What Happens When You Turn Affiliate Marketing Into a Games League

Why Most Affiliate Networks Are Built for the Brand, Not the Partner

Dorin Boerescu has been in this industry since 2009. He started as an affiliate, bought a network that was turning over next to nothing, and has since facilitated more than 828 million euros in GMV. But the number that matters most to him is not the revenue figure. It is the question nobody asked when they built every traditional network before his: who actually has the right to decide how the marketing budget gets spent?

What followed that question is Business League, a full-transparency affiliate ecosystem built around one metric, the number of sales. No branded traffic allowed. No hidden rankings. No six-month approval chains. Just a live leaderboard, gamified performance tiers, and a platform that treats affiliates like the traders they actually are.

Lee-Ann sat down with Dorin to find out how a concept born in Romania is now live in Ireland, why complete transparency makes programs stronger rather than more vulnerable, and what happens when you build an affiliate network from the affiliate's point of view rather than the advertiser's.

Talking Points Include

• Why affiliates are traders, not content creators and why the best performers in Business League have never read a Kotler textbook
• The leaderboard that embarrassed a client who thought he was number one and why seeing the real ranking changed how he ran his program from that day forward
• Full transparency as a fraud deterrent and why making all data visible to everyone keeps bad actors out and drives up quality across the entire ecosystem
• How gamification goes beyond commission from speed contests to conversion rate competitions, and why affiliates compete even when the prize money is only 25 euros
• The case against budget caps in performance marketing and why capping spend in a cost-per-sale model is one of the most counterproductive things a brand can do
  
  

Listen to Find Out More About

• How Dorin went from selling his agency shares in 2009 to building a network that outperforms traditional media channels on ROAS
• Why Business League launched in Ireland first, what he found when he got there, and which market is next
• How a branded traffic ban is enforced technically and what happens to affiliates who try to get around it
• The five performance tiers from freelancer to unicorn and what it actually takes to move between them
• Why Dorin would have dinner with Jeff Bezos and what Amazon's affiliate program did for this entire industry
• What an ROAS of 11.9 from non-branded traffic looks like in practice across 900 e-shops and 5,700 affiliates
  
  

Key Segments and Where to Tune In

• [10:25] The Business League model explained: Premier League for marketing, 28-day rounds, five tiers, and why the only metric that matters is the number of sales
• [19:10] Full transparency as a competitive moat: why showing everyone the data keeps fraud out, makes brands better, and builds genuine respect between partners at different levels
• [24:30] Gamification in depth: the First 100 speed contest, conversion rate competitions, and why Dorin used the same system on his kids to get them to brush their teeth
• [33:20] Rapid fire round: affiliate marketing in three words, the one thing e-commerce brands get wrong when they launch a program, and who Dorin would have dinner with