Today Marks 20 Years of Wealthy Affiliate!

byKyle

2.5M followers

3 months ago

Hey everyone,

This is going to be a long post, but an important one. So grab a coffee, tea, or beer and give yourself a 10-15 minutes to get through it.

It is an important milestone. Today Wealthy Affiliate turns 20. This truly marks a significant day in our business, and one that few businesses ever get to experience.

As a company, we have defied all statistical odds.

Most companies SHOULD have failed at this point, but we haven't. Not only have we not failed, we have continued to evolve and improve as a service over the last 20 years. But how did we do it? And why are we still motivated to continue with the same brand after all this time?

I want to answer these questions and more in the coming post. I know that you can learn a lot from our experiences, our successes, and just as many failures over the years.

How It All Started...

Carson and I met in college where we were attending for Computer Science back in 2001. In fact, Carson "tipped' me off about this "affiliate marketing" thing in one of our classes. He told me that people were making money online with it (and he was), so I figured I would try to figure it out.

It was quite secretive as he didn't want to "give me the secrets", so I went to work and figured it out. It took me three months to make my first sale, and at just over the year mark I was earning more than my profs at school through this "affiliate marketing" thing. So was Carson, independently successful with his own affiliate marketing business.

But we didn't start Wealthy Affiliate then. In fact, it was years later when we bumped into each other and we pitched each other the idea of joining forces and building something together within the online world. We knew that between us and our differing skill sets, we could create something substantial.

But where do we start?

We Started Meeting Weekly to Brainstorm Business Ideas...

We didn't come up with the idea for Wealthy Affiliate right away. In fact, we came up with many other ideas.

One of them was Uber, before it became Uber (we missed the boat on that one).

Another one was a health platform that would offer personalize diet plans, supplements, and workout schedules.

Another one was a kiosk at a mall that would be digitized and that would allow the stores to offer real time coupons (which also exists now).

But none of those stuck. After spending months meeting with Carson at a local restaurant (in Victoria, BC), we had come up with the PERFECT idea for a joint business. Why don't we teach people exactly what we are doing and how we are succeeding with Affiliate Marketing. The idea was born.

A short week or two later, on September 10, 2005, Wealthy Affiliate officially came to life when we clicked the button bring this platform alive. A platform that was purely focused on PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, and each week we gave people a keyword list, and ad samples, along with a few affiliate programs. It was $29.99 per month, or $359.88 per year...and that is ALL we offered.

It started to sell, we had our first sale the day we launched, and then from there it started to snowball. We were helping people, they were loving our service, and people started to share our platform.

It was simple. We were two friends with a vision. We hit "publish" on what seemed like a small idea at the time: create a place where people could learn affiliate marketing in an honest, straightforward way. What started as a simple platform for research and training has become a global community, a hub for entrepreneurs, and a living, breathing ecosystem that has supported millions of people in building businesses online.

That was the start, but we were far from done...

Growing With an Industry That Never Stopped Changing.

When you live through 20 years of online business, you live through eras. We have seen an economic crash, an evolution of an industry (affiliate marketing) right from it's infancy, and now we are entering into a brand new era with Artificial Intelligence creating another big shake up.

But if you want to succeed in any business, you have to embrace the idea of change. You have to push hard when there are days you don't feel like moving forward, and you have to be confident in your abilities even when you there is no reason to be confident.

You also have to be humble about your successes...you cannot "over celebrate", you cannot "gloat", and you certainly cannot become a jerk to others. You see this too much in this industry (and in business in general), and if you think too highly of yourself, you are going to be in position to lose everything.

But that is business. That's what makes business exciting. There are unknowns, there are feats of mental and emotional endurance, and there are extreme lows and highs. But you learn a freakin' lot going through every stage in your business.

Early on we realized that we don't control our business. Our audience does, and the technology available to us does. We are not building things for ourselves, we are building our product for our community, and we have to evolve as fast as the technology available to us...or we die.

There has been a great deal of change over the past 20 years...too many to list. To spare you a few hours of your time, I will list a few of the more significant changes we have seen.

• When we started, PPC was a game. You could bid for exact positioning under any keyword, and Yahoo was the main and most popular search engine.
• The early days of SEO was all about Meta Tags, it had nothing to do with the content. There simply wasn't enough content out there to properly have a quality search, so you could rank by plugging meta tags with your keywords.
• Google started to gain popularity and traction...and so did Google Adwords. I remember in 2009 when we reached our 1,000,000 paid "click", that is a lot of paid traffic. They were supposed to send us a Google Fridge for this milestone, but we never got it. This is also around the same time there was a massive housing crash, and many/most of our competition failed.
• The explosion of social media platforms that changed how businesses and people connect. Myspace...then Facebook...then Twitter....then Google+...then Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn.
• The mobile revolution, where websites and apps had to keep pace with handheld devices. This was a leap from desktop only, to having to reprogram entire platforms so they were mobile friendly.
• And now, fast forward to our 20th year. The AI era. A time of rapid, exponential change unlike anything we’ve seen before. We are deep in the trenches of the technology, and adopted it immediately in November of 2022 when it came out.

Through all of it, one thing has stayed true: you must remain elastic to change.

We’ve had highs. We’ve had lows. And we’ve come to understand that the peaks and valleys are not setbacks — they are required for growth.

Today, we’ve never been more excited about the future of our business.

But truthfully, we’ve also never had more unknowns. Technology in 2026 will look dramatically different than it does in 2025. The only certainty is change.

The good news? Wealthy Affiliate is in the thick of it. We build with AI, we use it daily, and it has become part of our identity as a company.

And we will continue to remain elastic when we need to, adopt the latest technology and strategies, and keep our family here ahead of the curve.

Let's have a look a just how much change we have gone through over the years.

Wealthy Affiliate Milestones Across the Years...

Carson and I arriving in Vegas at our annual Super Affiliate Conference

We have gone through a lot of evolution and as I sat down to build a list of the changes over the years, I started to realize that in many cases we were many years ahead of the curve and we came full circle with our technology many years later.

That is what happens, sometimes when you release a new platform, new product, or new service it is with good intent...but sometimes technology is not ready for the ideas, and in some cases sometimes the audience isn't quite ready.

So as it goes. That is the fun of running a business, sometimes you are throwing spaghetti against the wall...seeing what sticks and some projects never get the daylight you initially thought they would deserve.

Here are just some of the key moments that have shaped Wealthy Affiliate over the last 20 years.

• 2005: Wealthy Affiliate launches with its first training platform
• 2006: A forum is added to Wealthy Affiliate, and the community starts
• 2007: PPC & SEO dominate, and WA guides members through the fundamentals and moves into the SEO world.
• 2008: The Las Vegas Super Affiliate program is launched, with our first year having only ONE attendee in Vegas with us
• 2009: SiteRubix Drag & Drop website builder launches, giving members a way to build websites quickly
• 2011: StreetArticles helps members distribute content at scale, some user published articles reaching over 1,000,000 views (and earning $10,000's in revenue)
• 2012: Jaaxy launches, setting a new standard for research and keyword tools in the industry.
• 2014: Live classes become a weekly staple, and community learning explodes
• 2017: Hosting and Website infrastructure fully integrated into WA
• 2020: Community continues to grow & expand, with live chat advancements and community side features. The Amabassadorship program gets a facelift.
• 2022: ChatGPT is released, AI education and integrations within Wealthy Affiliate start to take shape
• 2023: Business Hubs is launched, our first big AI based project, along with an AI content creation platform.
• Early 2025: A Brand new version of WA is launched, including Communities, and Point Based system where members can earn from their activities within WA.
• 2025: DsgnPop Studio launches, beginning with an AI-powered Logo Creator. Additional projects are launched, including a new version of Jaaxy, a full Image Studio, and a brand new Affiliate Bootcamp.
• 2026-Beyond: The AI era accelerates, and WA doubles down with new tools and training. New and significant platforms are rolled out and continued expansion into creative, community, and learning tools

By the Numbers.

OK, now lets have a look at the numbers. Looking back it is hard to believe the WA started off with a single user...and that there was no community at all.

Here is a little breakdown of some of the numbers that highlight the amazing community that has grown over the last 20 years.

What Stayed Consistent...

Over the years, we’ve introduced products like StreetArticles, SiteRubix, Jaaxy, and now DsgnPop Studio. Many also didn't launch. Many more will come. But one thing has remained constant: the Wealthy Affiliate brand and what it represents.

Helping others. Staying current. Leading the industry in ethics, technology, and training. Building an amazing community. And even at times, fighting for what is RIGHT.

Because of this we have outlast every other company in the industry, and in the last year alone we have some of the bigger players drop like flies as they have been unable to keep up with the new AI wave. It happens.

There is not a single company that exists in this industry since we started back in 2005. Not one. That should be telling. We have taken the high road, and we have built the business of Wealthy Affiliate not on the basis of how we can make more money off of people, rather how can we better serve our community and audience.

Looking Forward to the Next 20!

The road ahead is filled with opportunity. We’re building:

• A next-generation research platform that reflects the realities of SEO, social, and AI discovery
• Expanded creative tools inside WA, starting with brand assets and visual workflows
• Clearer, topic-driven communities with guided beginner-to-advanced tracks
• A refreshed Affiliate Bootcamp to help anyone reach consistent traffic and conversions
• Proactive support and resources that scale with every step of your business

The landscape will keep changing. But our mission will not: we exist to help people build real, lasting businesses online.

Most of All, Thank You.

This milestone is about you.

To every member who has logged in, asked a question, published a site, or shared a win . You are the reason Wealthy Affiliate has reached 20 years. To those who have been with us from the start, and to those who joined yesterday, thank you.

Here’s to the next twenty years of growth, learning, and helping each other succeed.

Kyle & Carson
Co-Founders, Wealthy Affiliate