Welcome to the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast with me, Lee Ann Johnston, your host. And today I'm super excited to have somebody very special on the podcast with me, who's been in the industry a very, very long time, and who I'm excited to speak to today because he's operating in a really, really exciting space. So today joining me is Tim Heat, the founder of the Yellow Group. Hi, Tim.
SPEAKER_00Hi, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_02I'm very, very well. I'm super excited to have you on this podcast with me today. It's been a long time coming. But before we get started, I'd love you to tell our audience a little bit about your backstory, where you began, you know, your life in affiliate marketing, and where where you are now as the founder of the Yellow Group.
SPEAKER_00Well, preparing for this podcast, I was thinking of a few things. And um, I got back to thinking about poker affiliate listings and casino affiliate programs. And I used to be on PAL, the Poker Affiliate Listings so much with Randy and all the guys there, and it taught me so much just discussing different things about how to be an affiliate marketer and you know what to do and how to do it, and you know what the opportunities were and the deals coming through. And it was a really, really good foruming community back in the day, and still a lot of the people who are in that have come forward and progressed through the industry in a big way. Um, interestingly, we were a poker affiliate. I live in Estonia, haven't been here since 2002, and um we started out as an affiliate, and we really focused in on the uh on the on the poker side of things, and I wasn't really that interested in the casino. And I remember we got one deal with someone, and it was like we had a 62.5% deal, and I poker for our ranked back deals, but they gave me a 25% casino deal. I'm like, yeah, whatever, I don't really care about the casino stuff, but you know, I suppose 25%'s alright, you know, and didn't really focus on it. And yeah, that's back in 2004, back or 2005, back in the day. And if I had known what it was then and done it then, it would be a very different story. And look, you make your choices and you hit certain forks of the road, and uh, I'm very happy with the route that we took. But it's it's interesting now, being very heavily involved with casino and sports betting to think about what life would have been like as a casino affiliate. I remember we used to have conferences in in Prague and the EIG in Berlin and different ones out at Sigma and Megita and Macau and yeah, it's the LAC where it used to be at the different location, old Taggetty Road or something used to be called.
SPEAKER_02Old Willingsgate, I think it was.
SPEAKER_00Old Willingsgate, yeah. So we were walking around there, and um, there was the Euro partners had their big stage with free drinks, and I was bright-eyed, and my god, what's this industry? And one of the great things about that was that sort of real connection with your affiliate managers and other affiliates, and it was a very friendly and helpful community. I don't know, it's become a little bit more corporatized these days, and I don't know if that still exists like it used to exist, which is a real shame because I think affiliates were really viewed very much as marketing partners and helping grow businesses where it's it's really become commoditized to a certain degree these days, and it's I I see a number of issues with affiliate marketing and a number of problems that operators have with affiliates and and and affiliates with operators. And it's become very, very price-sensitive. When you get into regulations and when you get into different programs, everybody's trying to save a few bucks or a few percentages here and there, and you lost the real essence of what a wonderful industry we we work in. You know, and and back in the day, don't get me wrong, there was sniping and there was rogue affiliates and rogue operators and whatnot. So there's different challenges we had back then. But I just feel now everybody is dollar conscious, not really wanting to be as spend thrift as they may have been. But that said on the affiliate side, you had a lot of corporate affiliates, bad rate tech or XL or Better Collective, even now, you know, and these guys just went around buying up absolutely everything and really changed the relationship whereby they could dictate the terms to the operators. And if you're a new operator, you didn't really have a choice. You know, if you want to be on Ask Gamblers or Better Collective, you are looking at, you know, 150 CBA and 50% Rev share deal, and that's what you needed because that's where a lot of the traffic came from. So I think that that there's been a shift in how that's been looked at. And I've got some ideas how I think affiliates can work in the future. But our story, or my story, so doing poker, I originally set up all the websites for every casino in Eastern Europe pokerclub.e, pokerclub.lv, pokerclub.lt for Lithuania, uh in Kiev, in Poland, in Moscow, in Odessa. We used to run the poker tournaments software for a land-based casino. You know, when you play on a Friday night tournament with the ranking systems and whatever else. And I remember I put a party poker banner on that. And we ended up being one of the biggest party poker affiliates in Eastern Europe because I was probably your account manager back then, to be honest.
SPEAKER_02Really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that probably so that that was great, and that was a great way to get into it. We enjoyed working there, but then with poker, obviously rake back became a big thing. And so we started then working with a lot of different operators and skins and networks and build a thing called Rakeback Engine. So we used to then make white labels of that, which was basically an engine to automate the whole Rakeback facility of payments and then run white labels. We had 200 white labels throughout the world. So it was a very interesting piece of software. I remember on Party Poacher, you weren't allowed to do Rakeback. We'd built a software called IPTParty.com or .xe. And used to play party, then play your games, then run this updater. It would then run through the hand histories and we would calculate the rate that you've contributed and then pay a percentage of that back out. So we had a software to run that and do it all. And I I'd hate to sort of have to sit in front of Dick shit telling you the stuff we did back then, but um we we did everything because we just wanted to do well and grow what we were doing.
SPEAKER_02And I think that's the core story here for anybody that's entered into the industry in the last five years. This is the history that's been lost that got us to where we are now in the best practices and the state of the nation that we work in right now. Back then, 15 years ago, I mean, anything was a go. As long as you were sending customers and as long as you were converting, you know, the brands wanted to work with you. So it was a really wild, wild west kind of time where you tried anything and everything to kind of just deliver, right? I want to pick your brains a little bit about these ideas that you have in terms of how affiliates are working. You know, the industry's changed a lot back then, from then to now. There's a lot more regulation. But what are some of the biggest things that you've seen change over your tenure that is actually bettered in this time?
SPEAKER_00Look, I I think one of the big opportunities is real-time data. So we we run bigcasino.io and sportsbit.io, our main two big B2C brands, and you know, we're sponsoring Southampton, sponsoring Arsenal. There's still always a soft spot in my heart for how affiliates can work with us. But I think real-time data is super important that if I'm an affiliate and I send a big whale for a big sports bidding whale, I want to rail the action. You know, I I want to be able to see there's big action on Man New versus Liverpool, and I want to know which team to barrack for, nearly that I'm a part of the house, of which the affiliate really is. So I want to see all the bets going through. I want to see what my liabilities on the matches are. I want a transparent program to show me all the data. So the first big Casino affiliate program we did, we basically mimicked a copy of our back office, which was every transaction in real time. So you could log into your account and you could see the every single transaction. You can filter on one user, and when they're playing backer at 20 grand a hand, you could see bet transaction minus 20,000, win transaction plus 39,000, and the balance and everything else, and you can almost enjoy it in real time. What it did, which is really important to me, is gave absolute transparency to the affiliates that we're not trying to snipe them. In fact, this is our back office. This is showing you every single transaction in real time that you know you're working with us, you're an extension of our marketing team. We want to share in that. So, what we're trying to build right now, which I don't think an income access or a Maya affiliates or a net refer or Quince are doing, we're trying to give them affiliates the same tools that our internal marketing teams do. So I'm a big believer if we're doing programmatic media buying, yeah, and they're going through multiple different landing pages, registrations, currency, calls to actions, and then if we know in our data warehouse what the lifetime value of a customer is here, I now want to send that information right back to our programmatic media buying and saying, if you have found a customer with this 200 data points and profile and we know it's customer's gonna be worth 1200 euros. Now, when you're going to do your media buying and you're doing your cost uh CPM, you can now spend or bid up to $2.60 CPM because you know that channel will get you down and give you 130% ROI. And one software we've invested into, or a company we've invested into, is doing exactly that to really then automate that programmatic media buying to understand that whole customer flow because affiliate programs or operators didn't want to tell the affiliates actually how much money they were making to help the affiliates become more efficient.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, transparency has always been a sort of biting point in in the affiliate industry and accurate tracking is another area. You know, there's there's so many layers of you know, systems, tools, processes that it's often quite difficult for affiliates to get that data. So to me, I think you you've hit the the nail on the head. You know, accurate data has changed the way that we can work in a performance model with our partners and publishers. Do you think the affiliate channel is going to continue to grow? Because you've seen it from day one and you've lived it to where it is now and how complex and difficult and involved it is in terms of a marketing strategy. Do you still think that the affiliate channel has got a lot of growth? Especially in these really competitive markets. I mean, the casino and sports market probably one of the most competitive in iGaming, right? Where do you see growth happening? Where do you think that there's opportunities to still invest in this channel?
SPEAKER_00I think there's one fundamental issue here that most people running the casino operators are not gamblers themselves. So when you're looking at your quarterly senior management meeting and the CEO sits down and says, Well, hang on, while we're paying that affiliate 453,000 euros, what have they done this month? Now the the affiliate's got a whale. The whale's playing well. The first thing a senior management team can go, well, let's cut that off, and that will add to our bottom line. And they're not understanding all the hard work that the affiliates have to go through to give themselves to find that needle in the haystack. So I think there's a lack of knowledge from the operator side on the role which affiliates pay. Now that said, I don't think affiliate should be getting a lifetime revenue share. My view of this, and that's quite contentious, don't get it.
SPEAKER_02Hugely controversial. I've got a couple, I've got to catch you at there.
SPEAKER_00I'm on the affiliate side here. But let me let me expand my thinking. Yeah. Affiliate is simply bringing up a player to a side and then going, thanks very much, CPA and Rev share if I get lucky in the future. That is only part of the journey. That's only 10-20% of the journey. The very, very important part. 80% of the journey is getting the player on the casino, getting it to improve their players, their session lengths when they're playing blackjack. Because if you can play for twice as well or twice as many transactions, it's in every friend's interest. And when they do drop off, how do you reactivate them or stop them churning from that casino? Which is normally the cost that a casino needs to maintain to operate themselves. Now, there are sites like Interactive out there who will do churn reactivation and then they'll charge an affiliate fee. And I think let's call it inbound affiliate, should understand that if you're going to do retained affiliates, it's going to be a rev share paid there, which will be deducted from your lifetime revenue share here. But I almost think that affiliate should be paid on a per-transactional basis. So if you can build this relationship with the players and encourage them to play more, then you should be earning a bigger percentage on every transaction. Because this is what operators are going to say. Why are we paying a lifetime revenue share there? And I think there's an imbalance, misunderstanding between the two parties. If we could find an equilibrium that both parties are happy, then I think operators would say they are providing value. We can pay them more more often because we know the value we're getting.
SPEAKER_02But I think that depends on what type of affiliate you are and what type of traffic you're accessing, right? We're now working in a very diverse marketplace where even an influencer can now be an affiliate. I mean, affiliate is actually an archaic term now. We talk about performance. We pay on performance, we pay on outcomes. And I think that's part of the strategy that needs to sit behind an affiliate program is to understand where is your partner adding value in your buyer awareness journey and where are they reaching customers and niches that you are not reaching direct with your direct paid media spend. And I think the fact that we now have, you know, really deep data that we can look at and marry up with our partner traffic that's coming in, it allows us to start thinking out of the box. However, in this industry, we have always done things the way that we have always done them. So it takes a few clever people to sort of change the tide and start doing things a little bit differently where everybody benefits and there is better transparency. But unfortunately, I think that's going to take time. You know, in an industry where it's highly competitive and nobody ever wants to share information, that's a trust thing that that needs to exist with, you know, maybe just your top partners to start with, your big traffic drivers.
SPEAKER_00But then potentially, you're right. Streams are one type of performance marketing who are doing a lot of brand recognition and brand um branding for the company. Black hat PPC, completely different type of affiliate who just wants to get paid for the wham bam, thank you, ma'am. In and out done. Then you've got your Discord or your Telegram groups, which are very different. They're more community-based, they need to be paid to continue promoting the brand throughout. So potentially we need to start looking at the affiliate program. What are the three or four different business models, the commercial models that are appropriate for the type of traffic? We as an operator help our affiliates understand what is going to maximize their win that we as an operator are happy with, that we're not going to get in our ears chewed off in a senior management meeting because the CFA goes, well, if we cut those two players out, there's another million to the bottom of mine every month, which is what has happened in the past. Now, combined with that, the attribution model is still incredibly poor. And I just wish we were the travel industry because you've got thin margins, you need to be super smart. Casino, it's so easy to do this when you think about it. Send a player and get paid a 50% Rev share, lifetime Rev share. This is a very good type of business that we don't have to go after every single half a percent improvement or efficiency improvement because it's very easy to do it in the first place. But that leads to a little bit of laziness on all sides as well. I've almost strong believer that multi-attribution is the only way to do it, that your last touch point should be 50% of the affiliate revenue, your second last touch point should be 25%, third last 12.5%, and so forth all the way down. Now, this would mean when an affiliate's done the first work to get that first click, but then they go to Google two days later, and that's the last one. Well, that should be recognized to the affiliate for their part in the process. Because it's not just go to a top 10 casino site anymore, click a button, sign up and deposit, and deposit 100,000. Those days are gone. So we need to be a bit more smart. How do we attribute this correctly? Tracking in 2022, it's terrible. Absolutely terrible. Why can't we fix this up? But then you've got the issues that if you are sending people to a native app, how are you tracking that sort of click through there? And it's very easy to get lost in the ether.
SPEAKER_02I agree with you. I think that you've hit the nail on the head in terms of attribution. It's something that in the iGaming industry we're not really actually looking at accurately. Most companies that I deal with don't even, they're still operating on a last click for everything. But that also means that you need better data in your back end. And we know that tracking solutions don't always offer that kind of level and depth of information. So it means it's difficult for affiliate managers to do that. But I also want to impress that what you're saying means that your affiliate team has to be experienced. They need to understand media buying, they need to understand all the different channels. And this is why I'm so passionate about affiliate marketing, because honestly, it's one of the most difficult jobs that you can do in digital because you have to be a master of all trades, basically.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Now, do you think that the industry is investing in educating affiliate managers so that we can have better partnerships with affiliates? Because from where I sit, I think that's still something that's a deficit in most companies.
SPEAKER_00I'd say 10 years ago, the affiliate managers I worked with were hugely knowledgeable about their product and hugely knowledgeable about their program, and were an important voice within the company about the direction, strategic direction. I think, as I said, it's become commoditized, and it's now with big companies out there, it's very hard for the smaller ones to come in and have the same amount of exposure to the affiliate managers. And like all things, the best affiliate managers see what the numbers are being heard, and they go, well, hang on, I can go off and go and make my own top ten casino list.jp and Bob's wrinkle. And that's probably a little bit of the fault of the operators not understanding the flow of money and what needs to happen and properly incentivising those affiliate managers in the first place. Now that said, that's another bag in the words because what about the BI guys? What about the developers? What about the VIP team who handle amazing amounts of money and very, very important players? It's not a decentralized autonomous organization here at the end of the day. It's um and you know, let's say there's a bad month or a bad day, and yeah, you do two million. You reckon the guy from Custom Book Court's go, well, here's my $57 to watch that player winning when the shit hits the fan. It's not going to happen like that. So it could nearly be a level of entitlement there as well. That said, there are certain future progressions on how to take care of that to make sure everyone's swimming in the same tide moving forward with a staking token or something around that to make sure everyone's got a piece of the action, which I think is the right way to do it. But yeah, I I I think the affiliate managers were a lot more knowledgeable back in the day. And I know, pick random gaming island in the world, Malta. Your typical affiliate manager works for 17 companies within five months in Malta. So they'll all move each sandwich and 20 bucks extra, they'll move on to the next company and they'll take their their Rolodex with them to the next place. So perhaps as an industry, we haven't really focused on giving the affiliate manager job the attention or the reward that should be necessary given how much action is generated from affiliates into a casino operator in that first place.
SPEAKER_02I did want to mention that because I mean, roughly they say 40 to 60 percent of new customers come in through the performance channel, and yet it's the one channel that I see most CMOs ignoring simply because they don't understand it, they don't understand how it fits alongside the other channels, but also because they're relying on financial analysts to actually run their marketing team. And I think that's good that you've got, you know, financial people looking at the numbers, but there is a degree of marketing, you know, skill, creativity that needs to happen in order to build these relationships too. Now you touched a little bit on crypto, and I do want to kind of pick your brains on that because I know that you're leading the way in that space. But before we get onto that, I want to delve into your business experience because a lot of people listening to this podcast will be affiliates who are trying to build businesses just like you did. And I'd like you to share some of the things that you learned on your journey that you can maybe advise some of these affiliates about. And I know you I wish people could see your face, but this is audio. What are some of the things that you learned and got burnt on? And if you if you wouldn't mind sharing some of those things for affiliates that are coming up in our industry now to maybe take heed of a note of in order to build their successful businesses.
SPEAKER_00This is an audio podcast, it's not a video.
SPEAKER_02It's audio all the way, baby.
SPEAKER_00But then I can have a smoke and not worry about it.
SPEAKER_02No, you carry on. Be comfortable. We're having a chat.
SPEAKER_00The the the best thing I'd say about business, I think certain markets get hot very quickly, and there's a very much of a herd mentality. So we entered the Japanese market with Bit Casino in 2015. Vera and John were pretty much around the same time. It's only in the last year or two that every Swedish man with his dog has decided they'll become Japanese experts and go and launch a brand in Japan.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Mainly because the Swedish market got a lot harder and so did the German market, the Dutch market turned off.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But everybody's now rushing towards that market. Now, we've been in the Indian market, the Brazilian market for X number of years, last four or five years. And I'll now see people going, oh, there's so much we can do in the Indian market. Absolutely there is. But you need to start looking at the way in Gretzky, just think about where the punk's going to be hit to next. So, one of the great examples I use when people ask me about sportsbet.io, what's the most interesting market you work in? And for me it's Bangladesh. There's a huge amount of USDT there. It's a country of 40 million people, the most densely populated country in the world, but hardly any operators, and certainly no affiliates there, that is a wide open, virgin market that you can make mistakes in and try so many different things. Try the old tricks in the book that used to work 10 years ago and go and do that there. Now we I think we do about half a million GGR a month out of Bangladesh. And people go, How'd you get in there? I said, Well, we went there and talked to a few key people and we networked, and we found a few good groups, we found a few good um sites which are working there. Bet365, obviously in there as well. Pinnacle, obviously, in there as well. So there are some companies out there pushing. The point being, Canada affiliate go up and set up a casino show. Website in Bangladesh, random nation, go and find translators, go and get good content written, get it translated, build a community, and potentially you've got the chance to dominate the acquisition because as soon as, again, all every Swedish Spanish dog come running towards that new market, you're with the leading operator there, which you can then dictate your terms for the operator. But I always say be fair in business because Doyle Brunson would say you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only kill it once. So don't come in with an approach that you know we need a $2,000 CPA to 65% Rev share because no operator's gonna work, because it's gonna cost a lot more money for the product to do this stuff. Be a fair affiliate and work with a fairer operator and work together on how you can both improve your acquisition processes and their retention processes to work with the longevity of a customer.
SPEAKER_02I think that's the key word, longevity, right? Because we get a lot of affiliates that launch a site, maybe do a little bit of good SEO, they've got some decent traffic coming in, and they just literally churn and burn that website and burn the relationships of the operators that actually are the hand that feeds them. So I think that's really, really good advice. But in terms of mistakes, like what can you share like one of the biggest mistakes that you ever made as an affiliate that you think people could learn from? I'm really putting you on the spot here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, biggest as an affiliate. Not getting to the casino affiliate space early enough, obviously. I think from an operating perspective, one thing really pisses me off is when a good affiliate site starts saying I'm gonna charge a $40,000 listing fee to be in position number eight. Now, I think it's absolutely ridiculous because it's meant to be a partnership, and that really disappoints me that it's nearly in some markets, Sweden especially and Finland, it is an affiliate-driven marketplace, which is driven by I don't want to use the word greet, but I will, because that's simply the market dynamics that it can be. People can demand certain amounts of money, but you're not going to make any any operator friends. You know, I'd rather work with an operator who then says, right, we're doing an event at the Champions League final. Have you got any big players that we can take along and really enjoy that experience together? And enjoy the fun of doing this together with the operators. And you know, I suggest to all affiliates to go out and meet their operators, come to their office. I've had many Japanese affiliates come here and they just absolutely love it. You know, they come into my office, we have a drink, say good day, go to our our live studio, take them out to dinner. Getting to know the operators or get the affiliates, I think, is the absolute key to the equation to a long-lasting relationship, which is based on fairness and based on how do we both win at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_02So that's a good point because I hear affiliate managers saying I can't get hold of affiliates. I don't know who they are, I don't know how to work with them. We've got great offers we want to work with them. And I've got affiliates that say I have no idea who to contact at this brand. There's no face behind the actual program. There's no it's almost like the personalization has been taken out of relationship building, and that's ridiculous because that's exactly how this industry started. So I think I think you're spot on there.
SPEAKER_00We never ever really focused on data science and A-B testing as an affiliate. We put a banner up, which is normally served from the affiliate program, and we never focused on what converts best and what leads to the best lifetime revenue. I think there's an opportunity for someone out there to be the data scientist of the affiliate industry. Certainly in the program we're building called Partners that I owe, we do this on our internal marketing campaigns, and we do a lot of A-B testing, a lot of understanding the funnel and what the ROI is. I want to give those tools to affiliate, and I implore affiliates to actually understand the quality of their traffic and be able to say, you know, if an affiliate came to me and said, Our case study, you're looking at Vietnam, Tim. We have these sites, these are the this is the traffic we've got, not how many FTDs. FTDs by themselves are relevant because you can have $500 FTD deposits, or you can have 10, 5,000 FTDs. And I know which one I'd take every day of the week. But actually understanding the funnel analysis and understanding what banners convert the best, what streams convert the best, what time converts the best, what promotions convert the best, having that conversation with the operator. If we do this promotion now, this is what we can expect to get. And actually work with them to make sure the affiliate managers are then actively helping you, giving it to us to the affiliates to help them do the best in the job they can do as well.
SPEAKER_02But to do that, it means that your affiliate account manager needs to actually understand media buying, like we said before, because most people migrate into this industry because there is a skill shortage in this industry, either from a customer support background, so they're a really good relationship and administration type person, or they come from a sales background, they've got the gift of the gap, um, to actually go network and bring people in. But the fundamental basic skills of strategy that sits behind affiliate management, I feel is being lost in translation as this industry grows so quickly every year. And we're struggling to actually find people coming in. So if anybody's listening to this podcast and you want to build a career in affiliate marketing, this is really a good episode to listen to because we sort of outline where the shortages are. I want to talk a little bit about crypto as well, because you guys are leading the way in terms of how you are engaging customers and educating customers. And I dive a little bit deeper into this market day by day, and I do feel sometimes I'm going down a rabbit hole. But how do you see the evolution of the cryptocurrency being, you know, kind of localized into more and more businesses around the world? And how do you think that's going to change the digital landscape that we do business in?
SPEAKER_00Every affiliate should go to www.rabbithole.gg and actually do their course and have a good, solid understanding of how crypto works. Number one. There's also a site we're running called learncrypto.com as well. If look, I remember going to the NetHand board at their innovation week in 2017, and I took the CEO of Channel Analysis with me to sit to the board and explain why crypto is not dangerous from an AML perspective, from a KYC and extended agility perspective. And I did the same with microgramming, I did the same with evolution. And I fought an uphill battle for years and years and years about how to get crypto accepted into the gaming world. And quite honestly, I don't know why there was so much pushback from the dinosaurs and industry, but there was. There was a number of operators who worked with us very early on that got it, and we've made them a lot of money and a number of affiliates as well, you know, and we pay out in Bitcoin, and so a lot of affiliates are sitting on piles of Bitcoin as well. Um, I've seen, you know, as an example, we do 2.7 billion turnover per month across everything we're doing. Um, B2C, B2B, and everything, all in crypto. So one example I know, the biggest sports book in Australia, sportsbet.com.au, they're doing 1.2 billion turnover per month. So it just gives you an idea that the biggest operator in Australia at least twice, if not bigger. And that's again all crypto. The benefit to crypto from an operator's perspective is that when someone deposits, an operator can see how much money the customer's got, what their source of funds are, what their share of wallet is, and how the customer should be can profile the customer so quickly to understand who they are and what they're doing, and apply the right customer management and journey to the customer. What's more, they can deposit the money in, it's instant. If they win, they can cash out. And our golden rule at the YOLO Group is pay everybody in one minute. Full stop. Because as a gambler myself, if I win, I'll only pay it in one minute. So we had the same concept as well. You can't do that with Skrill, bank transfers, net teller, eco pays and whatnot, credit cards. It's just crypto has allowed the money to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Because if I win, pay me. And then I'm guaranteed within six hours that when I've had the money or feedback in the casino, because you can't really buy the bread and the milk with crypto. But the money can move back and forth. But I can hold the chips in my hand on my telephone, and that's the important thing. So we now satisfy the customers that if they win, they will get paid. So when they get their nurse to play again, they know if they deposit again and they have a big win, they will get paid. We paid out 2.5 million to one customer last night. He had a massive bonus buy on Pragmatic or Hacksaw or one of them. 2.5 million and he was paid within one minute. The guy wrote to his crying, saying, I can't believe it, you've made all my dreams come true.
SPEAKER_02But it's the instancy. It's the instancy of transactions, and it's not just in gaming, it's it's you know, we're talking about affiliate marketing in the trenches here now. I want people to understand that crypto can revolutionize the way that you actually engage and work with your partners as well. It can change the way that you track things because everything is transparent on the blockchain. But do you think it's sort of still four or five years away before it gets like widestream adoption, or do you think that that's happening a lot faster now, being in this space?
SPEAKER_00In Asia, certain countries have put have we needed use money changes to move the money out. That has absolutely fallen off the cliff. I would say 40% of Asia is now gambling on USDT.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Okay. I mean, some parts of Asia are obviously high value, but some parts are kind of low value, but fast shad and burn, right? So uh I think that's quite uh that's something for affiliates to really be looking at. If they're looking to get into new markets and actually expand their business into the next sort of herd mentality where everybody's gonna go and kind of focus, maybe now's the time to really start thinking about this and getting your head around it. Okay.
SPEAKER_00The other interesting one from a crypto perspective, I was looking at our Japanese numbers the other day in Ethereum, Ethereum deposits. If we take a yen deposit, the average is about 350, 400 euros every single average deposit of a month. In Ethereum, 6,800 euros is the average deposit.
SPEAKER_02Wow, you're giving away all the nuggets here, hey? Remember, there's gonna be people listening.
SPEAKER_00And I'm not scared of sharing our numbers because I'm really proud of them, to be quite honest. And you know, the more people we can bring in and understanding crypto and working with us, we know our products very, very good. We work with a number of the top affiliates around the world. We sponsor Arsenal, we sponsor Southampton. We're proud to be on the front seat of Southampton. So if we can show people that actually, yes, taking Ethereum deposits from Japan are fantastic. I'd love to see affiliates go out there and the one-man, two-man show, go out and make a blog site in Japan, hire local content writers, build a community, and start sending us some traffic. There's money to be made. It's but it's about you go back to the business question, taking a little bit of a risk sometimes as well. Don't just be happy with working in that Norwegian market, which is easy, because you've got about 2,000 other people who also think it's easy in that market. Go out and work in something difficult, and the barrier to entry is harder, and you will reap the benefits with crypto.
SPEAKER_02And and you actually mentioned something really pertinent to me on another conversation that we were having earlier today, which was you don't want to be a one-trick pony. If you're in SEO and you're doing your review site and whatever the case may be, you want to start looking at these new markets and you want to just understand what it means for you and for your business. You don't have to go all in and kind of, you know, rush to go and do something that you're not or fay with or not comfortable with, but start having a look at how these applications can move across multiple industries as well. And start updating your business because there's a lot of affiliates that talk to me about selling their businesses as well. Like what are investors looking for? They're looking for innovation, they're looking to see that you're stepping outside of the box, you're looking for growth areas, you're, you know, expanding your arsenal. You're not just in one niche. All your eggs aren't in one basket. I know we're hitting out the cliches here today, but I think that's very, very important as well. It's very good business advice.
SPEAKER_00And you're right, you know, if we're looking to invest or to buy a company, we don't want to go and I'm I'm picking a lot on Sweden at the moment, but it's a great example. We don't want to go and buy another affiliate from Sweden because it's a saturated market. I was talking to an OTC broker in Lebanon. There was an article that came out, I got my head at Raffriga, I said, go and find this guy, I want to talk to him. And three days later, sure enough, I'm having a call with him. And you know, $50 million per week is traded by this one over-the-counter trader in Lebanon. Now, that's dollars into USDT or dollars into Bitcoin. Now, if any good affiliate out there, go and find that opportunity, go and call them, meet them, talk to them, and say, I will help convert your players into casino players and I will manage that relationship there. You drive the traffic there. Work with them as you and go and be a master affiliate with the OTC trader in Lebanon, in Beirut. There's a massively untapped market out there. Nigeria, for us, it's going incredibly well because that upper echelon of players, everybody has crypto because they don't trust their own currency in their country. And people have a lot of crypto, they don't really treat it like the same it's in the in a bank. It's like cash in your wallet. You can easily pull out a couple of 50s, and there's no problem. Crypto's the same thing. It's scan, click, send, put your bet on arsenal. If you win, great, if you don't, bad luck. So I think looking around different markets and understanding, you know, what's happening in the Middle East, where are the the top 10 crypto countries in the world? And top of my head, Vietnam, Nigeria, Middle East, India, Brazil, Paraguay, for instance, one of the hugest countries in South America for crypto, Argentina. The the dollar, the peso's stuffed. Everybody's using crypto because they don't trust it. So if you can find those markets and find your way in, there's not many people in those markets. The rank techs of the world, the examples of the world, are not there doing that just yet.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_00They will come knocking at the right time once you've built a defensible business.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, the other thing is everybody rushed into the US, right? And there's more regulation there than anything else. So I think what you're saying is is wise. So if there are any affiliates listening, it's wise. If there's affiliate managers, you've heard loads and loads of nuggets here today. My parting shot for you is what do you think of the metaverse?
SPEAKER_00The metaverse.
SPEAKER_02Is that the next big thing after after crypto?
SPEAKER_00My question's always sort of come back to understand the customer.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Would I go and log on to a metaverse to go and play blackjack on a Friday night? Or do I simply want to fulfil my desire to play a blackjack on a Friday night and want to go to the most simplest place I can and make the simplest deposit process I can so I can play the game I want to play? Sure, there will be people in the metaverse and it's cool and it's funky, but ultimately I believe the metaverse is a whole big heap of FOMO. Now, I think there's a branding opportunity for an operator to be present there to build continually build their brand and to perceive themselves to be forward-thinking and whatnot. So I'm not saying the metaverse is wrong. I'm saying would a gambler. It's like remember they had those VR headsets. It was gonna be the next big thing in 2007 and ice. Now, would you really sit down and put a big clunky VR headset on to play baccarat? But evolution, it does the trick, it is best of breed in the live dealer software. You have the experience you want, you can communicate on chat, you can do it, measurement to satisfy your desire to have a bet there. So I would always say what satisfies the customer, and how do we make that as simple as possible? And when they win, how do we pay them as quick as possible? The best story I've got, it's not quite affiliate marketing, but very early on we had a Korean player and he won a quarter of a million, and we paid him out in a minute, obviously, and we did some research and thought he's a pretty important player. So we sent him a bottle of champagne, we bought his girlfriend a pair of Jimmy Chew shoes, and we sent him off to one of the best hotels in Seoul for a dinner and a night out. And I met him a couple of years later at the Rugby Roller Cup in Japan, and he goes to me, I don't understand, I've just won money from you. I don't understand why you've gone to this effort to congratulate me. And I said, Well, two things. You've been a fantastic player with us for the last four years or whatever it is, so we've won you as a customer, we've won your attention and your share of wallet. But more importantly, how many people did you tell about that experience? He goes, Oh shit, I've told everybody. It was an amazing experience. I said, and that was the basis of our career strategy, because you're an influential person. At the end of the day, gambling is flipping your coin, but it's 51.49. As a casino, we need to celebrate when a player wins and beats the odds. They're not playing against us, they're playing against mathematics. As an operator, we should be congratulating the player on the beaten the maths, and we should be super happy for them. We should celebrate the victory with them as well. And you know, if I extend it out, the affiliates they shouldn't be carrying on and complaining about no negative rollover. They should be super happy when a player has won. They should be contacting that player and offering their congratulations and what can they do more so the player will keep playing and extend that player lifetime value. Everybody is too short-mindset with what they're trying to achieve now and saying, Well, I'm not going to go and do no negative carryover, but it's a partnership at the end of the day. Cassette has got the ups and the downs, the affiliate should as well. Now, I know we need to change our way of thinking because the market's not ready for that type of thought process. It disappoints me that we can't all work in the same direction because I think there's not enough transparency there. And the affiliate software is out there that they haven't improved to where they should be, like in the tunnel industry. And the last point I'll make is I was reading this, Osric, who does all the bonus fraud, and he did a investigation in New York. If you went to every single offer, you could pick up $18,000 worth of free bonus money or a figure thereabouts. What affiliates don't realise is that $18,000 will be deducted from your affiliate earnings. So is it really the best long-term opportunity? Because these are players got to not play for 30 years before they get into the positive. So America's not the best market in the world, uh, except if you can go and pick up a thousand dollar CPA, but that will finish at some stage when the number crunches say this is not economically viable for us. So my advice is get to know your affiliate manager, go and meet them, meet them at LAC, meet them at the conference and go by the conference in Malta. Say, I want to sit down for a cup of tea. How can we work better together? And affiliate managers, go and meet your affiliates in person. I used to love meeting them all, get to know them. Perfect. You build a relationship.
SPEAKER_02I just did an AI five with Tim in case of listening. But that actually brings us nicely back to the first point that you spoke about, which was this isn't a pricing war. It's about building advocacy and building affinity around your affiliate program brand. And that's a drum I've been beating for the last 18 months. So thank you so much for being on this podcast with me today. You have dropped some awesome nuggets which we will make lovely audibles for. Thanks for talking about affiliate marketing in the trenches in the crypto industry and helping us to understand that a little bit. We will link to all of the resources that you mentioned because you did throw them out pretty fast. Um, if you're listening to this, we will link it to the transcribe. So make sure you visit affiliateinsider.com and you know, listen to this really interesting discussion that Tim has been very kind to give us his time for today. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast, and I'm looking forward to seeing you soon.
SPEAKER_00Perfect. Thanks very much.
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