Discover & American Express Credit Card Affiliate Payouts

Traditional brick-and-mortar stores look to drive traffic to their stores by way of sale circulars, as well as traditional advertising. However, working online brings a whole different set of circumstances, and often the best way to help drive traffic to your site is by way of marketing through affiliates.

Rather than company ABC working with hundreds of individual website owners, they elect to work with a handful of companies, XYZ, that manage all of the website owners on their own. In return, company ABC pays affiliate company XYZ a commission for every sale driven to ABC’s website. The affiliate companies, XYZ, then turn around and pay a portion of their commission back to the websites that originally drove traffic to the site.

So ever wondered what some of the credit card links pay to affiliates? Below is a compiled list of the payouts that an affiliate company called LinkOffers (formerly FlexOffers), and owned by BankRate currently pays their affiliates for an approved application.

Discover it® $ 100.00
Discover it® for Students $ 40.00
Discover it® for Students with $20 Cashback Bonus $ 57.75

Starwood Preferred Guest® Credit Card from American Express $ 128.00
Starwood Preferred Guest® Business Credit Card from American Express $ 80.00
Gold Delta SkyMiles® Credit Card from American Express $ 180.00
Blue Sky from American Express® $ 96.00
American Express® Gold Card $ 144.00
Blue Cash Everyday® Card from American Express $ 80.00
The Platinum Card® from American Express $ 224.00
TrueEarnings® Card from Costco and American Express $ 88.00
American Express® Premier Rewards Gold Card $ 252.00
The Business Gold Rewards Card® from American Express OPEN $ 160.00
The Business Platinum Card® from American Express OPEN $ 240.00
Gold Delta SkyMiles® Business Credit Card from American Express $ 80.00
SimplyCash® Business Card from American Express $ 80.00
Blue Cash Preferred® Card from American Express $ 88.00
Business Green Rewards Card from American Express OPEN $ 90.00
The Plum Card® from American Express OPEN $ 160.00

These were some of, if not the highest payouts in the industry, meaning that LinkOffers paid their affiliates the biggest chunk of the pie and kept only a small fraction for themselves. Other companies, such as CreditCards.com (BankRate), kept a far larger portion for themselves, with smaller payouts to the affiliates.

Keep in mind the above commissions are only a starting point, and depending on a certain affiliates influence or how much they wish to push a certain card, the commissions can be changed.

Today, rather than letting affiliates proclaim the ins and outs of an offer, and doing all of their work, credit card companies are hard at work to help censor and dictate the content that gets published. For example, here is a recent directive from AMEX discussing prohibited activities that have helped drive traffic to their products for years.

Prohibited activities include, but are not limited to:

• Encouraging consumers who do not own small businesses to apply for an OPEN product
• Instructing consumers who do not own small businesses to apply for an OPEN product
• Posting language which guides prospects to “churn” or apply for multiple American Express cards (Consumer or OPEN) to maximize point accumulation
• Promoting acquire & attrite behavior (i.e. sign up, acquire points, then cancel)
• Including directions around cookie deletion or taking any actions to guide existing Card Members to apply for prospect offers
• Suggesting or instructing prospects to call specific numbers for reconsideration if declined.

It is because of card companies dictating what people can and will not say that you see lots of content out there being rapidly revised and/or deleted to conform, for fear of losing the big dollars associated with credit card referrals. Today, such discussion will have to be found in forums where the content and discussion is not quite as censored.

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