Moving a disclosure from the footer to just above the fold tripled affiliate link clicks in a test run by a mid-size comparison site, according to internal numbers shared with me last month. The same page, same offer, same traffic source — only the placement changed. The lift held across 11 weeks and roughly 420,000 sessions, which is long enough and large enough that I don't think it's noise.

That result cuts against how most affiliates treat compliance text. The working assumption is that disclosure is a tax: you pay it in conversions, you bury it, and everyone moves on. What this test suggests is that the tax might be smaller than the placement penalty — or that the disclosure is doing something other than dragging.

What actually changed

The test was simple. Version A kept a two-line disclosure at the bottom of the page, below the offer table. Version B put the same text in a bordered box above the first affiliate button, with a single link to the full terms. Nothing else moved.

	Disclosure at bottom	Disclosure above the fold
Affiliate clicks per 1,000 sessions	31	94
Median time to first click	2m 40s	1m 05s
Bounce rate	61%	58%

The click-through rate went from 3.1% to 9.4%. The bounce rate barely budged, which matters — if the lift had come from fewer people leaving, you'd expect a bigger shift there. Instead, the same visitors clicked sooner and more often.

Why the lift probably isn't a fluke

Three things make me take this seriously rather than file it under "test weirdness."

First, the sample. Four hundred and twenty thousand sessions over 11 weeks is enough to rule out a short-term novelty effect, and the site ran the split 50/50 the whole time.

Second, the mechanism is plausible. A disclosure near the button answers the question a cautious reader is already asking: who's paying for this? Put it in the footer and that reader has to go looking, which most won't. Put it next to the button and the objection gets handled before it forms. Trust, in other words, isn't a conversion killer here — it's a conversion aid.

Third, it lines up with what regulators have been pushing for. The UK's Gambling Commission and several EU authorities have moved toward requiring prominent affiliate disclosure, not buried disclosure. If the compliant version also performs better, the old "compliance costs us money" argument loses its main prop.

The caveat worth flagging

This was one site, one vertical, and mostly sports betting offers. Casino and slots pages may behave differently — the decision is more impulse-driven, and a disclosure box above the fold could read as friction. I'd want to see the test repeated on a slots-heavy page before treating 3x as a general rule.

What it means for how you build pages

The practical takeaway isn't "make disclosures loud." It's that placement near the decision point seems to help rather than hurt. That has knock-on effects: your above-the-fold real estate gets more competitive, the disclosure competes with the offer headline for attention, and you'll need to write it in a way that reads as information rather than a warning label. A box that says "we earn a commission if you sign up through our links — this doesn't affect what you pay" is doing a different job than a wall of legal text.

There's also a responsible-gambling angle that tends to get lost in these discussions. Clear disclosure and clear risk information are the same kind of design problem. If a trust cue above the fold lifts clicks, it's worth testing whether a short "18+, bet within your means" line in the same position helps or hurts. My guess is it depends entirely on how it's written.

The open question is whether this holds at scale, or whether the effect fades once every affiliate does it. Trust signals work partly because they're unusual. If above-the-fold disclosure becomes standard, the 3x probably compresses toward 1x — and the sites that tested early will have banked the difference.