Creator Connections is running out of campaigns, and I’m not guessing. It’s Amazon’s own math. I put out a 25-minute breakdown of the numbers a few days ago and not a single person has refuted it. The counter at the top of the page says a million campaigns, but a few days ago 365,000 of them were full and totally useless, and that number has already jumped past 400,000. It’s filling up fast. So here’s what I want every Amazon influencer to start doing right now, before we hit the wall.
In This Article
- The Math Nobody Has Refuted
- If You Are New, This Is All You Know
- What This Does to Brands and Samples
- Reframing What a Good Product Is
- Why Saturation Mattered Less With Creator Connections
- The New Rule: Watch the Category
- How Oink Finds Non-Creator Connections Winners
- We Are at the Eleventh Hour
The Math Nobody Has Refuted
The number at the top of Creator Connections keeps growing, but it’s not a real number. What matters is how many campaigns you can actually join, and that number is shrinking every day. When I ran the math a few days ago, 365,000 campaigns were already full. As of this writing it’s over 400,000. There’s no workaround for that. You can’t un-fill a campaign. The trajectory is what it is, and unless Amazon intervenes, the trajectory ends in a place where there are hardly any empty slots left.
If You Are New, This Is All You Know
A lot of you joined the Amazon Influencer Program in the last year, and for you Creator Connections is the whole game. That’s going to make the pivot hard to picture. But the program was extremely popular before any of us on the influencer side even knew Creator Connections existed. When the program first started getting oversaturated, it was before Creator Connections was a factor at all. People were making real money on on-site commissions alone. That world still exists. You just haven’t lived in it yet.
So the first thing you need to do is figure out what your influencer strategy looks like without Creator Connections. Not as a backup plan. As the plan.
What This Does to Brands and Samples
There’s a second-order effect here that I don’t think people are considering. If campaigns keep filling up and creators can’t join them, that has to have a negative impact on brands’ willingness to send collaboration samples out. Why would a brand ship free product to someone who can’t even get into the campaign? So the pipeline of free products we’ve gotten used to is going to tighten too.
Which means we need a pathway to viable products that can still make us money even when they’re not Creator Connections products. I’ve been talking about this strategy on the channel for a while now, partially because I think these products are legitimate money makers on their own, and partially because I saw this math coming.
Reframing What a Good Product Is
If a product doesn’t have that extra Creator Connections commission juice attached to it, what do you look at instead? It’s pretty simple, and it’s what we used to look at before any of this. A good non-Creator Connections product has three things:
- It’s selling at least 500 units a month.
- It has an upper carousel on the product page.
- There are open slots in that carousel.
That third one is the one that changes your behavior. You can’t be messing around with full carousels anymore. If the carousel is packed, your video isn’t getting seen, and if it isn’t getting seen, it isn’t earning.
Why Saturation Mattered Less With Creator Connections
Here’s why so many of us got lazy about carousel saturation. With Creator Connections, I don’t care if a product is oversaturated. If I get a couple of days of visibility, that 10 percent baseline commission can pay off really well. A short window at 10 percent is a great trade.
Without that 10 percent, you’re relying on the standard on-site rate on the influencer side, which is often 1.5 or 2 percent. At those rates a couple of days of visibility doesn’t move the needle. You need visibility, and you need a lot more than a couple of days of it. That’s why open carousel slots go from nice-to-have to non-negotiable. It’s the only way to get the sustained exposure that makes a 2 percent commission add up.
The New Rule: Watch the Category
There is one new thing we’re adding to the strategy that didn’t exist back in the old days: paying attention to the commission category the product sits in. Back in March of 2026, Amazon dropped commission rates across the board for all categories. That sounds awful on the surface, but the reality is most of us never paid attention to category commission rates anyway. We were already doing low-category stuff and making 1.5 percent videos without knowing it.
Now, if a product doesn’t have Creator Connections behind it, we have to be deliberate. Stick to products in categories with at least a 2 percent baseline commission if you can, or 1 to 1.5 percent at minimum. What we absolutely do not want is the 0.5 percent categories. They exist, and they will quietly eat your month. If you want to make commission, avoid the 0.5s.
How Oink Finds Non-Creator Connections Winners
This is exactly the kind of product research I built Oink for Influencers to do. The 5 Pillars system scores products on the things that actually matter when there’s no bonus commission propping them up: sales velocity, carousel presence, open slots, competition, and category rate. Instead of eyeballing a product page and hoping, you get a read on whether a product can earn on a 2 percent rate before you spend an hour filming it.
Pair that with a Storefront Cross Check so you’re not re-filming products you already cover, and use the Comparison Video Schedule to stack related products into one video and multiply your carousel placements per filming session. The point is to make non-Creator Connections research fast enough that you’ll actually do it consistently.
We Are at the Eleventh Hour
I don’t know what happens if this keeps going and Amazon doesn’t step in. Mathematically, we are at the eleventh hour. Creator Connections is just running out of campaign space. The headline number keeps growing, but it isn’t real, and the campaigns you can actually use are disappearing. I’ll keep talking about the non-Creator Connections pivot here, because I think it’s the most important thing an Amazon influencer can be working on right now.
Don’t wait for the last open campaign to disappear before you build a strategy that doesn’t need one. Oink for Influencers finds the 500-unit, open-carousel, decent-category products that earn on their own. Install it, run the 5 Pillars on your next batch of products, and start building a storefront that holds up with or without Creator Connections.
