CJ Affiliate Review – Is This a Good Affiliate Network?

The “CJ” in CJ Affiliate stands for Commission Junction. That was the name of this affiliate network before they were rebranded.

In this CJ Affiliate review, I’m going to talk about this very old affiliate network, how to get started and whether or not it’s still a good affiliate network to use.

For spoilers, CJ Affiliate is #2 on ThriversHub’s 10 best affiliate networks to join in 2025 list. So, we know where this is going.

But read on to understand why you should definitely join CJ Affiliate network in 2025 if you want to promote the best affiliate programs for your website.

Table of Contents

What Is CJ Affiliate?

CJ Affiliate was founded in 1998 which makes it one of the oldest affiliate networks that is still going today and a pioneer in the affiliate marketing industry.

Back then it was known as Commission Junction and owned by a company called Value-Click, Inc. In 2014, Value-Click changed their name to Conversant and rebranded Commission Junction, naming it CJ Affiliate by Conversant. Conversant itself was acquired by another company in 2014, so the name was shortened to just CJ Affiliate or simply CJ.

History lesson aside, CJ is one of the biggest affiliate networks in the United States with over 3200 active advertisers. Many of these are huge, recognizable brands.

According to the publisher homepage on CJ Affiliate, the network paid out about $1.8 billion in commissions last year alone.

Affiliate marketers love and trust CJ Affiliate for:

However, CJ Affiliate may not be the most beginner-friendly affiliate network for a number of reasons which I will reveal as you go through this blog post. Still, it’s a very good affiliate network to form key monetization partnerships and boost your earnings.

Getting Started With CJ Affiliate

Signing up for CJ Affiliate is easy but can take a good chunk of time. Set aside an hour to get signed up with CJ Affiliate as you will be reading agreements and filling in forms.

You’ll need to have a website to get started as a publisher. You can also sign up as an influencer if you have a social networking presence with a huge following.

To get started, you’ll need to click on the “Get Started” button on the CJ Affiliate website. This will take you to the join page where you can choose your adventure.

As an affiliate, you would click on the “sign up” button under Publishers & Influencers so you can “partner with the world’s best brands”. Then follow the steps to register.

1. Fill in the registration form

The CJ Affiliate publisher registration form allows you to sign up quickly with a few form fields. This includes providing your main language, your country, your main email address, and choosing a password.

You will then be asked to submit this information by verifying your email address.

The fine print says that this is part of their process to keep the quality of the network high. Other steps you’ll be asked to do are to accept legal terms, provide tax info, and also your banking info.

2. Verify your email address

The next step is to check your email address that you provided in the signup form and click on the link to confirm your email address.

If you didn’t get the email, you can click the button to resend the email or click “start over” if you realized that you registered with the wrong email address or made a mistake.

3. Read and accept CJ’s Publisher agreements

Next, you’ll need to read and accept the CJ Affiliate publisher agreements. These are a set of legal agreements by which you will operate as an affiliate signed up with CJ Affiliate.

You’ll need to confirm by checking a box, that you’re at least 18 years of age.

Another check box confirms that you have the authority to represent or act on the behalf of the company entering into the agreement with CJ Affiliate. Most likely, you’re just an individual so you can just check the box and continue.

There are three agreements that you must read and agree to.

The “accept” buttons are greyed out as you cannot just click the buttons to say you read the documents. You’ll need to click on the linked documents and scroll all the way to the end to confirm that you read them. Ideally, you should read the documents and then confirm that you did read them.

After accepting each agreement, you can then click the continue button to go to the next steps.

4. Complete onboarding process

At this point, you’ve completed the registration but you may have noticed that there’s some information that you still haven’t submitted. For example, you still haven’t even added your name.

After the last step, you’ll be taken to the login page where you’ll login and start the onboarding process. You’ll need to complete all the steps to activate your account.

There are seven tasks that need to be done to complete this checklist. You have already validated your email to get to this point, so you’ll need to complete the other six tasks.

CJ Affiliate will guide you through the steps where necessary. Just complete them and move on to the next task in the onboarding checklist.

Once completed, you’ll be taken to your dashboard where you can start joining affiliate programs that you’ll like to work with.

What Brands Can You Promote?

CJ Affiliate has many brands that are household names. You will instantly recognize many of these big companies that choose to trust CJ with running their affiliate programs.

Brands love CJ because of their access to a huge publisher network, their tracking technology, support and because they’ve been around for such a long time and have the experience and expertise.

Here are some brands you can find on CJ Affiliate. You’ll probably know most of them.

There’s a good chance that if you’re thinking of working with a big brand and you go to their website’s affiliate page, you will probably end up partnering with them through CJ Affiliate.

Finding and Joining Affiliate Programs

Encouraging partnerships between advertisers and publishers is the main goal of affiliate networks. CJ Affiliate makes it easy for you to find new partnerships as soon as you log in.

On the homepage of your dashboard, you’ll see a list of new advertisers that you can join. You can also check the recommended tab for suggestions that are more tailored to you and your niche.

CJ Affiliate also features a robust search option to find relevant partners. To search, you’ll need to click on the “Partners” link in the dashboard header, then click on “Find Advertisers”.

Within the advertiser search, you can search by advertiser or keyword. Or you can check boxes to filter searches by:

You can apply any number of filters to drill down and find advertisers that best suit you. In the screenshot above, I found 170 advertisers when I checked the health and wellness category and filtered for United States as the advertiser’s country.

You can then arrange the results in a number of ways including alphabetically, by network earnings, or by EPC.

Sometimes, advertisers may extend their offer to you after reading your network profile. You can easily accept or decline their offers.

Joining Affiliate Programs

The majority of the programs on CJ Affiliate would manually review your application when you decide to join their affiliate program.

They have to view your network profile and your promotional properties to make sure you’re a fit for their program.

I like that CJ Affiliate has an indicator under the apply button for each advertiser so that you’ll know what to expect. The common indicators are:

Each advertiser has a “more info” section where they show the website link, socials, contact info, description, country, and other info.

So if you really want to join a program under manual review or you got auto-declined, you can always get the advertiser’s contact info and send them an email to clear things up. I’ve has some luck doing this with some CJ Affiliate advertisers.

Creating Affiliate Links on CJ Affiliate

The easiest way to create links in CJ is to find advertisers that you’ve already joined and click the “Get Links” button.

This will take you to the “Links & Products” page under the “Campaigns” tab. You can also go directly to this page from the “Campaigns” menu link in the header by clicking on “Links & Products”.

From there you can just browse a variety of different creatives such as banners and text links. To create a link, all you have to do is find the right creative and then click on the “Get Code” icon. You can choose to grab the HTML code, Javascript or just the click URL.

There are some helpful filters you can use to find links from your advertiser. For example, if the advertiser is running a Black Friday sale, you could apply the “sale/discount” filter to find Black Friday links.

Creating links in CJ Affiliate is a very easy task when you use the link creation page.

Getting Paid with CJ Affiliate

As soon as you make $50 on CJ Affiliate, you can expect to get paid. Well, not ‘as soon as’, since advertisers have a locking period so they can deal with any refunds or returns that may be associated with your referrals.

$50 is the threshold and any locked commissions can get paid to you.

There are three payment methods – check, direct deposit and Payoneer. I’m happy that they offer Payoneer since I can’t do direct deposit and checks from the US take 6 weeks to clear where I’m from.

CJ Affiliate is trusted for their reliable and on-time payments every time. Payments go out on the 20th of the month once you’ve met the threshold on locked commissions.

Affiliate Support and Help

I have been a publisher with CJ Affiliate since around the year 2007 and I have only had to contact support once.

My experience was that support works fast. I had contacted them about a check payment that I hadn’t received in the mail and they answered in 18 minutes with a solution.

If something goes wrong, you can access support by clicking on the question mark symbol in the profile menu at the top of your dashboard.

There are links to contact support, find help docs, and access resources such as API docs and more.

Clicking on the “contact support” link will open up the CJ Support Center where you’ll find some articles where you can get fast answers and also a form for submitting a case.

There is also a chat but it was unavailable when I was writing this.

CJ Affiliate Pros & Cons

There are things to like and things to dislike about CJ Affiliate. From my experience and being a publisher for over 15 years, here are some pros and cons about this affiliate network.

Pros (What I Like About CJ)

CJ Affiliate is among the best affiliate networks to join in 2025. The reason for this can be attributed to many of the pros mentioned here.

My favorite reasons to love CJ Affiliate are the reliable payments and that I can get mines through Payoneer as an option.

I also like that they support cookie-less tracking as more and more browsers are starting to phase out cookies.

The fact that some of the biggest brands in the world use CJ Affiliate for their affiliate programs is also interesting to me and I’m sure it is a big draw for other affiliates as well.

Cons (What I Don’t Like About CJ)

The registration process is a bit long and has a lot of steps involved. You have to read all the legal documents and fill out forms for taxes, website profile and promotion methods, payment info and more.

To be fair, CJ Affiliate is big on maintaining a high quality network for the benefit of the advertisers they support. Getting through the registration process helps to qualify you as a high quality publisher.

I say that CJ Affiliate isn’t so beginner-friendly for the above reason and also for a number of other reasons.

Once you follow the right training and get a little bit of experience with the affiliate marketing process, you should be OK and find CJ Affiliate a bit easier to use.

Final Words

CJ Affiliate is a must for any affiliate marketer who wants to partner with top brands and earn more from their websites.

They’ve been around for a very long time and have earned the trust from both advertisers and publishers alike. A trust-worthy and reliable affiliate network, CJ Affiliate earns its #2 spot on ThriversHub’s 10 best affiliate networks list.