MaxBounty · impact.com · ClickDealer · Aragon Advertising The Blue Book rankings are driven by the opinions of people who do affiliate marketing for a living. It means that a lot of marketing BS gets set aside. Nothing cuts through the noise of the marketplace like a few thousand angry – or happy! – marketers with opinions. What’s interesting is how few networks we have seen, in the 20+ years we have been publishing, that can maintain excellence year after year. There’s a reason that the Blue Book rankings have traditionally been known as the Top 20. It’s because for a long time, that was the point at which the consistency and professionalism started to be a little less reliable. Our 2026 winners are all fantastic flag-bearers for the principle that consistency and experience are the keys to long-term success for a network. MaxBounty, ClickDealer, Aragon Advertising, and impact.com have each appeared in our rankings many times, and between them have decades as leaders in their respective fields. They really are extraordinary networks. MaxBounty: Best CPA Network MaxBounty won the CPA table top spot, and then it also won both of the sub-categories beneath it, best CPA network for advertisers, and best for affiliates. Think about what that requires. Advertisers want cheaper leads and tighter quality control. Affiliates want higher payouts and faster money. The skill of a great network is balancing those potentially conflicting wants. To be voted #1 by both sides of the equation is a sign of how well MaxBounty is run. The network says it now runs 3,000-plus active campaigns with north of 30,000 affiliates, and it is famous for the reliability of its payments – a huge plus point in our affiliate feedback. MaxBounty was acquired by mrge, the German commerce advertising group, a couple of years back, which means they have a big story for brands as well. It’s no surprise they are still our top pick. ClickDealer: Best CPA Network in Europe Europe isn’t a single market for affiliates or brands. It’s a dozen or more different markets with different rules, languages and customer behaviors. Running health offers in Germany is not the same as running them in Spain. It says a lot that ClickDealer dominates our European results, with 18 verticals, seven offices, about 10,000 active publishers, and a client list that includes Walmart, Upwork, and Squarespace. They’re also future-aware, already thinking through many of the issues that AI is creating. See for example their recent piece discussing how you should attribute an e-commerce sale when the thing that clicks “buy” is an AI agent working on the shopper’s behalf, not the shopper. If I was a brand or an affiliate, I’d rather read a network thinking out loud about that than one publishing its fourth post of the year on choosing a vertical. Aragon Advertising: Best Pay-Per-Call Network Aragon took pay-per-call for 2026, ahead of CJ and Marketcall. Pay-per-call is unforgiving. The product is a phone call, which means a weak buyer or a lazy compliance process is sitting there on a recording, and no amount of dashboard styling hides it. Aragon Advertising, together with its sister, Aragon Premium, have led our pay per call rankings for years now, mostly because founder Todd Stearn is constantly thinking ahead and developing new ways to increase quality and performance for brands. As the channel shifts toward AI moving onto the call itself to score and analyze conversations, while search traffic moves off blue links and onto answer engines, every network needs someone like Todd who is looking to the horizon. Pay-per-call is still about human contact, and as a result the sector has a lot of growth left. We fully expect that Aragon will lead the way. impact.com: Best CPS and Affiliate Network impact.com topped the cost-per-sale and affiliate table, ahead of Awin Group and Rakuten Affiliate Network. Then in April, impact.com and Rakuten announced an alliance. Read that sentence again with the table in front of you: our first and third place networks are now working hand in glove. Of course, it’s an alliance, not a merger, and not many details have been made public, but it’s fair to summarize it as impact.com’s platform plus Rakuten’s services and intelligence. Rakuten Rewards adds a lot of consumer data and the Cash Back audience. impact.com spent June at its own iPX event in Austin announcing a long list of new offerings: a smarter in-platform assistant, an autonomous partner recruitment agent in closed beta, tracking for how creators influence what AI answer engines recommend, and creator storefronts. The storefronts and the social amplification piece are already live. We are still hearing questions from some agencies about account management and competition, but there’s no doubt it’s an exciting move for the industry. Partner marketing platforms are a big focus for us in the next 12 months. Look for our newly rebuilt PerformanceTech section to launch in October. See the full tables Best CPA Networks Best European CPA Networks Best Pay-Per-Call Networks Best CPS and Affiliate Networks Congratulations to all four. If you work with them, you already knew how good they are. Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Article, Blue Book, Featured Tagged under: #1 CPA Network, #1 CPS Network, affiliate networks, Blue Book Top 20, CPA Networks Europe, pay per call About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.