<b>Cloud marketplaces vs. direct affiliate links: a structural comparison</b>

<b>Cloud marketplaces vs. direct affiliate links: a structural comparison</b>

B2B affiliates increasingly choose between driving deals through a vendor's direct program and routing them through cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, GCP). The two channels have different economics, and the difference is structural, not cosmetic.

<b>The marketplace advantage: committed spend.</b> Enterprise buyers hold pre-committed cloud budgets (committed-spend agreements). Purchases made through a marketplace draw down that commitment, so the buyer effectively spends 'already-allocated' money — a procurement path of least resistance. Per cloud go-to-market data, marketplace-routed deals can close faster and at larger sizes for this reason alone.

<b>The marketplace cost: the platform's cut and reduced attribution control.</b> Marketplaces take a listing fee and intermediate the relationship, and the affiliate's role can be harder to track and credit than a direct link with a clean parameter.

<b>The direct-program advantage: cleaner attribution and higher margin share.</b> Direct programs can offer richer, more traceable commissions and a closer vendor relationship — but they fight the buyer's procurement friction rather than riding committed spend.

<b>The trade-off in one line.</b> Marketplaces trade margin and attribution clarity for procurement velocity; direct programs trade velocity for control and margin.

<b>Correlation caution:</b> marketplace deals being larger may reflect that large buyers have committed spend in the first place — the channel correlates with buyer size rather than causing larger deals.

<b>Open questions:</b> for which deal-size ranges does committed-spend velocity outweigh the marketplace's margin haircut? The crossover point varies by category and is rarely computed before the channel is chosen.