YouTube Broken Affiliate Links Revenue Calculator

Affiliate links break for several common reasons. Merchants change their URL structures, affiliate programs shut down or rebrand, tracking platforms update their redirect chains, and product pages get removed. Even small changes to a merchant's website can render hundreds of affiliate links useless overnight.

For YouTube creators, the problem is compounded by the fact that video descriptions are rarely updated after publishing. A video from two years ago might still receive significant traffic, but its affiliate links could have broken months ago without the creator ever knowing.

According to a study by Linkody analyzing over 1 million links, link decay is a significant and predictable problem:

• 3.4% of links break within the first month
• 8% are broken after 3–6 months
• 17.6% are broken after 1 year
• 28.4% are broken after 3+ years

This means that if you haven't checked your affiliate links in over a year, roughly 1 in 5 of them may already be broken — silently costing you money every day.

This calculator uses published research data to estimate revenue loss:

• Broken link rates are based on the Linkody link decay study, which analyzed decay patterns over time
• Affiliate link CTR benchmarks (1.5%–6.3%) come from Zebracat's YouTube affiliate marketing research
• Conversion rates (1.0%–4.1%) are based on Trackonomics publisher data across multiple affiliate networks

The three scenarios (Conservative, Realistic, Optimistic) let you see a range of possible outcomes. The "Realistic" scenario represents the median performance across the data sources.