My TikTok algorithm has gotten absolutely bonkers lately with Amazon influencer content, and I’m honestly trying to get off of it. Every single day I’m scrolling through and hearing people talk about Creator Connections in the most wildly inaccurate ways possible — how the program was created, how you make money on it, the free product stuff, how many campaigns there are, how many products there are, how many brands there are. I’m not here to figure out why people are saying this stuff or who’s saying it. All I know is that whenever I hear something incorrect about this program, I have to say something, because I want you to actually make money in it.

What We’re Covering

What Creator Connections Actually Is

Creator Connections is a program inside Amazon that Amazon has been going around asking brands to opt into. Brands actually have to buy into this, because it is going to cost them money. Amazon’s pitch to those brands is that if they join Creator Connections and offer an increased commission rate, creators will take their products and promote them off-site. That is what the brands were told, and that matters more than almost anything else in this conversation.

The entire Creator Connections ecosystem was built on the shoulders of off-site affiliates. For the last ten years or more, this side of Amazon’s affiliate world has been about driving outside traffic. If you don’t believe me, go into Creator Connections right now and click on any campaign. On the campaign details page you will find instructions for how the brand wants you to post off-site — social media, YouTube, all of it. You will not find instructions for how they want the video made. They’re not thinking about your video. That’s not an oversight, that’s the design.

Brands sign up, they create campaigns, and you can think of those campaigns as buckets. Inside each bucket they drop the products they want promoted. The value proposition to that brand is extra traffic and extra exposure from outside Amazon. And they pay for it.

The Brands Pay You, Not Amazon

This is the piece almost nobody gets right. When you earn Creator Connections commissions, it is predominantly the brand paying that out — not Amazon. This is one of the pages Amazon took directly from TikTok Shop over the last year, where the brands are on the hook for creator payouts rather than the platform. It’s one of the biggest reasons Amazon pushed Creator Connections so hard.

Amazon still kicks in a very small percentage, but the bulk of it is brand money. That’s exactly why every campaign has a budget, and why those budgets are set by the brand. Once you understand that, the rest of the program starts making a lot more sense.

Here’s the consequence: I’d estimate somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the brands who sign up for Creator Connections have no interest in your video at all, and even fewer have any interest in sending you a product. It got pitched to them as an off-site promotional tool. So the first myth we have to bust is the idea that Creator Connections is packed with brands eager to ship you free products because they want videos made. That is not why they’re there. It happens sometimes, but it is not the reality of the platform.

Amazon influencers started using Creator Connections pretty heavily toward the end of 2024, and honestly we didn’t even know what it did — Amazon was still telling us it didn’t apply to us. We were making a little money and going, “Amazon, are you sure about that?” It wasn’t until the middle of 2025 that Amazon finally added Amazon influencers to the actual Creator Connections documentation and made us legitimate participants. But the program is still built as an off-site tool. Remember how they asked you to sign up with your social media account? That wasn’t an accident. Amazon wants you driving traffic.

So most of these brands walked into an absolute storm of creators asking for free samples that they never signed up for. There are Amazon seller forums full of this. I know several sellers personally, and they will all tell you the same thing: brands are overwhelmed and exhausted by the constant sample requests, especially when they ship product out and nobody makes content, or the content is low value, or nobody posts it to social like they were told would happen. Can you still get product? Yes. But you’re working against a very tired audience.

The Real Numbers Nobody Is Quoting Correctly

I count these. That’s my life now. Here’s where things actually sit:

  • ~920,000 total campaigns in the new opportunities section (if you have early access)
  • ~64,750 brands participating, give or take about a 10% margin either direction
  • ~5.2 million unique products listed across those campaigns

920,000 campaigns sounds enormous until you realize it’s only about 64,000 brands behind them. Brands frequently spin up dozens of campaigns for the same products over and over, essentially spamming the system. 64,000 brands is nothing to sneeze at, but it is not 920,000 brands, and most of those 64,000 aren’t interested in a collaboration anyway.

The product count is the one that really bugs me. I’ve heard people claim anywhere from “hundreds” to “a million” products. Best case, they’re off by 4.2 million. And that matters, because “hundreds of products” makes this sound like a dead-end program. 5.2 million products is a completely different opportunity — and that number already has the duplicate listings filtered out.

Why You Keep Hearing 850,000 Campaigns

Every new campaign created in Creator Connections goes through a process called early access. If you’re a gold or platinum creator, you see those campaigns a full week before everyone else. For that entire week, gold and platinum creators get to have their way with the campaign — spam messaging brands, chasing collaborations, working the list hard.

And even as a platinum creator with early access, I can send out 100 messages and maybe get 10 responses, and maybe five of those actually pan out. Brands are not lining up to send you stuff. It can happen, but you have to be strategic and consistent about it every single day.

If you’re bronze or silver — new to the program or not earning much yet — you don’t get early access. You see roughly 53,000 fewer campaigns, which lands you around the 850,000 mark. So when somebody confidently tells you there are 850,000 campaigns, what they’re really telling you is that they don’t have early access. If they were making good money at gold or platinum, they’d know the number is 920,000.

To be fair, somebody jumped in my comments recently and said they quote the lower number on purpose because that’s what their newer community members will actually see. Fine, I’ll take that one. But plenty of people are saying it inaccurately simply because they don’t know.

That early access gap has a second, uglier consequence. If you’re silver or bronze, you’re showing up a week late to the party. The products still available for collaboration are mostly leftovers that the early-access crowd already passed on, from a brand that has already been hammered with requests. Every once in a while somebody squeezes out something great. Mostly it’s a no, or it’s whatever nobody else wanted.

The Free Product Myth

One of the things I hear constantly on TikTok is that you’ll be able to do your Christmas shopping with the free stuff you get from Creator Connections. If that’s your plan, your friends and family are going to disown you. “Thank you for the radish grow kit.” “Thanks for the umbrella, Dad.”

You can’t just walk in and get what you want. You can get samples, but it’s rarely about what you actually want — especially when you’re new. It becomes “what can I get?” which is also exactly why so much of it is low-quality product that won’t make you money.

The truth is that collaboration samples come from volume and consistency. Experience gives you a real edge here, because brands want to work with creators who have a track record. That’s also why Amazon prioritizes gold and platinum creators for early access in the first place.

How You Actually Make Money

Despite everything I just said, there is a lot of opportunity in Creator Connections — if you understand what it actually is. At the end of the day, Creator Connections exists so you make content that converts. That’s a video, or a link posted somewhere off-site that drives traffic. That’s it.

And a side note worth its own article: if you can build a strong off-site audience, you’ll make substantially more than you will as an Amazon influencer. Every category pays higher on the off-site side. Most people avoid it because it’s more work, but the payoff and the ceiling are both way bigger.

Which brings me to the thing that actually determines whether you earn: finding products that are genuinely selling. The majority of products on Creator Connections are not selling. Most of the products you can get through a free collaboration cannot make you money. That’s not my opinion — my opinion has no influence on the truth. Go ask the community, they’ll tell you fast.

So Creator Connections really comes down to identifying products with a real sales opportunity, then making a video for that product and hoping it lands on the product page. And here’s another thing I keep hearing that drives me nuts: “just make a video and they’ll put it on the page and you make commission.” There might be a thousand videos waiting for a shot at that carousel. Your video might never see the light of day. That’s not Creator Connections specific, but it matters here, because Creator Connections earnings for an Amazon influencer depend entirely on people actually watching your video. Amazon guarantees you nothing.

This is exactly why product research is the whole game. There are ways to target products where your video has a real shot at being seen and a real shot at converting, and that’s the entire reason I built Oink — so you can see sales signals, campaign data, and competition levels before you sink hours into filming something that was never going to earn.

The Bottom Line

It has been well known in this program for two years now: if you want to earn commissions as an Amazon influencer, free products are generally not the way to do it. They eventually become a burden when you realize they don’t convert — either because the product isn’t selling, or because the brand handed out so many samples that a hundred other creators made the same video and yours can’t get seen.

  1. Creator Connections was built for off-site affiliates, and most brands still think of it that way.
  2. Brands pay your commissions, which is why budgets and brand fatigue are real constraints.
  3. The honest numbers are ~920,000 campaigns, ~64,750 brands, and ~5.2 million products.
  4. Free samples are a byproduct of consistency, not a business model.
  5. Product research — finding items that actually sell — is what separates earners from everyone else.

If you want to stop guessing which Creator Connections products are worth your time, that’s exactly what Oink for Influencers was built to solve. And if you just want to be around people who’ll tell you the truth about this program, search “Oink for Influencers” on Facebook — the group is free and there are about 12,000 of us in there. Capiche?

I'm an Amazon Influencer since 2023 and blogger since 2021. My goal is to help you succeed in the Amazon Influencer Program.

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