Partner, Affiliate & Channel

• What it is: marketing through third parties who are paid or incentivized on outcomes — recruiting, enabling, governing, and measuring the partners who sell, refer, or surface your product. It spans three worlds that share vendors and almost nothing else: affiliate/performance (DTC publishers on a tracked link), B2B channel/ecosystem (resellers, co-sell, ISVs), and CPG trade/shopper (brand→retailer→shopper).
• The 2026 shift: the network/PRM layer is consolidating fast (AppDirect→PartnerStack+Tackle; impact.com→Rakuten — 2026-04, ledger), creators are the fastest-growing publisher category, and agent-mediated purchase is starting to threaten the cookie/click/referrer plumbing affiliate has always run on.
• The hard truth: the two most double-counting-prone numbers in the entire map live here — affiliate "influenced sales" and B2B "partner-influenced revenue." Both routinely claim credit for demand that already existed. I↔N is a VETO relationship, not a polite pointer.
• Don't: treat N as one uniform discipline, cite the "$135B partnership economy" or any branded ELG ROI multiple as fact, fold TikTok Shop GMV into the affiliate-spend number, or pay a coupon affiliate for a sale that was going to happen anyway.

How this domain is organized internally — and the decision logic, runnable workflows, and agent angle — are in the full map.

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