AppsFlyer, Branch and Adjust are MMPs — not affiliate programs.

Why this confusion exists

The word "affiliate" got overloaded. In web marketing it means a person who earns commission for referrals. In mobile adtech it historically meant something else: partner ad networks and sub-publishers in an MMP's integration marketplace. So an MMP's docs mention "partners" and "affiliates" constantly — meaning measurement integrations, not people you pay. Add the referral programs the vendors run for agencies recommending their software, and the search results become genuinely misleading. This page exists to un-mislead them.

What an MMP actually does

An MMP is the accounting layer of paid user acquisition. Broadly, the category covers:

• Install attribution. Deciding which ad click or link gets credit for an install, including Apple's SKAdNetwork reporting on iOS.

• Deep linking. Branch built its reputation here: links that survive the store redirect and land users on the right in-app screen.

• Spend and cohort analytics. Joining ad-spend data across networks with revenue cohorts, so you can compute ROAS per channel. AppsFlyer's core business.

• Ad-fraud detection. Filtering fake installs and click flooding across paid channels. A pillar of Adjust's offering.

These are measurement products, priced and built for teams running paid UA across many networks. They answer "where did this install come from and what did it cost?"

What an MMP does not do

An affiliate program is an operations problem, not a measurement problem. The parts no MMP provides:

• Creator recruitment and terms. Campaigns, commission rates, join links, invitations. An MMP has no concept of a creator who signs up to promote you.

• A ledger of what you owe a person. Recurring commission means tracking accruals per creator per renewal, at the rate locked at subscription start.

• Revenue verification for payment. Paying people requires proof stronger than attribution modeling. InfluTo ties every commission to a store receipt — via RevenueCat webhook or direct App Store / Google Play validation — because "our model attributed this install to you" is not a basis for sending money.

• Money movement. Escrow, KYC, transfers, payout minimums, refund clawbacks. MMPs never touch your money; a commission platform's whole job ends in a Stripe Connect transfer.

What a creator-commission platform does

Taking InfluTo as the concrete example: a developer creates a campaign and deposits a refundable escrow via Stripe. Creators get referral codes and links. The SDK (iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native — about 5 minutes to integrate) captures the code deterministically, with clicks deduplicated and fraud-flagged. When the referred user becomes a paying subscriber — proven by receipt — commission accrues, recurs on every renewal, survives the refund window, and pays out via Stripe Connect with a $1 minimum. Setup is free; the platform takes 10% of commissions. The full walkthrough is the step-by-step guide linked below.

Notice there is no overlap with the MMP list above. Different questions, different layers.

When you need both

• You run paid UA on multiple ad networks. You need an MMP. Nothing else de-duplicates credit across Meta, Google and TikTok ads.

• You pay creators a revenue share. You need a commission platform. An MMP can't do it, and gluing payouts onto MMP data means building the verification and money layer yourself.

• You do both. Run both. They don't conflict: MMP attribution and referral-code attribution operate independently, and the commission platform's source of truth is store receipts, not the MMP's model. A creator-driven subscriber shows up in your MMP as organic or as a tracked link — either way, InfluTo's ledger doesn't depend on it.

One practical difference in effort: MMP contracts are enterprise sales; InfluTo is a free signup and an SDK. If the creator channel is what you're testing, the test costs $0 plus your escrow deposit — which is refundable. Head-to-head details: InfluTo vs AppsFlyer and InfluTo vs Branch, linked below.