<b>The day Amazon cut my commission 60% and what saved me</b>

<b>The day Amazon cut my commission 60% and what saved me</b>

Month 1: $10 domain, outdoor grilling niche. Pure Amazon affiliate, 8% category rate. Easy money for a while.

Month 14: $4,000/mo, 95% from Amazon. I thought I'd made it.

The turn: Amazon slashed the home/garden rate. My 8% became 3% overnight. Same traffic, revenue cratered $4,000 → $1,600 in one payout cycle. No warning, no recourse.

Month 16: I scrambled to diversify. Added a grill-brand direct program (6%, higher AOV), a meat-delivery subscription affiliate ($30/signup), and display ads on informational posts. Took three months of rewriting links across 60 posts.

Month 20: $3,400/mo, now split — 40% Amazon, 35% direct brands, 25% the meat subscription. Diversified, and honestly more stable than the $4k peak ever was.

The failure was structural: I'd built a business on a partner who could rewrite my income with one policy email, and did.

The takeaway: any single program over ~50% of revenue is a liability, not a win. The grilling subscription I added almost as an afterthought now de-risks the whole site. Build the diversification before you're forced to.