Allan Stone, CEO at Intelitics, argues that bad partners aren’t the biggest inefficiency in iGaming. Instead, it’s the inability to see which parts of good partnerships are actually working.
I have the same conversation with operators across the industry on repeat. They pull up a partner’s performance, see a reasonable CPA and a steady flow of FTDs, and conclude that the relationship is working. Six months later, that same partner is underperforming with soft margins and inconsistent player quality. Despite this, nobody can really explain why.
The answer is always the same – they were evaluating the average instead of the partner. In affiliate marketing, averages are one of the most expensive illusions in the business.
The Most Expensive Average in Marketing
Think about what a typical affiliate actually looks like today. They’re running a featured review on their site, an email newsletter, a Discord community, paid social campaigns and a Reddit presence on top. Those are five distinct traffic sources, each attracting a fundamentally different type of player and all flowing into one partner ID.
The operator sees a single blended number. If the aggregate looks fine, the deal continues uninterrupted. Underneath that number, though, the email newsletter might be sending high-intent players who deposit, return and build genuine lifetime value. On the other hand, the Reddit traffic might be full of bonus hunters who disappear before their free bet settles.
One channel is funding the growth, whilst the other is draining it. The blended view makes both invisible. It tells you next to nothing about who’s winning you games and who’s costing you points. You’d never build a lineup that way, but that’s how a lot of operators are currently managing their affiliate portfolio.
Two Sides of the Same Blind Spot
The problem becomes more interesting when you flip it from the operator’s perspective to the partner’s, because most good affiliates don’t actually know which of their channels are working best for a given operator, either.
They know their top-level numbers and what converts, but they rarely get the downstream signal – which placements are driving players that stick around, and which are producing one-and-done customers. That information all lives on the operator side, and it never tends to flow back.
So the partner is optimising for what they can see instead, like clicks and FTDs, while the operator optimises for the aggregate. Both sides are effectively making decisions with incomplete data, and the gap between those two views is where the waste lives.
When operators start sharing granular, placement-level performance data back to their partners, something shifts. The conversation starts to become about which specific parts of it are working, making the process feel collaborative instead of being adversarial.
Partners who are willing to look at this channel-level breakdown and then scale back what isn’t delivering will see their overall numbers improve. They make more money, and the operator gets better players. This may sound obvious when you say it out loud, but the infrastructure gap between where most operators are and where they’d need to be to have that conversation consistently is significant.
The 72-Hour Window
There’s a timing element here that also doesn’t get enough attention. Even when operators do have access to granular partner data, the BI layer is often too slow to act on it. Digital campaigns need to be optimised within days instead of weeks.
This is where the performance gap between operators with real-time marketing intelligence and those without starts to compound. The ones who can surface a predictive signal on player value within the first 72 hours, and then route that signal back into acquisition decisions, are making precise budget calls while their competitors are still waiting for last month’s numbers to be cleaned up. The gap is exponential, and it’s growing daily.
Where the Millions Are Hiding
Affiliate marketing isn’t the problem. Partners remain one of the most valuable acquisition channels in iGaming, bringing real audiences and traffic that actually converts, so the model clearly works.
What doesn’t work is evaluating that model through a lens that was built for a simpler era. The single-ID, aggregate performance view made sense when affiliates were running a single website with a single referral link. That simply isn’t the landscape anymore. Partners are multi-channel media businesses, and the gap between what operators can see and what’s actually happening inside those channels is where millions in wasted spend are hiding. The operators who close that gap first will be the ones that build genuinely valuable partnerships for both sides.
