Top Niches in Affiliate Marketing: What Works Right Now?

Blog » Top Niches in Affiliate Marketing: What Works Right Now?

One of the most strategic decisions for an affiliate marketer is ⚙️ choosing the right vertical. To achieve any meaningful results in affiliate marketing, it’s important to focus on one or two niches instead of spreading yourself too thin.

What Are Affiliate Marketing Verticals and How Do You Choose the Right One?

Verticals are categories of products or services that advertisers promote through affiliate marketers. Here are the main verticals in affiliate marketing today:

• Dating — This includes online dating platforms. Affiliates are usually paid for a new user registration or for a confirmed signup. Less commonly, they’re rewarded when users purchase a paid subscription or premium features;
• E-commerce (Low-ticket offers) — Physical products sold via single-product landing pages (e.g., flashlights, stun guns, dresses, fishing lures, fertilizers, etc.);
• Nutra (Health Products) — Wellness and health-related products also sold via simple landing pages (e.g., hypertension treatments, joint supplements, sexual performance enhancers, anti-aging remedies, anti-smoking/alcoholism products). In both e-commerce and nutra, affiliates are typically paid for phone-confirmed orders. In rarer cases, payment is made for completed and paid deliveries;
• iGaming — Includes online gambling. A distinction is usually made between gambling (e.g., online casinos, poker) and betting (sports betting). Payout models often involve paying for first deposits or revenue share (RevShare), where affiliates earn a percentage of player losses;
• Finance — Encompasses banking services like loans and deposits. Payouts here are made for completed applications or confirmed approvals, such as loan issuance or deposit account opening;
• Trading — Includes Forex and binary options;
• Crypto — Includes cryptocurrency exchange trading or education on crypto investing. Crypto and trading are often considered subcategories of the finance vertical. Payouts are made for opening a trading account, purchasing a course, depositing into a brokerage account, or completing a trade. These are among the most profitable verticals but also among the most capital-intensive and challenging to master;
• Adult — Includes all offers in the “18+” category, such as supplements for male enhancement, subscriptions to OnlyFans, and adult content. Affiliates get paid for confirmed purchases or subscriptions to paid content/models. RevShare deals (a percentage of ongoing payments) are also common in this niche;
• Essay Writing — Academic writing services. Payouts are typically for a placed order or confirmed payment;
• HR/Job Recruitment — Includes hiring platforms. Affiliates earn commissions for job applications, scheduled interviews, or successful job placements;
• Utilities — Software like antivirus programs, VPNs, and ad blockers. Payouts are usually made per software install, but sometimes for a trial signup or first-month subscription;
• Sweepstakes (Sweeps) — Prize draws or contests. The goal is usually to get users to subscribe to push notifications or SMS ads. In some cases, the user must enter contact details; in others, they must make a small payment. Payouts are made per entry or lead.

These are just the most common and well-developed verticals. Naturally, this leads to the important question: How to choose a vertical in affiliate marketing?

What to Consider When Choosing an Affiliate Niche?

The first and most important rule: 💲 the more lucrative the niche, the higher the entry cost and the longer it takes to understand the market dynamics. Here’s a general overview.

Dating, sweeps, and utilities — These niches offer low payouts per lead (from a few cents up to $10), but the entry costs are also relatively low — both in terms of money and time. Starting budgets typically range from $500 to $2,000.

Examples of payouts for registration in dating offers.

Nutra and E-commerce (Low-Ticket Physical Products) — These verticals offer mid-range payouts. Since the products vary widely, so do the commissions. On average, payouts range from $5–6 up to $45–50 for a phone-confirmed order.

Crypto, Trading, Gambling (iGaming), Sports Betting, HR, Essay Writing — These are considered high-payout verticals. While the actual commission depends heavily on the GEO and the lead type, these niches generally offer the most lucrative payouts.

However, these verticals require affiliates to thoroughly understand the specifics of the niche, including the user journey — from the initial ad impression to the target action. Keep in mind that in these verticals, advertisers often impose strict KPIs. For example, in iGaming, a common requirement is that at least 40% of players who make their first deposit must continue playing and make 2–3 more deposits. This means you’ll need to identify and fine-tune your targeting strategy to drive traffic that meets the advertiser’s performance benchmarks.

Example of Restrictions in a Casino Offer.

Finding the right 🔎 targeting and ad creatives in gambling or trading campaigns takes both time and a solid test budget. A reasonable starting budget for these verticals is $5,000 or more.

🌏 GEO (geographical targeting) also plays a critical role. Launching a high-payout vertical in a low-cost GEO can significantly reduce entry costs while allowing you to learn the ropes within that niche.

Some affiliate programs won’t even approve your account or accept traffic unless you have prior experience. Networks in the utilities, nutra, and sometimes dating verticals are more likely to work with beginners. A few iGaming and trading programs may consider inexperienced affiliates, but this is rare.

Thus, it is impossible to definitively identify the best verticals in affiliate marketing — each of them has its own 👍 advantages and 👎 disadvantages. However, it is possible to examine working funnels in different GEOs and verticals. This can help determine which direction to choose and where to start.

Current Vertical Trends in Affiliate Marketing: What Do Spy Tools Show?

To understand which offers affiliate marketers are currently driving the most traffic to, it’s necessary to comb through 😎 spy tools — that is, to look at fresh and up-to-date ads being run by affiliates. The most popular traffic sources among affiliates are FB, TT, and push networks. Accordingly, we will analyze affiliate ads using Tyver, TT Creative Center, and Spy.house.

To begin, we’ll search via the spy tool Tyver (it displays fresh and current ads on Facebook). We’re not looking for creatives tied to a specific topic; instead, we’re analyzing which verticals have the largest number of active ads. That’s why in the advanced search settings, we enter typical identifiers used by affiliates into the “In link” field — such as utm_source=, pixel_id=, sub1=, etc.

Do not use keywords or other filters! Sorting is done by ad reach.

And judging by the Facebook results, the most actively promoted offers are:

• Dating networks targeting Austria, Germany, France, Spain, and Poland;
• Diabetes treatment products (nutra) targeting Spain;
• Online casinos (gambling) targeting Austria, Italy, Germany, and Greece;
• Car cleaning and fuel-saving products (e-commerce) targeting Romania, Poland, and Greece.

Now let’s move on to TikTok. To do this, we go to TT Creative Center and set the following parameters:

• Target actions — App Installs, Conversions, and Lead Generation. These are the objectives affiliate marketers usually use when launching ad campaigns;
• Sorting — Sorted by Reach, meaning the most viewed ads will appear at the top.

As a result, we see that the top positions are occupied by ads for 💰 financial services (banks), as well as job offers.

If you scroll further down the feed, you’ll find ads for cryptocurrency services, dating (dating), weight loss products (nutra), and casinos (gambling). At the same time, the finance and HR verticals are mostly promoted in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. Crypto, dating, and nutra are most actively advertised in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe (France, Spain). Casinos and betting offers are primarily promoted in Latin America.

Push networks are another popular source of traffic used in affiliate marketing. Let’s take a look at what’s being promoted there most often. There are paid tools like spy.push, but you can also use the free Spy.house, which also collects fresh creatives from major ad networks. We won’t apply any filters — we’ll simply select the current month as the display period and filter by impressions to identify the longest-running ads.

As we can see, the majority of creatives are 🔞 adult subscriptions to OnlyFans models (some of them have been running for nearly three years). These campaigns are launched across a wide range of countries — from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan to the Arab world, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

But if you scroll further down, you can also find ads for male enhancement products, trading income offers, and even sweepstakes — the latter are mainly targeted at Russia and the CIS countries.

But almost all of this is the output from the push.house network. Therefore, it would be a good idea to also take a look at other networks besides this one.

And in those networks, the situation is similar — adult content, “earnings” through trading, dating, and also casinos.

It’s important to remember that, in addition to targeted ads and push traffic, there is also conditionally free traffic (CFT). The scheme for generating it involves the webmaster:

Creating multiple accounts, pages, groups, and channels across various social networks;

• Filling them with content to gain organic reach;
• Redirecting this traffic to the offer’s landing page.

Tracking CFT as advertising through spy tools is very difficult — you need to constantly monitor YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter for content that could be used to generate affiliate traffic.

But based on experience, the top GEOs and verticals for conditionally free traffic are:

• Dating and adult — USA, Australia, Europe. Payouts are the highest here, but getting the first leads is relatively easy;
• Gambling, betting, and crypto — USA, Australia, Europe, as well as the CIS, India, and Southeast Asia. Payouts are higher here, but getting initial leads from developed countries is quite difficult, so affiliates often turn to the CIS, India, and Southeast Asia.

So, if you decide to focus on CFT, use these patterns as general guidance.

Conclusion ✅

Based on entry costs, affiliate network requirements, and traffic sources, the best combinations for affiliate marketing in spring–summer 2025 are roughly as follows:

• Dating, sweepstakes — push networks, conditionally free traffic — USA, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan;
• Nutra — push networks and social media targeting — CIS, Europe, Arab countries, Southeast Asia, Latin America;
• Crypto, gambling — push networks and social media targeting — practically worldwide. However, the more developed the target country, the larger the starting budget you’ll need.

The directions outlined above are the most popular and well-studied (you’ll find a lot of useful information and case studies on them). But they’re not the only options — nothing stops you from choosing essay offers, HR, or white-hat e-commerce and developing in that area.

Thus, it’s impossible to confidently name the best GEOs and verticals for affiliate marketing. But by selecting a direction and testing it, you’ll eventually figure out what 🙋‍♂️ suits you best and can grow in that niche. The key is to remember: a starting budget is needed not just to run a successful test, but also to run ads at least until the first payout from the affiliate network.