Publishers with affiliate operations are entering Black Friday with a clearer picture of the new commerce landscape, but far less certainty about where their readers will come from.

ADWEEK spoke with revenue-side leads at six major media companies. They all came to the same conclusions about the state of affiliate marketing: Organic search is no longer a dependable growth engine, the holiday shopping window now includes all of November, and publishers are refocusing on first-party channels and direct relationships with their most loyal readers.

The shift away from Google

After years of optimizing for search traffic, publishers are now building their Black Friday strategies on the assumption that yield from the channel will be erratic at best.

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