You listen to the affiliate inside the affiliate marketing factors. The fact that the digital and affiliate market experts to want to grow and active strategy while driving sales. So what get behind the scene? So the quality of digital and affiliate marketing experts. The strategies to value bonds. So we'll help scale and growth. Successful affiliate marketing programs. The truth is, you simply won't find good information anywhere else. So why not deep dive into the world of affiliate marketing and program management? Discover new digital strategies effects. And again, more traffic and increase sales. They have been gained of decades of experience running millions of affiliate programs at World War Next. For more information on what app offers or how to put your flights on the next open cohort, please visit affiliateinsider.com and hit the training button to find out more. Now here's your host, award-winning affiliate programmarketer for, thought leader and the drums digital top 50 UK agency owner, affiliate manager, motivator, the founder of affiliateinsider.com herself, Liam Johnston.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to Affiliate Insider's Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today I'm super excited because we've got an affiliate industry legend with us, Mr. Ori Weiss.
SPEAKER_01Wow, Leanne, thank you. Thanks for having me. And I haven't been called a legend for a while, so that feels obviously great. So but I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. It's great to be here.
SPEAKER_03Amazing to have you here. So Ori, it's it's you know, we've known each other for a long time. You've been in the affiliate marketing industry, probably a little bit longer than what I have, um, hence why I'm calling you a legend. Uh, for those of you who aren't maybe familiar with Ori and his love history and affiliate marketing, I'm gonna ask you just to tell us a little bit about your background and why you're here talking to me today about a very interesting subject, um, which is affiliate marketing in the education industry. So I'll let you kick off and then we'll start asking you some of the questions and really dig deep into the subject.
SPEAKER_01Sure, I'll try to I'll try to keep it brief. So um so I'm Ori. Uh I've been in the affiliate industry since 2003, which I think uh makes me more of a dinosaur than anything else. Um so I started off pretty much in the beginning uh running a small affiliate network in 2003, slowly started building up and acquiring some affiliate sites, SEO-focused sites in Scandinavia. This was before Scandinavia was a thing. Um, and that was kind of uh that was the beginning of my journey in this industry. It's it evolved later into what most people know as Excel Media. So we grew from a small kind of field network, a small uh publisher of SEO-focused sites in Scandinavia. The business grew quite a lot over the years. Uh it started off just me, and then uh two other co-founders joined in in 2008. We merged a similar business into it. Uh and from then we went on a kind of an expansion journey, both adding regions, adding products. Um, we were the first, we sold a majority share of the business to a private equity group in 2012. We were we stayed on board. Um, we then we were, to the best of my knowledge, we were the first gaming affiliate to list on the stock exchange. That was back in 2014. We listed on on the London Stock Exchange.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, got very excited by that.
SPEAKER_01Same here. Uh it was uh it was kind of a great moment after a year of uh bureaucratical pains and a lot of calls and more papers and signatures than I can ever imagine. But it was definitely worth it. It was a great experience for me and the whole team. I was super proud of everyone involved. And we had a good in it, a good journey on this uh as a listed business. We uh we added again more sectors. We went into personal finance, we went into the social gaming. We were kind of the first of the um the big affiliate consolidators, uh not as aggressive as some of the others. Uh we've had uh better acquisitions, worse acquisitions, but we've definitely done a lot. Um and so I I ran Excel uh as a group CEO until 2019. Um I'm still involved, I'm still on the board, I'm still a large private shareholder. On a personal level, I'm involved in a bunch of other affiliate businesses as an investor. Um I've invested in industries in other industries and other sectors like SaaS and healthcare over the years, but I'm back in affiliation after uh you asked why are we talking about something something uh something different today than gaming and stuff like that. So I can share a little intro story that when I left Excel October 19, I I did a uh I had an over-under bet with my wife how long I can stay idle and kind of not do much. I should have taken the over. It was the line was six months. It literally three months later, she was like, uh, I win, right? Yeah.
unknownYou win.
SPEAKER_03I mean, that's such an amazing story, just from an entrepreneurial perspective, because I think a lot of affiliates listening to our podcast are wanting to live that dream, you know, that that story that you've just told in five minutes. But the journey to get from you know an affiliate to a listed company is just phenomenal. And and you know, you've done such an amazing job. But today I wanted to talk a little bit about your new um venture, Team Odien. Um so talk to us a little bit about what this pivot was, how you how it got here, and then let's talk about that education piece because I don't think many people look at the education sector um as part of affiliate marketing. It's quite like really niche.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, and and that that that's true. And it was the same for me. I never considered this. I I thought this was kind of those blue chip industries that don't have what we do in them. And I I think that for me, the first time I kind of somebody opened my eyes to the education sector was during the Excel time, we looked at a variety of industries, right? So we we always had people on the lookout for sectors that we can apply what we do. Um, education seemed to always seemed to be that one that got away because we always found it, oh, there's something there. Uh, we don't have the time or the capacity, or financially, it doesn't fit now. It was always that one that kind of got away. Um, so obviously, you know, when I officially gave up on that over-underbet and decided to do something, I um I started digging into it. I spent some time uh with some asked asked some uh banker friends of mine to do some research, uh kind of scoped the industry, and pretty quickly figured out that there's something, there's something to do here. And this is an industry that is ripe for disruption. Um, and yeah, so I think that this officially became a thing uh mid last year and started stepping up uh towards the end of 2020. And I think if I have to highlight like why why education, right? Why because it's obviously, you know, in many I think from from an outsider's perspective, it would be a 180 from something like gaming, right? So it's a bit of a 180, I admit. And um, and I I think I everyone asked me the same question, and then I kind of ended up with one speech that I give about this, which is very short, I promise. Um and uh it's kind of like if you think of the um of how we make decisions, right? I'm looking from a from a customer perspective, right? Yeah, so I I grew up in the industry comparing effectively comparing products. What we do as you know affiliates is predominantly you can call it price comparison or product comparison. That's that's generally what we do. Of course, there are exceptions, but that's most of what we do. And if you kind of think of the food chain of things we compare, right? So from I starting off with slot machines, for example, which is something very very obvious in our industry, in the gaming industry, um, there's yeah, of course, you can compare. There's there's there are parameters, but it's not a it's the ex the expected value in your life of choosing one slot machine or another, it it doesn't really matter that much. It's more of a preference, or so there's less of a methodical kind of scientific approach to it. But if you start if you go up that, if you continue with that thought, so if you look at something like sports betting, right? So sports betting already is a much more complex product, but uh it really makes a difference on your outcome, uh how what you'll choose, how much you know about the sector. Do you understand the sport? Do you understand the odds? Do you understand which bookie is best for you? There's more in in it, right? And from my perspective, I was very fortunate during the Excel time to go to yet another industry, which is personal finance.
SPEAKER_04Yes, right.
SPEAKER_01So personal finance, credit cards, mortgages, insurance, these are things that really move the dial on people's.
SPEAKER_03And everybody needs it, like everybody has it.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Everybody needs it, everyone that has it, and you'll be shocked how many people take a finger in the air approach for choosing their credit card or choosing their mortgage or choosing their insurance. Oh, I saw an ad for something on you know, so I'm gonna go with that because it looks nice. So following that logic, these are industries that definitely um there's a place, and you see that in the UK, right? Money suit market, go compare, you switch, there's a bunch of these in the US, there's a bunch of these as well, and they really make an impact. So a majority of a majority of consumers will actually use price comparison uh websites for their financial services products, and then you get it get to education, right? So you think of it for at least if we focus specifically on what we're focusing on, which is the US domestic market for now, most Americ most Americans will uh will end up paying a significant amount of money for school, right? It's a fact of life, exactly, and many of them will end up with a student loan. And the qu the thing is that when you look at how they make that choice, there it could be anything from my parents went to I don't know, Princeton, I live next to I don't know, the University of Central Florida. I heard that if I get my nursing degree from uh you know the University of Vermont, it's great, but this is too big a decision to just make like that, you know? And uh when you think of it like this is exactly where affiliates come in, right? Because affiliates give you affiliates or comparison affiliates, they give you the tools to make educated decisions. I'm I've been playing I've been playing poker for 20 years, so I I think of everything from an expected value point of view, and I think just randomly choosing a school, a vocational training, uh, bachelor's or master's or anything is poor expected value because you don't know. Okay, I'll give I'll be very specific, I'll give you an example. So you have, let's say, a 30 34-year-old person that has a bachelor's degree, has a job, has a mortgage, has uh two kids or whatever, and they're thinking, okay, I always thought of being uh applied behavioral analysis uh because it's interesting to me. I'm gonna get myself a master's and I'm gonna in in applied behavioral analysis, I'm gonna pay$80,000 for it, take a 50k student loan, and obviously I'm gonna make so much more money and have so much my employability will increase tenfold.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Not necessarily. So, what what part of what we're doing here is that we're giving people the tools to actually make that decision. If where I live, does it really help my employability to get that degree? Is this the best degree based on my career history and career outlook to make that choice, to make that progression? Um, what is the expected salary? Help them find funding for it. Maybe they can get a scholarship. So that's why I think, and we we we believe all of us that there's a big need for this.
SPEAKER_03That's kind of educational choice making and it's providing all of that data in one place. Uh, because uh, you know, just the time alone, I know I was looking to uh become a business coach, uh qualified business coach, and just finding the course that I wanted to take that fit around my hours, that you know, fitted with my budget, that gave me the qualifications that I needed to um, you know, practice both here and in the US and Australia and everywhere else. Like the time it's it took for me to actually find all that information, I could have like studied half the course already before I'd even booked to go on. So I think you know, uh comparison is huge, but it's also the the second step which you've just mentioned, the employability after is this the right life decision for me? If I'm gonna drop 50 grand, 80 grand on a you know MBA or whatever the case may be, how do I find that information? And quite frankly, in my 20 years of working in affiliate marketing, I've never seen anybody um aggregate this information, this kind of information together. So it's you've got quite a forward-thinking view on like affiliate marketing and how to apply it into different industries. But um talk a little bit more about what team Odeon is doing. So um, you know, where are you now with this business and and what is your hopes for the kind of future?
SPEAKER_01Okay, look, so we're we're pretty much in the kind of the early days of this still, right? But so we we uh started putting together the team. I was very fortunate to get a kind of a couple of industry experts um and and a great and a great team of people that bring you know varied varied expertise and experience. Um we put we launched our first uh consumer-facing website, uh Degree Choices, that was in December 2020. It's still very much an MVP level. There's a lot a lot going on behind the scenes. What we've been working on pretty extensively is we've been working on two things very extensively. One of them is obviously the content. And I know this is like the biggest cliche in affiliate marketing, but content is king, right? Or king, queen, or whatever you want to call it. Uh, and um here even more because for affiliates that follow Google Trends, uh YML, and uh it's a big thing. And uh, you know, I I would say I would argue that education definitely file file it's it fits both your money and your life. So Google has it under an extra magnifying glass. You have to have experts, you have to have high EAT expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. You need to prove that you know what you're talking about. You can't pay someone two cents a word uh to write content that doesn't make sense just to write content. You really need to give people added value. So we're spending a lot of time on that. Our editors, we have internal editors doing that. We've also been spending uh a lot of our time and tech effort into really putting together a lot of data for our consumers, right? And and and I think for for people coming from the gaming industry, you can think of this, compare this to sports, right? Sports, if you want to be a good sports betting affiliate, you really have to offer a lot of sports-related, unique insights.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01Same here. So I will not offer uh great value to my users if I don't tell them how's your employability gonna look like? How much money is this gonna cost you? What is this the right choice for you? I need we're gathering information from things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics from uh iPeds, which is a huge database of schools and training and vocational training schools. Uh, we gather information from independent um uh salary and employ employment uh statistic statistic companies like PayScale, um scholarship data, you know, the list goes on and on. And as we know from sports, getting the data is easy. You pay a data provider to give it to you, right? You if you pay enough, you'll get whatever data you need. But making sense of it and extrapolating insights, so that's you asked me what we're doing. We're focusing on great content and really creating tools to help people make these decisions.
SPEAKER_03And I want to focus on the tools bit because obviously there's gonna be a little bit of technology that's come. So so you've you've had this great idea, you've seen a niche in the market, you've thought about how it applies to affiliate marketing because that's your area of expertise. You've now created this business. Um, but it's a little bit more than just that, because from this business, there's gonna be tech that's gonna need to be matchmaking or and then after the person's finished their course, like you know, affiliate marketing is also about the life cycle, is I guess what I'm trying to say. You know, it's like you're starting this business to get people matched to the right places, to the right courses, um, to the right information that they need to make very serious life decisions. But then after that, is there an opportunity for you to then help them get placed? You know, like how does that life cycle, that loop look like?
SPEAKER_01Well, that that's a really interesting thought, actually. And I think at this point, uh, I would say that we're focusing more on helping them make the choice, helping them fund it. We're not really looking into we're in the future, we'll probably look into student loans, but right now we're looking for like kind of uh scholarships and government funding and stuff like that. Yeah, but there's I completely agree with you that there is a uh cycle element here. There's a circle element here because we want to know if I can hear in four years or in three years that that person I recommended to take the master's in social work came back and said, Hey guys, I got employed and I'm making 70,$74,000 a year instead of 60,000. This is totally worth it. That's fantastic for me. It's a little the job placement part, definitely something we we're thinking of for the long run, but we still got our, you know, we definitely have our hands full with uh the first part of the journey.
SPEAKER_03I would say and how sophisticated is the technology gonna have to be in order to uh kind of like do this matchmaking because there's loads of data that you're collecting here now. How do you actually make that simple and easy to for the user to use and get?
SPEAKER_01I gotta say it's definitely more complex than I thought it would be.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh which which you know, I I I I went into this knowing that this is not gonna be a simple task. Um, I would say it's stage one of this is really less the matchmaking itself. Um we're not career counselors, right? We're not uh we're not we we our our kind of uh point of what we try to differentiate with is really helping you reach the best decision you can on your own. You might still want to go use uh career guidance or or even college admittance guidance. You know, you might end up you might end up going to applying for a school via one of our websites, and the admissions person in the school will tell you, you know what, not maybe not this, maybe that. Right? So that's that's something that you know we might get there in the future. But my my goal is to really give them tools to to especially for the people that are making this as a uh more of a practical choice. It's I admit that for a 19-year-old high school graduate that wants to go study philosophy because they think it's interesting, I probably have less to add. I might they might need this, and they definitely will be an interesting candidate to to use our tools and to read, but this will definitely be more interesting for someone, let's say in the stage, thinking of that elective degree they might take later, or in the future. By the way, I just I keep mentioning the word degrees all the time, which kind of for me is associates till a PhD. Yeah, there's the whole realm of vocation vocational training. Vocational training, absolutely, which we are we're adding in the future. So anything from uh nutritionist to uh garage door technicians and coaching, yeah. Um, so anything that people pay to educate themselves is part of what we're looking at.
SPEAKER_03So it's that tertiary education, that self-development education, as well as the traditional sort of degrees, masters, PhDs, everything else. Okay, so we've talked a lot about this product, and and I think the interesting thing for me for our listeners is just the psychological thought process that goes behind you create you, who is an industry legend, taking a total pivot and going, I'm gonna create an affiliate business in the education industry. So you've shared a lot about the thought process, about why you're doing this, about you know how you how you see the vision of this business going forward. But I want to kind of like wrap up a little bit with um, you know, a lot of affiliates are always looking for ways to grow. And I really want to pick your brains as an entrepreneur now, too, um, to pivot or switch and focus uh to grow their businesses further. So, as someone who's been there and done that, what key pieces of advice can you give to affiliates who are listening to this particular episode about new niche markets and approaching those in a in a really um insightful and uh business successful way, if that makes sense?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, well, look, it's it's it's a tough question. And I and I think that everyone is different, right? So everyone excels, every, let's say every affiliate that's listening to this excels in something else, right? So somebody is great at SEO, somebody might be great at uh content development, somebody might be a great marketer, a great PPC person, or you know, there's so many things. So I think first and foremost, you gotta fit if you're if you're thinking of a new industry, you gotta find out where your skill set fits into that industry. Now I know this is obvious, but I spent a lot of time personally examining the pro the uh kind of the process of people choosing education before I decided, okay, I'm doing this. Right. So I went into uh I I looked for researches, I I asked uh counselors, I asked, so how from your experience, how do people make this choice? And when I realized that a lot of people are actually look asking questions and and then and and not getting the answers or looking for data and not being able to because look, um just to be specific for a second, uh anyone can go access the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. And everyone thinks they should. And a lot of people, I've seen this. This is something I checked. It's not my uh kind of I've checked that people do that, but they don't come out with answers, right? So I identified wait, wait, wait, wait. I know how to take complex data uh and kind of give simple to use insights because I've done that in sports, I've done that in finance. Yeah, this is the skill for this. So to answer your question, if you're gonna pivot into something, you gotta first make sure that your skill set is a adds value there. And and then of course, there's the kind of the the basic things that everyone will tell you. Uh, is there a market to be had? You will you have clients there, right? So I also need you need to check um, do universities actually talk to companies like us, right? Is this a thing? I was uh fortunate and unfortunate to find my old uh I dare to call them nemesis, uh Red Red Ventures, a huge company in the US that owns so many different sites in so many different industries. So we uh I kind of joke around. I don't know if the guys at if the guys at Excel would appreciate me saying this, but I felt in the past that we were we were kind of a David to their Goliath before. So we did pretty well because David David does pretty well at the end, so it's okay to say that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So so we did we we went up with them, and when I saw Red Ventures uh involved in this industry, I was like, okay, there's an industry here. There's because they're they're the kind of company that only ventures into fields that
SPEAKER_03And they can make money from.
SPEAKER_01They can make money from and that they can add value in. I gotta admit, on a personal level, for me, this was extra, I had an extra motivation to do this because on a per on a personal level, I've I've always been a big believer in it and uh impact for profit. I know it's a bit strange for a thing to do, just to say, but uh I personally, and this really uh shouldn't be taken out of context. I'm not a huge believer in philanthropy. Like I really believe that if you can add impact, if you can create impact and create something positive by with a profitable business, that's way more sustainable. Yeah, and I think that's something here. Maybe not that kind of I D I I pivot away from the question. Yeah, just a side comment.
SPEAKER_03That's fine. I mean, this is what I our our listeners want to hear. Like they want to know how to be successful. And the the best way to learn from that is by speaking to people like you who have been successful and who are willing to share some of the knowledge that you know you've gained over your long and illustrious career in affiliate marketing. If we look to the future, just to sort of round off the piece, how do you see affiliate marketing playing a bigger role in business? Um, both from a uh strategy perspective but also from growth? Because there has been a lot of uh them and us in the affiliate industry, especially in gaming. And um, you know, there um a lot of people are sort of not really understanding the ecosystem of affiliates right now because there's so many players, there's networks, there's brands, there's you know, affiliates, there's publishers, and everybody is a publisher now with their social media channel, and it's just becoming a right big mess. And how do you sort of quantify it and qualify it? So I'm kind of asking everybody at the moment how do you see the future? Because it's moving, it's a moving target, like it's we it's changing every day, and trying to map strategies and map uh plans and try and grow your business, it's becoming a bit of a nightmare because everything's moving along all the time. So, what are your thoughts on the future of affiliate marketing and how things might change between merchants and publishers, operators, and affiliates?
SPEAKER_01You know what? This this demon them and us thing is we've been we've been saying this for so long.
SPEAKER_03I know.
SPEAKER_01Right. And and I I never I understand where it comes from. Yeah, it used to look different, right? Uh back in the day it was very it was very much a them and us, I think, because um legacy, legacy bad feelings.
SPEAKER_03That's it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it and it's also I think a part of it was that affiliates didn't really know what operators do. Yes, and and operators didn't really understand what affiliates do.
SPEAKER_03And I actually want to stop you there because I think that is still the case. And I'm hoping that operators listening to this podcast today will understand the depth of preparation that has gone into you starting this new affiliate venture, which which is why I called you out and made you talk about what you did before you even launched this. Because the cost of just launching this affiliate business, there's there's a cost and there's an ongoing cost for affiliates to manage their business. I think sometimes operators don't see that.
SPEAKER_01No, they don't. And especially in this case, look, I can be up, I can be straightforward about it. We it was it was me bankrolling it in the beginning, uh, but we raised money. Uh, we just finished it a month ago. Not mainly because this is it's a complex thing to build, exactly what you're saying, right? This is not like, oh yeah, I'll just whip up a website, I'm gonna start uh, you know, send me the wire here. It doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_03These days are long gone. Like that's not what what is involved in starting a successful affiliate business anymore.
SPEAKER_01It used to be like that. That was fun. I gotta say, that was a lot of fun back then.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but nothing anymore.
SPEAKER_01No, it's not, it's it's fun in a different way. But uh, I I would say that to kind of open that question about where is this going, I think, yeah, that the the fact that both sides understand what the others do is super important. I think that um it's less this them and us thing is kind of a bit less of an issue now, uh, because I think uh there have been so many large affiliate groups to come out there that operators have understood okay, wait, this is not as simple as we thought. This is not a couple of people in the basement, you know, sitting in sitting in uh in their pajamas making money. It's it's it's more than that. So that's that I think we're kind of slowly bridging that gap. I think that um there's something bigger in play here that is also relevant for gaming, but is definitely relevant for education, it's relevant for a lot of industries, and it's funny that the two totally different industries like education and gaming have something in common. I think that the fact that the product is in, and I don't mean this in any any negative way towards the operators, but the product the operators are offering is less differentiated. Yes, there's less of a difference between casino A, casino B, sports book A, sports book B. And I'll go on a limb and say there's less of a difference between the masters and social work from university A to university B. Yeah, of course it might be a little bit different, but if you look at the numbers, the differences are not huge. And if you look at the the kind of even to go to Ivy League, right? Yeah, people go through they people drop 50k US a year to go to Harvard for whatever it is that they're have they really spent the time thinking, does this add more value to their life than taking a 15k a year degree and getting some more internships or whatever? So I and why where am I going with this? Is the fact that when in my opinion, when an industry or a product becomes more uh standardized and less differentiated, the room for comparison grows, right? Because there's so many options from a consumer level. If I go choose a casino now, I have so many more options. If 15 years ago, if I went to 888, I had a specific set of games. If I went to Play to Casino, I had a very different set of games. This these people gave me a big bonus, these people gave me a small. Now everyone's has everyone's games anyway. Yeah, and everyone's giving it's a lot harder to choose, right? Same goes, and and again, I know this is a very two strange industries to compare, but if you look at education, right? If I choose a master's of nursing from a certain university next to my home or another one online, yeah, or if you think of it, so much more people are studying online anyway. So the geographic geographical element there is even that element, which was different for for education than from you know gaming, even that element's being it's kind of fading away because I'm sitting at home anyway. I want to choose what's best from a lot of products that are pretty much similar, yeah. Right. So I think it that's where it's going. The power of comparison and the importance, forget power, the importance of comparison will grow. And we see that in personal in personal finance in the UK specifically. I think last statistic I saw 90% of insurance is bought from price comparison websites.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, totally, totally. I can believe that. I mean, the other thing to think about as well is that affiliate marketing is changing because consumer behavior is changing. You know, consumers want to get information faster and faster. It's not like it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago where a search engine would spit spit out results that weren't even relevant to the question that you answered but or asked. But the the thing is that people want valuable, accurate information immediately. And the quicker you can deliver that, the more successful your business becomes because you end up building your database a lot faster and you end up building your authority a lot faster. So it is a little bit of you know, content is king or queen or whatever it is. It's it's about making sure that your tech stack delivers that in a in a logical and ethical way, that people get the information that they're looking for accurately. But then it's also about thinking about the kind of business side of it, you know, is the market that you're going into uh sustainable, is it a place where you will be able to add value? So it's just basic good business principles that I think people just kind of not, you know, they don't think about. But I'm I'm really, really um grateful that you've shared all of this on the podcast today because a lot of people ask me, you know, where should I focus my efforts next? Like what's the new upcoming market? And actually, I think stop thinking about the market and think about the niche. Like, where can you add value?
SPEAKER_01No, think exactly. Think we're it and and just to I know we're kind of running short on time, but uh even two days ago, right? I it's completely different example. I wanted to buy some device for my for a home gym, right? Back in the day, I used to Google it maybe, or maybe just go to the store and buy it. Then I used to Google it first result and paid search. Oh, yeah, here's the device. I went through a comparison site that gave me reviews, showed me experts that I know. Yeah, so and funny thing is, in even for a I don't know,$40 device, I went through the whole EAT YMYL process of trusting the experts and making sure that imagine people doing that for choosing a sports book to put their money at, or even more choosing a degree to pay you know$50k for.
SPEAKER_03Well, the thing is, how many people even have access to to that whole process when they're making that decision because it doesn't really exist? Like, yeah, you might get a couple of reviews and things, but there is no data out there, so you're pioneering a new niche here that I think is going to become quite um relevant because you're looking at the way that the consumer behaves and you're trying to uh promote a product that will service that. So I think it's still about value, it's about what does the customer need and want, and how can I deliver that. And if you focus your affiliate business aligned to that, there's very little that you can't succeed in.
SPEAKER_01And and I'll add to that exact completely true. And I'll add that from an operator's perspective, operators understand this as well, right? They want educated users that know what they're getting into, especially. And if go back to my previous life and gambling, in gambling, you want to know that the users know what they're getting into, especially in the in the age of responsible gaming and stuff like that. You want to know that users know what they're getting into, what the odds are, you know, that you're licensed and all that, they need to have done the research, even though it's kind of such an impulseful, impulse, impulseful product, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But you can't have people just throwing their money around.
SPEAKER_03Well, the other thing is it also impacts margins. If you're working with affiliates that can filter the customer so that the customer you get is a customer that's more likely to convert, no matter what industry you're making in retail, finance, gambling. I mean, the money, the the numbers make sense because you you're paying less to convert them, you're paying less to promote or or get them to convert, you're paying less to retain them because the customer was already pre-qualified before you saw them. So affiliates are a vital part of your channel. I'm gonna keep banging that drum till the day that I die. You know, affiliate marketing has always been my first love. Um, and I think you know, you've just kind of like validated that for me with your 20-odd years of experience.
SPEAKER_01So and and and and you should be banging this drum because I I used to I used to say this. Um, I used to tell investors when they in the beginning with Excel, um, we because we were a couple of years before everyone else that tried to explain what we do. Yeah. So imagine explain, imagine explaining uh to with to the finance to the city finance people that are used that when one day we'll see an oil and gas company in Nigeria, a telecom provider from Belize, uh, I don't know, uh, an insurance company from the US, and then you know, gambling affiliates. Try to explain to them what this thing is. And I and I remember like, and and they always used to ask me this question like the others used to say something like, Why do the operators need you? You know, they can get their own. Of course they can, but this is I always told them, I always told them, guys, think from an operator's perspective. Yeah, if you're having a bad quarter and you're and your boss tells you you need to improve the numbers, this is the last channel you're gonna cut. Because you're gonna cut you're gonna cut the above-the-line stuff, you're gonna cut the paid search, you're gonna cut all kinds of stuff that goes that you're paying in advance. This you pay when it works. So the the the whole premise of performance marketing for me is the kind of the cornerstone of why this is not this not only is it not going away, it's going more and more operators, especially ones that in undifferentiated industries, like we talked about, that they're because obviously it's not just that the products become undifferentiated, their margins become lower, right? That's part of the growth of an industry of maturity. Um, they have to do that.
SPEAKER_03People like you and I who have 20 years' experience and seen the whole life cycle from beginning to where it is now, we we get that because we've got the reflection. But the new people coming into the industry that have three or five years experience and haven't been exposed to that historical growth cycle, because let's face it, nobody ever shares their numbers in the in the public space unless they have to. Um, it's a little bit harder to train, which is why you know I've set up affiliate insider to actually help people understand the history of affiliate marketing, to understand the value that it brings over time. Because everybody thinks, oh, I'm gonna launch an affiliate program and you know everybody's gonna come knocking on my door and I'm gonna get thousands of players. Don't work like that. There's so much stuff that needs to be prepped and planned and you know implemented and strategically thought through before you even get to the launch phase. So yeah, I mean it's just been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today. And thank you so much for for you know sharing your insights, both both from an entrepreneurial perspective, but also from a niche perspective, which never really gets spoken about. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with this business. Um and yeah, um, thanks very much for being here.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me, Leanne. It's been a pleasure and happy to always contribute.
SPEAKER_02And 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 and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving tips, tricks, and strategies to keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales.