Why Your Amazon Affiliate Links Stop Earning Money

You uploaded a video six months ago. It still gets views. The affiliate links in the description are still there. But the commissions have dried up. What happened?

Amazon affiliate links don’t fail loudly. They fail quietly, weeks or months after you stop paying attention. Your video keeps getting traffic, viewers keep clicking, and most of those clicks now lead nowhere — or to a page where the Buy button doesn’t work.

There are four main reasons your Amazon affiliate income drops. Three of them you can fix today. One of them is just how the seasons work. Let’s go through each one.

The simplest failure: someone clicks your link and Amazon shows them a 404 page or redirects them to a generic search result. Nothing to buy. Nothing to earn from.

This usually happens when:

• 01The product was discontinued and Amazon removed the listing entirely.
• 02The seller deleted the listing themselves.
• 03The product was pulled for a policy violation.

From your side, the link looks the same as it did the day you put it in. You can’t tell anything is wrong without clicking it yourself — and you probably haven’t clicked your own affiliate links since the day you published the video.

The fix is finding a replacement product and swapping in a new link. The hard part is knowing the link is dead in the first place.

This one is sneakier. The link still works. The product page still loads. Everything looks fine — except for a small line of text saying “Currently unavailable” where the Buy button used to be.

If a viewer can’t buy the product they clicked for, conversions often drop sharply. It doesn’t matter how many people click. No purchase, no commission.

Out-of-stock pages are common because:

• 01Popular products sell out faster than the seller can restock.
• 02Seasonal items go out of stock for half the year (winter coats in July, fans in December).
• 03A small seller closes their Amazon storefront temporarily.
• 04Supply chain delays push restocks back indefinitely.

Sometimes the product comes back. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, every day the product is unavailable is a day your link earns zero.

This is the failure mode most creators never even consider. The product still exists. The seller still sells it. But they’re selling it under a new Amazon listing with a new URL — and your video still points to the old one.

Why would a seller do this?

• 01They updated the product — a new model, a new version, a refresh — and listed it as a separate item.
• 02The old listing had bad reviews they wanted to leave behind.
• 03They lost control of the original listing (it happens more than you’d think).
• 04They consolidated multiple product variations into a single new listing.

Your old link still works. It still loads a product page. But the product is now labeled as the older version, or it has been gradually pushed down by Amazon’s algorithm. Sales drop. Your commissions drop with them. Meanwhile the new listing — the one your viewers actually want — is making money for someone else.

Worth being honest about: not every drop in affiliate income is a broken link problem.

If your channel reviews holiday gifts, expect a huge spike in November and a cliff in January. If you cover gardening tools, your numbers will look amazing in April and grim in October. If you review pool gear, summer is basically your entire year.

This is normal. Your links aren’t broken. The seasons just changed. No tool can fix that — not AffiliScan, not anything else. The only real fixes for seasonal swings are content strategy: diversify your topics, build evergreen videos that earn year-round, or lean into the seasonal nature of your niche and plan around it.

That said, when your earnings drop and you can’t tell whether it’s a seasonal swing or actual broken links, a clean health check on your links is what removes the ambiguity. If every link is working and every product is in stock, the drop is seasonal. If half your links are dead, that’s a different problem — and one you can do something about.

Three of the four problems above — broken links, unavailable products, switched listings — are fixable. The hard part isn’t fixing them. It’s knowing they exist in the first place.

AffiliScan is a free Chrome extension that catches all three. Open a video, click Scan, and within about 30 seconds you see every affiliate link’s status: working, broken, unavailable, or pointing somewhere it shouldn’t. For bulk monitoring, add a whole channel or playlist to the dashboard and AffiliScan scans every video on a schedule, emailing you the moment a link breaks.

You stop discovering dead links by accident months after they broke. You start fixing them within a day.

Your back catalog of monetized videos is a real income stream. It’s also a stream that quietly springs leaks every week. Discontinued products, out-of-stock items, sellers migrating to new listings — every one of these is a viewer click that earns you nothing.

The traffic to your old videos isn’t going to wait for you to notice. Audit your links today. Fix what’s broken. And put something in place — manual or automated — to catch the next broken link before it costs you another month of commissions.