Section 255.5 of the Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides describes a coffee blogger who earns a commission when readers buy through links on the site. The Guides say that blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose the compensation, because knowing about it could affect the weight readers give the reviews.1 The rule behind the example is short. A connection between endorser and seller that might materially affect an endorsement's credibility, and that the audience does not expect, must be disclosed. The current text was published on July 26, 2023. In the regulator's example, an affiliate link is a recommendation with a payment behind it.
That payment arrives only when a purchase does. Amazon's Associates Program Operating Agreement, updated in October 2025, says an associate can receive commission income for qualifying purchases when customers click through its links and buy.2 The rate is a fixed share of qualifying revenue by category: 10.00 percent for luxury beauty, 4.50 percent for physical books, and 0.00 percent for gift cards.3 Under that agreement, a click that ends without a purchase earns nothing.
Each model pays at a different point between arrival and purchase
Google Ads describes cost-per-click bidding, the usual meaning of pay-per-click, as paying only when someone clicks the ad and arrives at the advertiser's site.4 "Contextual PPC" adds one condition: the ad appears on a page whose words match the keyword. AdBubbles belongs to the contextual half of that phrase and not, today, to the pay-per-click half. Its ad is a bubble, a small panel that opens from an underlined word in the text, and advertisers buy words in prepaid monthly packages. Publishers keep 70 percent of what advertisers paid for campaigns on their pages, divided among the sites each campaign ran on in proportion to bubble opens. Cost-per-click bidding is planned.
Between arriving on a page and buying, a reader passes three points at which one of the three models pays: an open, a click, and a purchase. An open is a bubble that has stayed visible for one second. AdBubbles counts a publisher's share at the open, a pay-per-click ad charges at the click, and an affiliate program pays at the purchase. Fewer readers reach each later point, so the model that pays latest pays for the rarest event. A rare event has to be worth more each time to match a common one. AdBubbles sets no cookie, stores no identifier, and collects no personal data from readers.
Long-tail traffic is thinner than the phrase suggests
The phrase "long tail" described retail before it described search. Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Smith reported in 2006 that 30 to 40 percent of the online book sales they examined were in titles a physical store would not normally stock.5 Skiera, Eckert, and Hinz, who defined the tail as the many less popular keywords people use to search, measured it in search advertising in 2010.6 The top 20 percent of keywords attracted on average 98.16 percent of all searches and generated 97.21 percent of all clicks. A site with hundreds of pages, each drawing a few visitors who searched for a specific phrase, is built from that thin part. Whatever event such a page is paid on must happen among those few visitors.
On a page with thirty readers, the purchase may not happen this month
Suppose a site has 400 pages and each draws 30 views a month, 12,000 in all. Suppose one reader in fifty clicks the page's affiliate link, and one clicker in twenty buys before the merchant stops counting. That is 240 clicks and 12 purchases across 400 pages, so most pages produce none. Now suppose one view in twenty-five opens a bubble on the same pages: 480 opens, spread across the site rather than on the dozen pages that sold something. The open happens on pages where the purchase does not, and whether 480 opens are worth more than 12 purchases depends on two numbers the supposition leaves out.
One is the value of a purchase: the merchant's rate multiplied by what the reader bought. The other is the value of an open: the publishers' share of what the advertiser paid, divided by every open that campaign produced on every site it ran on. A bubble also needs a word an advertiser has bought, and a publisher who adds a site can request a crawl of its sellable words.
The affiliate link is the publisher's recommendation, and the bubble is the advertiser's
The FTC's business guidance on the Endorsement Guides, updated in July 2025, addresses a site that earns commissions on links.7 It says the site should disclose its relationship to the retailer clearly and conspicuously, and that the closer the disclosure is to the recommendation, the better. The words "affiliate link" alone, it adds, may not tell consumers that the person placing the link is getting paid. An affiliate link sits inside a sentence the publisher wrote, and the recommendation is the publisher's.
A bubble carries none of the publisher's words. It holds an "Ad" label, a headline and body the advertiser wrote, the advertiser's domain, one link, and a small "Ads by AdBubbles" mark. The Competition Bureau's guidance on influencer marketing counts payment in money or commissions as a connection that may be material.8 It asks that a disclosure be visible on all devices without a click or tap to expand it. Whether the text around an affiliate link meets that description is a question for its author; the bubble's label is the same on every page.
The two can run on the same page because they are different elements
An affiliate link is an anchor the publisher placed in a sentence, and a bubble is a panel on an underlined word inside the publisher's scope. The embed skips links, so a word inside an affiliate link's anchor text is never underlined. Which element is worth more on a page depends on what its few readers do. A reader who arrived ready to buy can complete the purchase, and one who came for an answer and leaves without buying can still open a bubble.
Google's spam policies, updated in August 2026, call buying and selling links for advertising and sponsorship a normal part of the web's economy.9 Such links do not violate the policies, the page says, when they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". Every link inside a bubble already carries rel="sponsored noopener", set by the embed. The attribute on an affiliate link is the publisher's to add.
The comparison can only be made after the page has run
A publisher account and the embed cost nothing, and the crawl of sellable words can run before any bubble appears. The publisher dashboard then shows, per site per day, views that carried bubbles, opens, clicks, and earnings accrued. Placed beside an affiliate program's report for the same pages and month, the dashboard shows which event that site's readers produced.
The comparison has a limit that neither report removes. AdBubbles matches the words on a page to the advertiser who bought them. It does not choose which readers see a bubble, does not follow a reader to another page or site, and promises no result. A site's share of a campaign also depends on the opens the same campaign produced on every other site. On a page with thirty readers a month, one purchase decides which model paid more, and the next month's thirty readers are different people.