What the Rakuten-Impact Alliance Means for the Affiliate Industry & Brands
Today, Rakuten International and impact.com announced a strategic alliance that will fundamentally reshape the affiliate and performance marketing ecosystem. Under this collaboration, impact.com will become Rakuten's exclusive technology platform, with Rakuten migrating all of its customers onto impact.com's infrastructure while maintaining its managed services expertise.
This is a significant moment, not just for these two companies, but for the entire industry.
The Unbundling of Platform and Services
What's really happening here is the decoupling of the technology layer from the managed services layer. For years, the standard platform model in affiliate marketing bundled platform tracking capabilities with in-house agency management. Rakuten built their business on this integrated approach: one vendor, one platform, one services team.
But that model is changing. Impact.com launched with a different philosophy from day one, focusing on the platform while letting specialized agencies handle the strategy and execution. Now, with this alliance, we're seeing that vision play out at scale.
For brands currently on Rakuten leveraging their managed services, this is the moment to assess whether your current setup is truly driving the results you need. The unbundling could actually be good for brands in the long term, but it means being more intentional about who's managing your program and how they're driving incrementality.
What This Signals About the Industry
The affiliate space is at an inflection point. Advertisers are under more pressure to prove outcomes, drive efficiency, and build growth channels that are both measurable and scalable. This alliance is a clear signal that affiliate is moving beyond its traditional role into a much more strategic part of the performance marketing equation.
When you combine Rakuten's global partner relationships and consumer intelligence with impact.com's platform infrastructure, you get something the industry has historically lacked: a unified system that can operate at the scale and sophistication of major performance platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. The fragmentation is what's held affiliate back. This alliance is accelerating the consolidation that makes affiliate a viable alternative for brands looking to diversify their performance marketing mix.
What This Means for Migration
If you're a brand currently on Rakuten, you're probably wondering what a platform migration actually looks like. As an agency that has migrated dozens of brands from Rakuten LinkShare to impact.com over the years (including Nordstrom, Nordstrom Rack, Snipes, and DXL), we can tell you firsthand that the mechanics are straightforward but require real rigor: partner outreach, auditing, contracting, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks during the transition.
One thing we always recommend during a migration is conducting a fraud audit before moving your entire publisher base over. In past migrations, that cleanup has saved clients millions in commissions before the new program even went live. Brands don't always know how much dead weight they're carrying until someone forces that audit.
For brands already on impact.com, this is a good moment to revisit whether you're taking full advantage of what the platform offers. Optimize, impact.com’s attribution and incrementality solution, is a perfect example. As impact.com’s only agency certified to implement Optimize (and impact.com's first Diamond Partner since 2021), we've seen clients save anywhere from $100,000 to $800,000 in commissions in a single year just by deduplicating costs across channels and re-weighting commission structures toward partners who actually drive incremental value. We currently have a 62% adoption rate for Optimize across our client base, and the results consistently speak for themselves.
What Brands Should Be Thinking About
If you're on Rakuten right now, ask yourself:
Has my program truly scaled, or has it plateaued?
Am I getting bespoke strategies, or am I stuck in a one-size-fits-all approach?
Is my upper funnel strategy growing, or am I over-indexed on lower funnel and loyalty partners?
Am I leveraging advanced commission tiering, fraud detection, and incrementality measurement?
The old way of running affiliate as a last-click cost center is being replaced by more sophisticated thinking, more sophisticated measurement, and smarter strategies. That's been our point of view at New Engen since inception, and now it's the direction the whole industry is moving.
Ready to talk about what this alliance means for your program? Reach out to our team at New Engen. We'd love to walk you through what's possible on impact.com and how we can help you build a more efficient, more incremental, and more scalable affiliate channel.
