Monetisation & Revenue
Affiliate Link
Also called: referral link, commission link
The tracking sits in the link itself, usually as a tag or a redirect that drops a cookie, so the merchant can attribute the sale back to you. Commission rates and cookie windows vary enormously by programme, and a short window means a viewer who clicks today and buys next week earns you nothing. Disclosure is a legal requirement. In the UK and the US you have to make the commercial relationship clear where the audience will actually encounter it, which for a video means inside the video itself, with the description as a backup rather than the whole disclosure.