9 Best Movie Affiliate Programs and Networks [2024]

It's been a few years since the movie industry and cinema has changed its path to becoming completely available online. This is to the point that you can watch all the series and movies that have come out recently almost instantly by subscribing to a movie and media-sharing service. You might even already have some ideas of some streaming and movie platforms that you are subscribed to for all the fun, trendy, hyped-up series.

You might just call this the modern age but we would call it an opportunity to earn a lot of money. On a daily basis, lots of people subscribe to these streaming platforms and most of them are so prominent that you wouldn't even need to advertise for them. However, there's still a massive wave of people who have not yet experienced this digital way of watching your favorite media, And focusing on those people mixed with affiliate marketing can bring in a lot of cash for you.

In this article, we're going to take a deep dive into the movie affiliate programs and networks that can help you earn money.

What Are Movie Affiliate Programs and How Do They Work

Streaming platforms are usually subscription-based. That's why you are not going to get people to purchase a product or complete a registration form necessarily. The way this works out is that somebody wants to sign up on a streaming platform and subscribe to them so they can immediately start watching a series or a movie. By following your affiliate link you can get a commission for every person that subscribed to one of the plans of that streaming platform.

When we use the word streaming here we don't mean game streaming or live streaming but streaming media such as movies, films, and series. In some of the movie affiliate programs, you can actually promote standalone movies but keep in mind that the majority of these programs offer a subscription-based model.

In today's world, subscription works much better for people, because they can pay a low amount of money on a monthly basis and enjoy the service that a platform is offering them. As soon as they don't want the service anymore they can simply unsubscribe and stop paying the company. Whereas In the traditional form of purchasing movies and series you would have to purchase a movie and just keep it forever even if you never wanted to watch it again.

Payment Models in Movie Affiliate Programs

There are a couple of payment models in the movie affiliate programs but as we mentioned the majority of them Revolve around getting some money for every subscriber that you provide for the company.

Cost per Sale (CPS)

The cost-per-sale payment model in movie affiliate programs basically means that you get a flatshare every time somebody subscribes to a plan for a streaming service. This means that even if the person buys the premium package you will still get the flat rate per sale. Different movie affiliate platforms and programs have different terms.

For example, some programs may offer you the same cost-per-sale payment model for redirecting users that will just sign up for a free trial, which includes credit card information, so it would still count as a sale. Some others might only count the sales as confirmed subscriptions for a certain period of time be it monthly or annually. Some of the programs might also sell gift cards so users can gift them to other people. You can get a flat Commission for those kinds of sales as well.

Cost per Lead (CPL)

In the movie niche, The cost per lead payment model refers to creating a lead for the affiliate program, in other words, a customer. As mentioned before a free trial sign up can count as something that you can get paid for, And simultaneously a customer. Some programs might choose to pay you for every person that signs up for these trials, even if the user doesn't actually end up renewing the subscription after the trial period expires.

Cost per Action (CPA)

The cost-per-action model in the movie niche applies to the users that you redirect to the affiliate to perform signing up completing a registration form or even creating an account on the target platform. You can sometimes get a flat rate of $5 to $10 for simply referring a user who signed up on the streaming service through your CPA website focusing on movies.

While it is not that common in this niche, a revenue share payment model can also exist among some of the programs that offer standalone products such as gift cards or movies. This works in a way that if a user buys a gift card, you can get a percentage of the amount of money spent on that product.

What to Consider When Choosing a Movie Affiliate Program

There are a couple of things you might want to consider when you are choosing a movie affiliate program. Since most of the services in this category are credible enough, you might want to pay attention to what benefits the program offers you instead. Here are some of the things you’d better consider before you choose a movie affiliate program to continue with.

Payment Rate

As mentioned before most of the programs in this niche work based on subscriptions. Therefore no matter how much money you actually earn they are going to give you the same flat rate for every subscription package purchased or every new customer. So let's say, on a program with a CPS of $10, if a standard subscription plan for a movie streaming service is $100, and a premium subscription plan is $200, you will be getting $10 per subscription No matter what package the customer purchased. So it's important to check how much the payment rate is and whether it's worth it considering the credibility and the popularity of that streaming service.

Service Features

Sometimes movie streaming services come with different features that might make them more interesting to your audience and provide more opportunities for you to earn money from them. Some of these features include the ability to purchase standalone movies, get access to channels, provide accessibility of movies and series in different locations around the globe, or just simple features such as the availability of subtitles and all languages, etc. These features are good incentives to write about on your affiliate website or social media and gain some public attention.

Cookie Duration

Cookies save the data of users on the browser. By data from the users, we mainly mean the data that comes from them are being redirected to an affiliate service from your promotional link. Cookie saved this data on the browser for as long as the program has defined it. Some programs choose their cookie duration to last about one hour and some others 90 days. Obviously the longer the cookie duration, the more referrals when counting toward your benefit. If a user revisits a streaming service after they had first visited the website through your affiliate link within the cookie duration time span, it would be counted towards your credit. So it's better to aim for programs that offer a longer cookie duration time.

Payment Frequency

Pivot frequency defines how often you'll be able to cash out your money. Some programs allow you to cash out your money every month, some biweekly, and some every two months. There are some programs that allow you to cash out your money whenever you want if it reaches the minimum withdrawal threshold. If it matters to you how often you are able to withdraw your money then you should look out for programs that allow you to cash out quite often.

Minimum Payout

Minimum payout is pretty similar to payment frequency except that a minimum payout is the minimum amount of money you have to earn before the affiliate program allows you to cash it out. Sometimes the minimum payout is very low and you are able to cash out your money as soon as you have referred just a few affiliates. And on some other occasions, the program might ask you to wait before your credit reaches $500 before you can cash out. Affiliate programs with the lowest minimum payouts are the best so try to aim for those ones.

Affiliate Trackers

An affiliate tracker is a tool that allows affiliates to view insights on their performance, how many people they referred to the program, how much money they manage to earn, and what requires improvement. Using affiliate trackers you can get some Analytics and try to improve the way you sell the product so you can make more money. Some affiliate programs offer you this tool on your personal affiliate dashboard on the program, while some others don't and you have to manually do so for yourself using other third-party services. Try to look for programs that offer these affiliate trackers so your job would be much easier.

How to Drive Traffic to Movie Affiliate Programs and Networks

Movie affiliate programs and networks might work a little bit differently when it comes to driving traffic to those offers. Since the movie industry isn't exactly the most profitable industry in affiliate marketing history, You might want to take a different approach which usually appeals to geeks and nerds. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to drive traffic to movie affiliate networks here so you can appeal to the right audience at the right time.

Step 1: Create a Movie and Entertainment Blog

This is the most important traffic source for you out of all others. Usually, when somebody watches a series or a movie and they become a fan of it, they tend to go on search engines and search for all the information they can get, including rants, reviews, and even just basic information about that movie. Usually, these fans find some websites that feed their hype and the trend very well, and they just stick to it for every single news in the future. That is how geeks in this industry are familiar with some common names and big entertainment platforms which they always get news from.

You want to aim at becoming such a platform. You want to become the main source of information about hype, trends, reviews, and everything else for people who are interested in movies and series.

Even if you don't actually want to create a website it's important to create a blog page on a website such as Medium to at least have a tribune where you get to talk about the latest movie and series news. On this website, you want to include different types of content so you can rank on Google search results and get a lot of attention.

While in another niche the design of the website wouldn't matter much, in the movie niche,  you really want your website to appeal to the young audience. Therefore, it should have a very vibrant design filled with joyful color palettes. You can always find some ready templates from a CMS (Content Management Service) tool that you use, such as WordPress.

After having prepared the website you want to make sure that you add different categories or sections on the menu for different types of content that you will be uploading. You want to include sections for the following: Movies and series reviews, Streaming platform reviews, Latest movie and series news and updates, Personal opinions, and rants on different series and movies. The last one is actually very important because in this industry everybody is always looking for urgent content and opinions. That is why you really should know your audience well. You must be educated well on the pop culture industry and lead the discussion.

Now that we have everything we need and the website is set up we need to move on to the next sections to see how we can write the content on this website.

Step 2: Write Movie and Series Reviews

This is just the beginning. Before you move on to writing streaming and movie platform reviews, You want to prove to your audience that you know your pop culture. That is why you should start writing about recent movies and series. Even if you don't want to watch them you can just watch some quick recap of them from YouTube and then write some reviews or some general insights on the recent media.

These reviews should be very in-depth. They should include some information about the actors and how the story goes on but exclude spoilers or possible reveals of the ending. It should also be super friendly so that the audience gets excited to read it till the end. Unlike other niches, the audience in this one is always looking for something new to feed their hype, not their need. This is a very important thing to keep in mind.

You might be thinking about how you can get some insight into the latest movies and series trends. Fortunately, there is an amazing tool for this created by Google, called Google Trends. Simply go on Google Trends and search the topic that you are looking for, in this case movies.

When you find these trending topics you want to create a content table and start writing content about each one of the movies but keep in mind that there is a time factor here. The sooner you write reviews or content about a certain movie or series the more people will find it on Google. The competition in this niche is huge so whoever is the first to write about a certain movie gets to be on top of the search results.

Step 3: Write Streaming Platform Reviews

When you are done preparing some base for your website, it's time to move on to writing some actual buying guides from streaming or movie service platforms. A lot of people are actually looking for where they can find a certain series on the Internet. As an example, the latest trendy series “The Boys” has been streaming on Amazon Prime. A lot of people will be searching for where they can find the series to play it. If you give them a review of “The Boys” and mention that it's available on Amazon Prime with your affiliate link, a lot of people will end up purchasing the subscription, which subsequently makes you some money.

When you're writing a streaming platform review, you should pay attention to the fact that you're not writing a review on the streaming platform itself but on the series that the streaming platform is providing. If you write reviews on different streaming platforms, Say you write a topic like “Netflix Review”, there is a good chance that the audience might not actually get incentivized to purchase a subscription. This is because they are not actually sure what series are being played on Netflix. They don't have any motivation to necessarily purchase this specific streaming platform. That is why streaming platform reviews without some examples of movies and series available on it are essentially useless.

It's important to hide your affiliate links to the streaming platforms inside these series and movie reviews. But since not every movie in the series is on a streaming platform online, you won't be spamming your audience with all these affiliate links, which is a good thing.

Step 4: Focus on Keywords and Trends

As mentioned before you really want to focus on the latest trends in the entertainment and pop culture industry. Google Trends is an amazing place to find the Trends, and even if you still need some more inspiration you can always check out some of the bigger and more authoritative websites in the movie industry to get some insight on what the latest movie trailers or series are. Gossiping is a huge culture in this industry, so you will always find some competitors that are writing about a certain actor planning to play a role in a movie. Guaranteed, you will get a lot of attention from such topics.

Keywords are also important factors when trying to rank on Google using SEO rules. You need to make sure that you include keywords in your blog title, in the text, in the image all descriptions, etc. Here are some of the trendiest keywords in the movie industry if you want to get started.

Step 5: Create a Social Media Account for Latest News of Movies and Series

After having created your website, uploaded content on it, and shared your affiliate links, it's finally time to get some social media coverage. Some of the best social media platforms for movie geeks and nerds include Instagram and TikTok. We can always see people on Instagram and TikTok uploading movie scenes, clips, recaps and even memes.

When you have your website you can confidently go on social media and create some TikToks or Instagram Reels and give a quick recap on movies, summarize them, or motivate users to watch them online through viral video clips.

The number of people who are doing this right now is uncountable. What you should always pay attention to is not to spoil any movies or series on social media because that would just count as a bad reputation for you.

You want to keep a lot of secrets on the movies and series and tell people to go watch them instead. You never want to cut straight to the chase and tell them the whole story. You just want to give them a taste of it.

On your social media bio or posts, you can also include some links to your affiliate website so some of the audience that like your content can check out some more on your blog and hopefully click on one of your affiliate links so you can earn some cash.

Step 6: Keep it All Updated with News and Rants

After you have completed all these steps it's time to pay attention to the final and most important tip. Competition in this industry never ends. Every day new entertainment news comes out, new series are released and new movies are scheduled and premiered in cinemas. Some movie blogs and websites that work in this niche try to cover all the news and updates related to the entertainment industry and even try to write about a certain movie and review it inside the cinema as they're watching it. Well, maybe not exactly like that but you get how intense the competition is.

Usually, if you're one of the first people to share some news or updates about a movie or a series that has just been released, people are going to start sharing, retweeting, or reposting your content so that will gain you much more visibility and coverage. As mentioned before, time is of utmost importance.

If you follow the steps mentioned above you can hopefully kickstart your affiliate career in a short amount of time if you actually put some passion into it.

Case Studies

In this section, we're going to talk about some of the more popular monetized movie blogs and websites that drive traffic to movie affiliate networks and programs. We're also going to try to figure out what ways they use to earn money through affiliate marketing.

Case #1: ComingSoon

Coming soon is a prominent blog in the entertainment niche. They have all types of content about movies, series, streaming platforms, games, TV shows, anime, etc. While they are usually one of the first ones in the search results about any type of movie or series and they run a lot of ads, they also do affiliate marketing which makes up a lot of their income.

The main source of affiliate income on this website is definitely the streaming tab which includes a list of streaming platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Apple TV, etc. When you click on each one of these streaming platforms you can see a list of news movies and the latest updates on that streaming platform. After clicking on a news article about a recent movie, You can see some affiliate links to the streaming platform that the movie is available on.

Thanks to these collaborations and affiliate marketing tricks, ComingSoon Has been able to make more than $10 million annually.

Case #2: CinemaBlend

The second website on this list is cinema blend which is also another top-ranking website about movies and series and entertainment in the pop culture world in general. On this website, you can similarly find a lot of reviews of movies and streaming platforms.

On this website, you can find content about movies, TV, recent news, streaming, superheroes, reviews, voices, videos, and other types of content related to entertainment. After clicking on the “Streaming” tab we can immediately see the affiliate disclaimer. This means that on this page or on the articles on this page, you can find some affiliate links to the streaming platforms that users can subscribe to and CinemaBlend will be making some cash on the side.

Unlike the previous case, CinemaBlend has reviews on streaming platforms, as well as reviews on the movies that are available on each streaming platform. Here are just a couple of examples on how they use affiliate links inside their articles about the pricing or the terms of the streaming services.

They have multiple other blog posts where You can find complete information about a streaming platform or movie subscription.

Check out this example, which includes a direct link to the Apple TV+ affiliate offer.

Cinema blend also generates more than $15 million a year thanks to the affiliate income, third-party collaborations, and obviously ads that display on their website.

The secret to the success of both of these platforms is that before anybody even knows about the existence of such blog posts on the streaming platforms, they will be seeing the movie reviews and original content and establish a sense of trust with this website. Plus in both of these cases, the comment sections are pretty filled with comments and everybody is engaging in discussions about the movies and series.

Conclusion

The movie industry is massive and the amount of money that is earned inside of it is as huge. The affiliate industry might not be the biggest yet but we can see that a lot of movies and cinema premieres are moving towards becoming available online. Recently premiered movies are now becoming available on online streaming platforms in less than a month because most users have been accustomed to not going to the cinema after the pandemic and enjoying movies from the comfort of their houses. That is why it's an amazing chance for you to start your own website and promote movie streaming services and programs.

The only tip we can give you here is to have passion, not give up, and continue to keep your website and your content updated with all the latest pop culture news.