Data, Trust & Scale: The New Foundations of affiliate networks

At the Xanada Investments Pitch Contest last week at NEXT.io - The World’s iGaming Community, I expected tough questions after the pitch but it wasn’t anything I could do to prepare for it. For me, it was a real iGaming roast but rapid fire and no time for jokes other than comments about purple underwear with NEXT written on it. 

So this newsletter, I’m taking the questions I got and want to do a deeper dive on the answers. Not just to do a better job of answering, but they were great questions with Pierre Lindh giving me the toughest one. 

Housekeeping: shoutout to newsletter sponsors StatsDrone and FTDx ! Join the newsletter on our Beehiiv channel too. 

Also, I just want to give a heads-up that iGaming Club by AffPapa Malaga is happening soon, May 26- 28th, so get your tickets. 

Pierre Lindh⚡️: The customer tends to gravitate towards the market leader and you do have some tough competition. Why will you win eventually against your competitors?

I said it on stage, it was a tough question that almost hurt but the biggest challenge was just giving a concise answer. This is the detailed answer.

Let’s start with who does have an affiliate network:

• AffiliationCloud by Raketech

• Kiickr by Game Lounge

• Mrktplays by Catena Media

• Gambling Affiliation

• MatchingVisions.com™

• AffiliationSPACE

• Revenue Lab

• Super Afiliados

• Casino Affiliate Programs

This is a big list and is getting bigger as there are a few other big affiliate groups NOT on this list but likely will be later this year. 

Let’s start off by stating that today, StatsDrone isn’t an affiliate network but we are powering a few affiliate networks and this is perhaps the biggest demand in our business. Our roadmap could be one of these 3 things:

1. Only be a supplier of software for affiliate networks (SaaS model only)

2. Launch our own network

3. Power as many networks as we can potentially helping us with big data

The SaaS advantage

Let me start off by addressing what all of these networks don’t have. They don’t have the SaaS advantage. 

That is, affiliates joining our ecosystem first. Not all affiliates want to be part of an affiliate network, knowing that the network owns their players and a copy of their data. 

By not offering any SaaS tools at all for analytics and/or adtech, this is how we can capture a market share that either doesn’t want to join an affiliate network.

I did say in my presentation, that our SaaS users are 1 click away from joining the affiliate network model. Either this could be our affiliate network, or those networks can pay to capture that user.

The SEO advantage

Not all affiliate networks work and integrate with everyone. We have 1700+ integrations with affiliate programs and some are even affiliate networks.

Every integration is an affiliate program review for us, which is search traffic and essentially being the encylopedia of affiliate marketing. 

Not all the affiliate networks mentioned work with more than 200 brands, while we have around 4000 brands in our database. When an affiliate wants to do research on any brand or program, we’ll be top of mind. 

Our current search rankings are satisfactory right now but with a bit more investment, it would help us dominate the search engines including AI overviews. 

The advanced analytics advantage

I believe we have built one of the most advanced iGaming affiliate analytics platforms around that is built to scale. 

We capture this data currently:

• Account level

• Brand level

• Campaign level

• Dynamic variables level

• Postback level

Soon we will have player engagement reports. 

On top of all of this, solving accuracy of data is our strength and is the one thing that prevents a lot of companies trying to compete in this narrow niche of affiliate marketing. That is, affiliate stats aggregation. 

The affiliate manager tools advantage

We are very close to launching our own tool to find all iGaming affiliates. This research tool would also be very useful for affiliate managers. 

On top of this, we believe that most affiliate programs don’t have their own BI platform to make data-driven decisions in dealing with their affiliates. We have already built this system for affiliates, and we are in the process of cloning these ideas for affiliate managers. 

If someone gave us an active affiliate network today to optimize, this would be our first task in analyzing all affiliate campaigns and tracking links. 

The adtech advantage

If we can help update bonuses and brand data for 4000+ brands and be the source of truth for closing brands, this would be our advantage. 

Sure, affiliate managers of a brand could work with a big affiliate network but by being an agnostic platform, they would come to us for ensuring more affiliates had to up date bonuses and brand info. 

Without going into further detail, just think of a bidding network. That network both needs more affiliates and more brands that would want to participate in it.  

What about deals?

In theory, the best deals can help, but this could also be a curse.

Do all brands want to pay the max commission for every player generated through a network?

There are many brands that refuse to work with affiliate networks for this very reason. So I don’t believe this is our disadvantage either which some people might think is the key to dominating this space. Value needs to go both ways. 

Dmitry Belianin: You mentioned a shaving element in one of your slides. It appears to be one of the hidden and most afraid topics to talk about in your niche. How will you be able to fight shaving whether it is possible or not?

My answer I gave was an answer I already logged in my head so I had the answer ready to go.

Today, we’ll be the company that talks about the uncomfortable topics and put a spotlight on them. 

We are solving some of these issues with our tools and with the help of our Head of Product, Joe Hatch, we launched a concept we call Changelog which helps affiliates analyze any changes that happen in their affiliate data. 

I believe the problem will solve itself through data transparency in an accidental way.

Why?

When leading affiliate programs like Partners.io or affiliate program software like Affelios start offering streaming of data, there will be no questioning of the reporting. 

Data streaming is the real, real-time data we all want. Postbacks is NOT real-time despite what everyone is saying online. Postbacks seem to cause more headaches than they solve. 

If more affiliate programs and platforms start offering true real-time data of affiliate stats, there will be more trust built. We can still have our suite of analysis tools to spot odd behaviours of shaving, such as magical winning players consistently showing up at the end of the month. At the end of the day, what the affiliate will eventually care about is the best ROI.

If we get streaming of affiliate data, then the top metric remains the same: which brands deliver maximum ROI with the best player values. 

Justin Paul Anastasi: How do you plan to scale to meet the demands of much larger affiliate networks?

This was another tough question that I almost froze upon answering. 

When we rebuilt StatsDrone, one of the top requirements was that we needed this to scale for not just 1000 affiliates, but at least 10,000. We actually didn’t think we would fully end up in the affiliate network space unless it was to run our own affiliate network.

Our system is library based and when you connect a single affiliate program in the current app, it will grab all brand data, campaign data and even dynamic variables without needing to configure anything. It is fast, efficient and it could be deployed on any server anywhere. 

As of Wednesday, May 14th, 2025, we have 1745 supported affiliate programs with 1316 of them having data by API, which is 75% of the affiliate programs. 

If anything, our tools could be the complete catalyst for growth in the affiliate network space. 

Let me share 2 common ways in which some people run their affiliate networks  

1. Each sub affiliate has their own account created with unique affiliate links

2. Each sub affiliate is assigned their own campaign with unique affiliate links

Situation 1 works like this: 

Affiliate joins an affiliate network and asks for tracking links for 888 Casino and LeoVegas in Canada, UK, Ireland and New Zealand.

The network creates 2 accounts for the affiliate but the ownership details and login access are owned by the network. The network then has to login to the backend and get 4 tracking links per program. That is 8 tracking links copied manually into another platform where 24-48 hours later, the affiliate has their tracking links. At this point we pray the correct tracking links were selected. 

This is a logistics nightmare.

Situation 2 works like this:

Affiliate joins the affiliate network and asks for the same 2 casinos with 4 GEOs. The network automatically generates these 8 tracking links instantly where the tracking link uses a hard coded dynamic variable tracking link assigned to the affiliate in question. 

All tracking links are created as a campaign and show up instantly in reports. This situation can be repeated all day long without any human intervention. 

Once again, our dynamic variables solution will be a powerful addition to any affiliate network. It will generate click ID level tracking so every player’s deposit and revenue activity can be tracked and known. 

On-premise stats

We have already launched our on-prem version of StatsDrone for the affiliate stats which we call DIDO. We have solid coverage, accurate data and any affiliate or network could use this. Our DIDO product can handle multiple accounts and 1000s of affiliate programs. 

Adtech at scale

I addressed the affiliate stats component aka analytics. Now let’s address the adtech component which is the data driven affiliate ads.

Our solution could be a full solution where our code renders the ads on the affiliate site or the affiliate could choose to use the data as an API and power their adtech. 

Our CTO does have experience building complex apps with heavy server requirements and ensuring high uptime. 

We do have something to prove here, and we believe we have an experienced tech team that is up for this challenge.  

Vladimir Malakchi: Your not your first year in the industry, your your project is working, you have a lot of network and you’re still not having a huge amount of revenue. What is the bottleneck, what is the main issue and what are you going to solve?  

We built a TAM slide that some investors felt it was too busy so we didn’t include it but I’m sharing it here. 

My estimation is that less than 1% of affiliates use an app to collect and track their affiliate stats. 

On the other hand, we believe that more than 50% of affiliates use link management tools and there is a high adoption of various types of adtech tools. 

The one tool that can bridge affiliate stats and adtech would be link management tools. 

Just looking at the data for link management tools which some people call it affiliate link redirects or affiliate link cloaking. 

• 7,000,000 users and plans starting at $99/year

• 443,000 users and plans starting at $99/year

Link management tools are the gateway to unlock more value in using dynamic variables. 

Many affiliates we talk to want to have advanced data. Dynamic variables basically will give you data on revenue decay of every player and basically show you player values. 

The dynamic variables users we have are great customers but more of them want this power and we believe they want a done-for-you service. 

One more powerful upsell we will have in building our own link management tools is smart redirections that will disable clicks going to closed casinos. 

To my knowledge, I don’t know of any link management tool that will map closed brands and automatically redirect them for you. 

It is a hard sell trying to pitch affiliate stats to affiliates.

It is an easier pitch to sell link management tools when millions of affiliates already are using them.

So in short, yes our LinkedIn game is helpful along with this newsletter, our Affiliate BI podcast and word of mouth.

Our goal to unlock more revenue are link management tools and better targeted outreach that aims to help affiliates more than anybody else has offered. If we can always inform them they have broken tracking links or are linking to closed brands, they appreciate it. 

Once again thanks to Vladimir Malakchi from Xanada Investments and Pierre Lindh⚡️ and Martin Pettersson from NEXT.io in putting this together. Awesome startup group and an all-star judging panel.