affiliate marketers
A vertical in affiliate marketing is a market, niche, or offer category united by the topic of its services and products. An affiliate decides which offers to promote and which ad formats to use based on the vertical.
In our overview, we’ll analyze the following niches that are popular among affiliate marketers:
- Gambling/Betting
- Dating
- Crypto
- E-commerce
- Sweepstakes
- Finance
- mVAS
For each vertical, we’ll discuss the advantages and disadvantages. We’ve marked the pros with green check marks, and the cons with red crosses, for instant visual clarity.
Gambling/Betting
Online casinos, poker rooms, bookmakers, and other similar services are all part of the gambling/betting vertical. Due to high consumer demand in recent years, this niche is very popular among affiliate marketers.
Advertisers pay money for a specific action from a customer. Target actions include deposit funding, user registration, a certain number of free spins, and other similar activities.
Advantages of the Gambling vertical
✅ High demand
Gambling has been a prominent vertical for several years now. In general, people are venturesome and want to try their luck.
✅ Different cooperation schemes
The payments to an affiliate marketer are made under different schemes:
- RevShare (a percentage of casino profits)
- CPA (cost per action — a fixed payout for performed actions)
- % of active deposits
- RevShare + CPA Hybrid
Disadvantages of the Gambling vertical
❌ Complicated flows and KPIs
Complex flows and strict KPIs are among the most significant cons of working with gambling offers. Apart from a simple registration, a user is often required to make a deposit.
❌ Strict regulation and prohibitions in many GEOs
Due to legislation in many countries where gambling services are prohibited or strictly regulated, it isn’t easy to push such offers on advertising platforms and networks.
❌ Approvals and holds
A common disadvantage of many verticals is the waiting time for your lead to be checked for quality and fraud. Typically, the payback period for a lead takes from a couple of weeks to several months (depending on traffic quality). Even if you drive hundreds of registrations daily, if they do not convert into deposits, the advertiser can reject all the traffic and will most likely close your access to their offer.
Dating
In today’s post-pandemic, unstable world, people often feel lonely and search for new relationships — romantic ones or friendships. That’s why dating apps and websites are so popular among consumers, and affiliate marketers love this vertical due to its high conversions.
The dating vertical can be divided into two areas: Mainstream dating and Adult dating.
Mainstream dating is targeted at those searching for long-term, serious relationships. Tinder and Badoo are examples of apps in the mainstream dating segment. Adult dating, on the other hand, is targeted at those interested in non-binding, casual meet-ups. Examples of apps related to adult dating are 4club, Asiandate, EmilyDates, and Loveeto.
Advantages of the Dating vertical
✅ Number of offers
There are so many offers in the dating vertical that you don’t have to worry about one offer failing. If one offer doesn’t work, you can always run another.
✅ High demand
The audience maintains a steady demand, meaning you’ll never lack potential consumers. There is always someone to target with dating offers.
✅ Different payment options
When you work with this vertical, there are four common payout models for most offers:
- SOI (Single Opt-In – pay per registration)
- DOI (Double Opt-In – payment for registration plus email confirmation)
- RevShare (percentage of user spending on the service) — used less often
- PPS (Pay Per Subscription) — even less common
Disadvantages of the Dating vertical
❌ Approvals and holds
Payout holds in the dating vertical can range from two weeks to a month, since affiliate programs need time to analyze traffic quality and the revenue it brings.
Crypto
In case you’ve been out of the loop for the past 10 years and haven’t heard about the ubiquity of cryptocurrencies, here’s the scoop: Crypto is a powerful field and isn’t going anywhere in the coming years. With the most popular digital assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum, there is an established flow of exchanges and transactions in many aspects of everyday life.
The Crypto field can be divided into the following areas:
- Education: Many cryptocurrency websites offer educational training on trading, blockchain technology, and mining.
- Investments: People who invest in crypto can wait quite a while for assets to grow and generate profits in the long term.
- Trading: The process of buying and selling cryptocurrencies is aimed at generating short-term profits.
- Auto-trading: A form of crypto trading where a bot (provided by a broker) performs trades automatically for the client.
The most suitable traffic sources for the Crypto vertical are Facebook, TikTok, Google Search and Ads, SEO, push traffic, pop-under, and YouTube.
Advantages of the Crypto vertical
✅ High payouts
The payouts for an affiliate marketer are quite high due to the lucrative specifics of this vertical.
✅ Different cooperation schemes
There are three main models of affiliate rewards that work in crypto offers:
- RevShare (percentage of an investor’s deposit)
- CPA (payment for a deposit made by a user)
- CPL (payment per lead, e.g. a registration fee)
✅ No holds
You’re able to receive a payout as soon as the target action is completed. In practice, most often the target action is a deposit.
Disadvantages of the Crypto vertical
❌ Complicated flows and KPIs
In Crypto, the chances of losing the lead are very high, which makes the user flow critical. A typical user flow in Crypto looks like this:
Announcement → Landing page layout → Application form on the landing page → Call center follow-up → Making a deposit.
The minimum deposit in Crypto is usually high, so many users hesitate. If a person has to part with a substantial sum, they need compelling reasons to do so. For an affiliate marketer, it’s not easy to convince a client to make a deposit.
❌ Strict regulation and prohibitions in many GEOs
Initially, crypto was a completely unregulated environment. It rose to prominence partly thanks to this freedom, and the field grew tremendously over a decade.
Today, increasing attempts at regulation are putting a spoke in the wheels of the cryptocurrency machine. More and more governments are passing harsh laws to restrict the crypto market. (For example, China banned all cryptocurrency transactions in the country.)
E-commerce
E-commerce is a field that deals with selling tangible physical goods online. Nutra products, clothing, home and gardening supplies, hobby and sports goods, pet and baby products, electronics — today, you can buy anything with a couple of clicks.
E-commerce is a profitable niche for both an affiliate marketer and an advertiser. The advertiser doesn’t have to put a lot of effort into marketing their products: affiliates will do the advertising for them in exchange for a commission.
When it comes to money, payments for a target action are usually paid on a CPS model (Cost Per Sale). The publisher (affiliate) receives their money after the buyer picks up the goods at the post office or receives the delivery. Some affiliate networks work on the CPO model (Cost Per Order). However, due to the prevalence of fraudsters, the number of PPS (pay per sale) programs with payment for just a confirmed order (without delivery) is constantly decreasing.
There are different categories within E-commerce, and goods are usually grouped into three classes:
- White goods: Products that do not mislead buyers. Electronics, furniture, cosmetics, accessories, and other legitimate products fall in this category.
- Gray goods: Products whose benefits are greatly exaggerated. These are often knock-off items or questionable miracle remedies (e.g. replica watches, “anti-wrinkle” creams with overstated effects).
- Black goods: Products that outright mislead people and might even be illegal. You’ve probably seen ads promoting some means to “enlarge” body parts — those are black goods. In other words, black goods are low-quality fakes or scams.
Advantages of the E-commerce vertical
✅ A “real” niche
E-commerce offers authentic goods with tangible, practical value, unlike many other verticals. Everyone needs things like toilet paper, dog food, or a new mobile phone. By working with E-commerce (especially advertising white-hat goods), you can be confident in what you’re promoting and have a clear conscience.
✅ Many affiliate networks
When you work with the E-commerce vertical, you have an abundance of affiliate programs to choose from. Even Amazon offers its own affiliate program, meaning you can pick any product from their platform, create an affiliate link, and start promoting it.
Disadvantages of the E-commerce vertical
❌ Restrictions on traffic sources
You have to be very careful when choosing your traffic sources. Most E-commerce affiliate programs don’t allow traffic from “pirate” or illegitimate websites. Even push traffic might be restricted, because brands do not want to be associated with gray-area marketing schemes. Affiliate marketers often have to opt for more expensive traffic sources to promote products, such as social networks, search engines, or messenger apps.
❌ Approvals and holds
The E-commerce vertical has one of the longest hold periods for payouts — often a month or more. The main reason for these long holds is cookie-stuffing fraud, where someone with access to large traffic volumes plants cookies from different stores on all visitors. For example, if cookies remain stored in a user’s browser for a month (which is common for online stores), that period is enough for an average user to make a purchase somewhere. An online store might then wrongly attribute that purchase to a fraudulent “publisher” who stuffed the cookie, and pay out a reward to them. Because of such schemes, networks impose long hold times to verify which sales are legitimate.
Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes is the vertical of online lotteries and prize draws. Ads such as “Subscribe to win an iPhone” are examples of the sweepstakes niche. To participate, a user typically needs to submit their contact information (name, e-mail, or mobile phone number).
The winner of a sweepstake lottery is chosen randomly, which is why so many people want to participate: everyone believes they have a chance and want to test their luck. Additionally, users usually do not need to pay anything to participate. They just enter their contact details and hope for the best without risking money in most cases.
Four main flows are present in sweepstake offers:
- SOI (Single Opt-In): A user needs to enter their contact information in a form on a website and click “OK” or “Participate.”
- DOI (Double Opt-In): Similar to SOI, but the user also needs to confirm their email address via a confirmation link.
- CC-submit (Credit Card submit): The user needs to provide their bank card details for verification. Typically, they subscribe to the advertiser’s service for a token amount (e.g. $1) to confirm the card.
- PIN-submit: Similar to CC-submit, but instead of a card, the user subscribes via their mobile phone number and confirms via an SMS PIN code.
Advantages of the Sweepstakes vertical
✅ High conversion rates
Due to the broad appeal of sweepstakes, you can expect high conversion rates. In most other verticals, a user must make a purchase to count as a conversion. Sweepstakes, on the other hand, offer a relatively easy flow from the user’s perspective. The user doesn’t need to pay to participate (or only pays a symbolic amount), which lowers the barrier to conversion.
✅ Profitable volume
Since so many people are willing to participate, working with the sweepstakes vertical can bring in good profits. The massive volume of interested users means a well-optimized campaign can generate substantial revenue.
Disadvantages of the Sweepstakes vertical
❌ Restrictions on traffic sources
The abundance of fraudulent traffic from unscrupulous publishers forces affiliate programs to scrutinize traffic sources more closely. Many networks impose strict rules about which traffic sources can be used for sweepstakes to prevent fraud.
❌ Approvals and holds
The main disadvantage of this vertical is the lengthy verification process for transactions and chargebacks. Banks often block user payments (or claw back small charges) due to the high incidence of fraud in this space, which means networks may hold your earnings until they verify the quality of the leads.
Finance
The Finance vertical is one of the most profitable and rapidly developing verticals. You’ve likely seen banners advertising mortgages and loans both offline and online. The general population is growing more financially literate, and interest in investing and obtaining passive income is on the rise. Trading, brokerage, and other financial services are experiencing a real boom.
Types of financial offers include:
- Credit cards
- Loans
- Microloans
- Binary options
- Consumer loans
- Banking services
- Brokerage services
- Deposits
- Insurance
Advantages of the Finance vertical
✅ High payouts
Investing your time and effort in the Finance vertical can bring you substantial profits. Financial services often pay high commissions for qualified leads or customers because each converted customer can be very valuable to the advertiser.
✅ Diverse target audience
From desperate people trying to make ends meet, to those who want to invest surplus income, the Finance vertical covers a wide variety of potential clients to target. This diversity means you can tailor different campaigns to different sub-audiences (e.g., debt consolidation for one group, investing opportunities for another).
Disadvantages of the Finance vertical
❌ Restrictions on traffic sources
In the Finance vertical, many traffic sources are off-limits. For example, you typically cannot use adult traffic or incentivized (motivated) traffic. There are also often prohibitions against running contextual PPC ads that directly use the financial brand’s name (to prevent brand bidding).
❌ Complicated flows and KPIs
Only a complex, multi-stage flow can bring you a qualified lead in finance. It usually looks something like this:
Announcement (ad) → User fills out a form on a landing page → (Maybe another step or form) → Call center engagement → Final agreement/approval.
The reason for such a complex flow is that banks and financial companies are very cautious in approving customers. They have elaborate systems for assessing a person’s creditworthiness or suitability. This adds extra steps and can make conversions harder to achieve.
❌ Approvals and holds
Big payouts for financial offers have a trade-off. Traffic quality checks can take up to two months. Banks have systems for evaluating a person’s solvency and risk profile with many indicators that affiliates cannot control, which affects approval rates. As a result, you might send a lot of leads but see only a fraction approved – and payment for those might be delayed until the bank finalizes the approval.
mVAS
The mVAS vertical (mobile Value-Added Services) is a niche of mobile content offers or services that a user subscribes to via their mobile phone using DCB (Direct Carrier Billing) technology. When a user opts in to such a service, the charge is applied directly to their mobile phone bill instead of a bank card.
With mVAS, a customer can subscribe to various services that provide access to things like video and music content, horoscopes, dating services, legal adult content, courses, and so on. This abundance of services allows an affiliate marketer to use a wide range of traffic types, from Gambling traffic to Adult traffic, to promote offers.
The mVAS vertical is usually divided into two broad categories: Adult and Mainstream, which in turn can be divided into dozens of more specific sub-categories.
One clear advantage of the mobile Adult niche is that the category is regulated by the laws of different countries and mobile operators. “Can the Adult niche be legal?” you may ask. We answer: Yes – it’s possible in the mVAS vertical. Despite being adult content, when it’s offered via mobile carrier billing, it’s done under the supervision and rules of carriers, which makes it a legal, controlled environment.
At the same time, in the mVAS vertical, there’s no concept of overbearing regulation as seen in other verticals. Mobile operators have their rules, but there’s generally more flexibility and fewer legal hurdles compared to, say, finance or gambling.
(There are several types of flows in mVAS – essentially the steps a user takes to subscribe to a service. If you’re interested, you can read our separate article on the different types of mVAS flows.)
Advantages of the mVAS vertical
✅ No approvals and no holds
One of the key advantages of mVAS is the instant charging of the user via DCB technology. An advertiser never places holds on your earnings because the user’s payment is immediate. In addition, affiliate programs focused on mVAS often provide daily payments, which significantly simplifies life for affiliates since you don’t need a large cash flow to sustain campaigns.
✅ Simple user flows
Even the most complicated flows in mVAS are far simpler than those in other niches. Subscribing via a phone is usually a quick action (often just a couple of taps or an SMS confirmation), which means less drop-off and easier conversions.
✅ Easy and quick to test
The entry barrier in mVAS is one of the lowest in the CPA market. This is a big plus for both beginners and experienced affiliates who burned out and want to try something new. Advertising campaigns for mVAS offers are relatively easy to set up, and you can get results (or feedback on what’s not working) quickly due to the simple flows.
✅ Huge potential audience
The modern world is home to 7.9 billion people, and more than 6 billion of them have smartphones. The potential audience that might be interested in your mVAS offer is enormous.
To sum it up
There are no “bad” verticals — you can succeed with any niche that you enjoy working with. Each vertical has its unique advantages, while the disadvantages tend to repeat across multiple niches.
If you can’t decide which niche to choose to start with, consider the vertical with the fewest disadvantages. To make your life easier, we’ve created a table with all the pros and cons:
our blog https://affdragons.com/blog/
We’ve conducted a detailed analysis of various verticals and can confidently say that mVAS takes first place. This vertical is the easiest to learn and launch in, for both beginners and experienced affiliate marketers. No heavy overregulation by laws in different countries, no serious pitfalls — this makes the mVAS field incredibly attractive for anyone looking to maximize their affiliate marketing success while minimizing headaches.
