Now here's your host award winning affiliate programmarketing for those leader and the drums digital top 50 UK agency owner, affiliate manager, motivator, the founder of affiliateinsider.com herself, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today I'm absolutely thrilled to have somebody very, very special on the podcast with me who's going to be talking a little bit about affiliate marketing in Indian Asian markets. So joining me today is Managing Director of Grid Logic Group, Parikshet Madishetti. Hi Parikshit, how are you? Hi Anne, I'm good. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I'm absolutely thrilled to have you here. And before we get started, I'm going to just tell everybody a little bit about Grid Logic. You're a software company, a gaming company, a hospitality, and a media business. Your gaming division has one of the largest B2C and B2B components undercover of the Taj Rummy and Taj Network, respectively. And Taj Rumi is India's first and only brand with artificial intelligence. And the Taj Network is the only and largest B2B provider of white labels for Rummy, poker, and daily fantasy sports in this region. So if anybody's listening to that, we have somebody who's incredibly experienced in the iGaming and gaming space and also in affiliate marketing joining us today. And without any further ado, I'm going to say welcome, Parry. Tell us a little bit about your background and about your experience in the space, and then let's get started.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, Anne. Thanks for having me and uh thank you for the kind introduction. Um, I started off my career way back in 2006, and um uh I was interning with a company called Cozy Games, if you know them. Um, apparently I was uh one of the initial set who started that company uh with Shri and all the other guys. And uh I got this exposure of uh uh understanding the bingo market in the US, bingo market in the UK. Uh they made it big. Um apparently I finished my internship and also about completed about a year and exited them to start my own business. So that's how I know the UK market very well. And then we became an operator on our own uh by actually having a software provider called Play and Go. Now they're a large casino provider. So we exited that business in 2012, and that's when we entered the Indian market. So coming from the UK background and actually starting up here in India, uh, where we didn't have any experience, we just packed our bags and come here and saw a whole new terrain of gaming. And uh, we were fortunate to have a lot of learnings and uh happy to actually uh give you some of the learnings from uh my eight or nine years of experience in operating in India.
SPEAKER_03So this is an incredibly exciting market. I mean, everybody over here is talking about the Asian market and how to kind of get our brands taken over there. A lot of affiliates are looking at investing in this market as well. So let's start off by getting you to just tell us a little bit about you know what is happening in the affiliate market right now in Asia. Like, where are we at? Are we still very much in an uh immature market or is it you know fast growing? Like just what's the landscape like at the moment?
SPEAKER_02I would actually start comparing it with the UK market uh because it's it's more relevant to your audience, maybe. So uh in the UK, I came with a background of revenue share, I came with a background of CPA, I came with a background of a hybrid deal, and uh uh and the deals actually last for a lifetime. That's the background I came from. And when I actually come in into India, I see that a huge population, a 1.3 billion population, if I'm not wrong, 30% of them have access to the internet. And uh uh at this moment, as we speak, there are about 100 million players who have already tried one or the other platform and are actually playing on one leading platform. It could be Rami, it could be poker, it could be fantasy, or it could be casual games. Uh, more than 100 million people have actually tried the real money segment here in India. So it's huge. And when we came in, uh when we were actually talking to affiliates and publishers, uh, revenue share was a new concept for them. They were like, Why would I actually invest in your players? Why would I actually invest in uh your business? And we try to explain them that hey, you make more money. Uh initially you may not, but over a period of time you actually make more money is what we were actually trying to educate all the affiliates and publishers. Uh, we know we were not liked by saying that, and uh, we didn't have many publishers working with us. Uh, of course, we tried both upfront as well as revenue share, but uh it was a mix of 20% and 80%, whereas all the other brands were just doing upfront because when you're operating in India, you actually end up raising more cash than you actually need. Okay, and all these companies had that kind of cash to spend and try, and they were actually happy that the lifetime values were more than all the other markets. So they were actually spending more and also recovering more, and they just used publishers as a medium. So it took time for us, and uh, my journey, my specific experience, I think we worked with uh four or five good publishers uh or the companies, the marketing agencies and the companies which are like the top-tier ones, they didn't mind investing in our business for their profit, but eventually they understood that uh, hey, we're investing in Paris business, and it takes about 18 to 13 months for actually getting my money back. Why don't I do a white label of my own so that I wait for eight months anyway, but I also get organic traffic and also build my own brand. I have my own IP, and end of the day, I build value, and that's how we started our B2B business, and all our top publishers became our white label partners.
SPEAKER_03Wow. Okay, so the market is quite um robust because you from from what you're saying at the moment, there's a lot of actual traditional affiliates, like guys that are building websites, driving traffic, um, you know, building communities around brands over there. Obviously, there's the top tier, and that kind of brings us on to one of the questions that we wanted to speak about, which is what does that landscape of affiliates look like? Like for a brand that's wanting to get into India, do they have to go and search and recruit affiliates with websites in India, or are there big top-tier networks that you can go to to launch your brand initially? Because you've just mentioned that that you know some of your top-tier publishers and media partners actually ended up becoming wide label partners themselves. So is there still like a really diverse range of traffic sources in India, or is it very much kind of the big networks have already like grabbed their market share and the smaller guys are still coming into the market and being educated?
SPEAKER_02I think we have a mix of both. Um, I'm very comfortable working with networks because all the publishers, end of the day, are actually partnered with networks. Okay. There are actually uh five or ten networks which you can actually go to and you can tap whole of the Indian publishers.
SPEAKER_03Who are those networks if you don't mind dropping just a couple of names?
SPEAKER_02We work with uh Wii Commission, uh, that is one of our uh top so for publishers, they are number one. They have almost all the publishers in India. Okay, and uh there's also Collection Digital in India, which also has an ability to do programmatic buying beyond publishers. So they have publishers and they have uh this programmatic buying uh division as well. And we have P Labs Digital, which is like specific to iGaming, who works with uh only iGaming companies, there are one, and there's like uh Value Leaf here in South India who are actually good uh with SMS marketing, email marketing, and uh basically Facebook and Instagram and so on. There are many uh I can have I'm happy to actually share this list to you if you want to put it in comments. But yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_03That's amazing. So very much network-led publishers are joining networks and actually being managed within um the group. Um, so you know, brands that might be listening to this podcast, that's a really big nugget that um Parikshit has given you guys today to actually go and have a look to partner with networks first before you try and um build and educate those individual uh publisher relationships, which we do here in in Europe quite successfully. So we spoke a little bit about some of the games now. Uh, what are the most popular games that um the Indian sort of uh player demographic is really aligned to? Like where can a brand or an affiliate look to build a niche right now that would be quite successful for them? Talk to us about the sort of cultural uh consumer culture over there.
SPEAKER_02I would start with games of skill, and games of skill uh actually went on adding a few games uh in the last five years. So we started off with Rami as a game of skill and it can be played with stakes, and 90% of the market today is dominated by Rummy. Okay, then we had poker, which entered the market as game of skill again, and I think uh it's also a significant segment now, yeah. And uh currently the largest segment uh in terms of players is daily fantasy sports. So more people actually play fantasy, but more revenues are there in Rummy. So Rummy, poker, fantasy together are actually having uh this tag of skill games, and recently we've uh actually had this exposure into casual, hyper casual, into real money. So you could pay carams, you could play chess, you could play anything in the format of a tournament, and uh there are many games which are coming up, so all these companies which are actually producing them or sourcing them to all the players, whichever is doing well can be actually worked upon. Like the games which are doing well after Rami Poker Fantasy now are call break. Uh I think to an extent it's chess. Yeah, then there is pool. Uh apparently, if everything goes well with the courts, uh Ludo is also joining them.
SPEAKER_03Okay, all right. So that's quite interesting. So it's very much a casual gamer, it's uh games of skill. Um, and you know, we spoke we spoke about the demographic a little bit earlier, you know, everybody like mobile penetration, that's obviously a massive thing. Now, when it comes to affiliate marketing, tracking mobile and tracking websites and tracking all of these attribution channels is incredibly important. So, what is the sort of uh infrastructure like over there in terms of launching an affiliate program that can track cross-channel? What has been your experience in terms of um you know finding solutions that can manage all of this?
SPEAKER_02The market totally is driven towards uh affiliate networks or agencies having a mandate to work with your company. Okay, and hence the solutions also are very generic. If you ask me for tracking, they would actually use a tool, and for attribution, they would use another tool. And together, if you want to see something uh with like how they how your data is performing, then you can have your BI layer and then you have your tablet, Power BI, and other business intelligence tools which are being used. Uh, I think there is a gap in the market. There is nobody who's actually giving you tracking plus attribution only for IG. 100% agree. Yeah. And somebody who caters to publish that there is a CPA campaign, and there is a revenue share campaign, and there is a hybrid campaign, and there is no regulative rollover, and then you have your monthly invoicing that actually happens publisher-wise, even you're working with a network, that's actually missing as of today. And I think uh Winter is doing a good job by entering early and trying to understand the market, at least from Rummy Poker point of view, they've done very well. All our publishers are happy, and now we're able to reconcile everything very easily compared to if you do an Apps Flyer or if you do an Adjust or a branch or any other software, which is like purely performance-driven. I give you a download, you pay me a dollar, it's very transactional. Instead of that, if you have revenue share, you actually track download, install, registration, then your deposit, and how much you make, everything is tracked here in Winter. So I think they're doing a good job. Uh, they should definitely improve and go deep into the market before anybody comes in, is my view.
SPEAKER_03I mean, tracking has always been a thing that's been uh spoken about a lot in iGaming, and and we've been comparing a lot of stuff that's happening in the retail space with some of the bigger, larger affiliate networks around the world. So it's very refreshing to hear somebody speak about tracking being a seamless solution and actually thinking about how do we take all of those data segments together to actually produce an affiliate program that can be managed by margin across multiple different channels. Because I think that's the biggest uh pain point that affiliate managers have is that they've got lots of different data segments. Um, and with a market like India, where there are so many different fractions and so many different um you know networks, publishers, media partners, you really are gonna need to have a robust tracking solution to track all of this data and to track the sheer volume of numbers that are gonna come through if you're successful in launching your product or your program there. So this kind of insight is incredibly important for uh you know brands that are looking to get into India to actually think about their tech stack and to think about how they're gonna manage not only the marketing component of launching into an Indian market, which is a tricky market to navigate, um, but also what content they're gonna use to get into that market successfully, and then also what tech stack they're gonna use. So I want to talk a little bit about effective affiliate marketing in India because it is a region that's growing incredibly fast. We see a lot of people looking there because it's uh you know like a really popular market to get in, and the sheer volume of numbers, as you mentioned, at the start of this um conversation. But is there still a strong growth rate happening over there or has the ship sort of sailed? I mean, what what's what have you seen in the last sort of three years and where do you see the next five years going in this market?
SPEAKER_02I would actually say when I started off, it was a 40 million dollar market, and as of today, it's about a three billion dollar, if I'm not wrong. Okay. And we're growing 30% in the last three years, uh, year on year. And I don't see this stopping because there is a clear demarcation of uh legal and gray. So if legal is about a three billion dollar, I'm assuming that uh gray markets are about 10 times more than this, and cash markets are 20 times more than this, because predominantly uh these are the people which operated lottery and all the other segments like horse racing. Maybe we were not even born then. So I think for them to come online is a big challenge, and when they actually come in, it'll be a much, much bigger market than the UK market, is what I'm assuming.
SPEAKER_03So we've got sheer volume of numbers, we've got lots of consumers that we can go and target. There's still an opportunity to go and build a niche, in your opinion, because the market is growing exponentially. The ship has definitely not sailed yet. So any affiliates that are looking to get into this niche, you would 100% uh recommend that they come into the market now still and build that niche. Because there really is a very big divide that's happening in the iGaming space on the affiliate front from the partnerships, the partners that we speak to every day. A lot of affiliates are looking at the US and the others are looking at you know Asia. And it's it's almost like there's this divide, and somehow Latin America has sort of been lost in the fray. You know, it was maybe three years ago Latin was the big market to get into. But Asia is definitely a complex market, and it's it's something that um affiliates are sort of looking at, but they're not quite sure how to get in. So uh, you know, you having this experience and coming on this podcast is is obviously great for our community because what I really want to get down to is the nuts and bolts of you know, what's the advice that you would give to affiliates that are looking to come into this market? How would you advise that they invest um to actually grow their affiliate businesses in Asia?
SPEAKER_02I think uh in India or Southeast Asia, one good thing is you have straightforward uh options to actually buy a player from. So you have your Google, you have your Facebook, then you have uh your uh tabula outbrain native uh marketing, which you can actually do. You can average your player price anywhere between $25 to $50 uh for an acquisition from an acquisition point of view, and you can actually make anywhere between $250 to $500 in two years as a brand. So even if you're actually sharing 50% of that, yeah, you make much more than what you have actually invested, and that happens in anywhere between 8 to 13 months. So I think uh it's easier to start here in India, and it's easier to find brands because if you ask in the UK market, there would be 100 brands which would have actually reached that saturation or the threshold level. But in India, uh hardly there will be five brands which would actually do over a hundred million of users. Rest of all would be in between one to ten, ten to fifty, or ten to eighty. Uh so there is definitely scope of having a partnership which is easier. You can come in, maybe and invest a thousand dollars and see how it's working. If you choose the right product, if you choose the right brand and the right deal with the right tools, I'm sure uh you will definitely have 2x. But um ideally, I would aim to have 4x in the same time that you make money in the US, you can actually make 4x here in India.
SPEAKER_03And what kind of specific like um skill sets would you need as an affiliate? I mean, obviously the opportunity to buy traffic, so you know, media buying background would be great, but doesn't you know SEO is that something that's relevant in the in in India in terms of driving traffic, or is it very much more a paid model where you're gonna put some money down, buy some traffic, build a brand, um, you know, maybe even take a white label if the if if that's a better opportunity for you and you can manage that logistically? Like what are your recommendations in that respect?
SPEAKER_02It's it's in my personal view and with my experience, I would say that SEO would actually do well, but uh uh the traffic actually is on mobile and it's on uh mobile apps and specifically in APK. So even if you're doing your optimization on Play Store, real money skill gaming brands are not allowed to be on Play Store. So you have your Apple App Store that allows you to actually have an app, but there's only five percent of the people who are on Apple, and the rest of the market is actually divided in between web and APK. Okay, so uh it's easier to actually choose these platforms like Facebook, Instagram, um, Google AdWords, native platforms, and it's much easier if you come from a background, if you could optimize the traffic, if you can optimize the price, if you can optimize your creatives and try to improve your funnel in terms of click to install ratios, install to deposit ratios, and trying to bring the player back. If you have that CRM skill and optimization skill, then you will actually win the game.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so that's very, very important numbers that you've thrown out there that I think our listeners will definitely definitely appreciate. I mean, the the kind of as we We wrap up this conversation, which has been absolutely full of golden nuggets, if I do say so myself. What can brands do to increase partnerships with publishers? Because obviously, relationship building is a big part of what we do in affiliate marketing here in Europe. But like, what are some of the top tips that you can give to brands that are looking to build relationships with partners in India? How would they go about you know doing that successfully? What works basically?
SPEAKER_02So the current challenge of publishers is that brands are not inclusive, brands don't entertain their creativity and it's purely transactional, and they want to actually rate the publishers in terms of performance. So if you look at it from their side, it's like this. But if you look at it from brand side, when you actually get creative, you get more numbers, but that's just a spike. So you need to continue that spike with retention and revenue. Like uh when PUBG was banned in India, everybody came up with these ads. PUBG band, you want to play Rami, click here. You want to play poker, click here. That actually got us like 50% more CTR, 200% more registrations, and also people have tried your conversion goes from 5% to 25%, but the retention again comes back to that 10 to 15% after three months. So while we like those spikes, we would also need returns. So you need to have stable branding and you need to have stable conversions. There shouldn't be noise in your traffic or noise in your retention. So, from a publisher point of view, if you're if they're able to bring quality campaign ideas and trying to actually show us numbers month on month, that they're not actually mixing any traffic. You could actually mix traffic from Facebook, you could mix traffic from AdWords and show that on an average the player is doing well. We know how Facebook traffic works, we know how adverse traffic works, we know how SMS traffic works. Instead of doing it in the background, you be transparent and tell the brand, hey, I'm getting 100 players from Facebook, 100 players from AdWords, 100 players from SMS, and this could be the value. This is how the players have to be treated, and this is what we are doing from our side. This should be what you should do. And if everything is documented and we agree to a price point that it works for both, then it'll be a great partnership as per me in between brands and publishers.
SPEAKER_03Is there still a lot of loyalty though? Because you know, here in the in Europe, it's very much price-led, you know, like the affiliates go wherever they're gonna get the best deal, and kind of that's how the business flows. But is it still relationship-led in India at this point? You know, if if you get in and you build those solid ground, you put the groundwork in place to actually build really good relationships and educate and and stimulate your affiliate relationships. Is is that sort of brand loyalty being built at the moment by anybody?
SPEAKER_02The thing is, uh, there are not many brands as such. If you ask me how many campaigns are actually going on in the UK market, if I'm not wrong, there would be about 200, 250 per affiliate, and they know the uh their ability to do their SEO, so their friend page will have a minimum of 10 banners or 10 brands. But if you ask me here in India, there are only 10 or 20 brands that spend money monthly or have the ability to spend that kind of money to have a company, a publisher or a network company, and have a team of your own, of course, you will have cost, and to recover that cost, you need to be working with the best brand, which gives you best pricing and also gives you the right kind of liquidity at the right time. So there are not much options you will be working with the top 20 brands here, because if you're working with every mom and shop site that is actually popping up, they wouldn't have the ability to give you that kind of liquidity to run your own company. So the focus should be on building better, stable, profitable campaigns, and all these big companies which are working with you uh will actually double down at any given point of time. You show me that 100 players today are giving me a value of $100, and tomorrow I will actually double down and say, why don't you do 200 or why don't you do 1000? So it's on relationship because all these 20, 50 companies which are in like the top tier, which are spending, don't have a dearth of cash. They have enough rounds that they have raised, yeah, they will continue to raise until the industry sinks. So it's either going to go big or go home. Okay. It's on it's on both the brands and the publishers to milk while the industry is actually green.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And I think I think you've hit the nail on the head there. So the the end result of this conversation on this podcast is that there's a lot of opportunity in India still. The industry is green for you to go and innovate and try new things, and also to focus on building um really solid relationships that take you through to the long term. So doing that double-down approach. Where do you see, as our final question for this podcast today and all the value bombs that you've dropped for us, where do you see the future of affiliate marketing in this uh geo? So in Asia as a whole, or in uh India particularly, which is where your expertise is? Do you I mean, will we see the skins market roll forward like we did here in the UK? Um, or do you think that the infrastructure will develop faster due to speed tech and user engagement shifting to online and even now more so as a result of COVID, which we've seen across other digital channels?
SPEAKER_02So I have a divided view on this. There are few uh publishers which have a long-term view and actually will take white labels and actually strive to build that brand. Um, uh, unlike UK, if you have hundred or thousand players, they actually keep giving you that kind of revenue. India isn't that market. So you need to actually bring in a few million players at least to have a decent position uh in the market. So there will be publishers who choose to have stable white label revenue that I'm going to put in thousand, five thousand, ten thousand players, and I'm actually going to make 50,000, 100,000 or 1 million every month, and I'm happy with that. That's one set of publishers whom I actually see will be opening more white labels. Yeah. The other set of publishers are we make money while sun is actually shining. So they actually make that 50,000, 100,000 or 1 million in a CPA deal. They focus on execution, and they actually try to make the money which the long-term publisher would make in 10 years, they will actually make it in one year. But again, the 10 years guy makes 20 times more than this one-year guy. So these these are the two ways in in which you could do. Um, but the long-term view is coming into white labels because you'll have your own share of organic traffic. And today Facebook is working, tomorrow it may not, tomorrow there will be one other platform. We don't know the CPA cost then, we don't know the lifetime value then. So it's always better to have users, and one fine day when sports betting or any other games of chance opens up in India. Yeah, the next day you wake up, you'll have a multi-billion dollar company.
SPEAKER_03So you're here to hear first, people. Get in early, get your brand builds, start building your community of consumers, and you know, see where the market takes you. I think this has been a fantastic conversation. So I'm really, really grateful for having you on the podcast today. You've delivered some amazing value bombs which we're going to be able to share with our community. I'm looking forward to seeing how the Indian market progresses. Hopefully, you know, God willing, whatever, that we can travel again and see one another in person at events. But thank you so much for your time and for giving us all of this information on the on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure to have you as my guest. Thanks, Anne. It's my pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_01And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider, Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes or give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you'll never miss another entitled after the title.