Episode 81·30 min·9 Sept 2026

Why Is Trust Breaking Down Between Affiliates and Operators? | John Wright, Nousviz

with John Wright, Co-founder, StatsDrone

Surya Palli

Founder of iGaming Real Talk.·9 Sept 2026

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Trust between affiliates and operators is becoming harder to maintain, and John Wright believes better access to data could force both sides to become more accountable.

John, Co-founder of Nousviz, returns to iGaming Real Talk to speak with Surya about affiliate shaving, aggressive commercial deals, traffic quality and why the problem is not always one-sided. He argues that operators can lack transparency, but affiliates can also take advantage of operators through deals or placements that do not deliver what was promised.

A large part of the conversation looks at whether industry-wide benchmarking could help. John explains how anonymised affiliate data could be used to show conversion rates, player value and operator performance more clearly. His view is that once affiliates can compare where their traffic actually performs best, operators will have more pressure to fix weak CRM, VIP programmes, payments and other parts of the player experience.

They also discuss the technology behind affiliate management. John talks about fragmented APIs, the StatsDrone Affiliate Software Report, the number of affiliate platforms in the market and why standardised data is still missing. Nousviz is being built around bringing information from different systems into one place rather than trying to replace every individual tool.

The final part turns to AI agents. John sees 2026 as the year agents become more important, particularly for companies that want better data, customer support and analysis without building large BI or engineering teams. But AI also creates a new problem for SaaS companies: if software becomes easier to build, every product needs a clearer moat and stronger reason for customers to stay.

“It's a problem on both sides of the fence. We have affiliates that are taking advantage of operators. That doesn't get talked about enough.”

“I think because the space has gotten so rough that the trust is really broken. No one's trusting the data coming from the operators, and operators are starting to lose trust in affiliates.”

“You shouldn't be worried about losing affiliates. You should be worried about your cost per click. You're not going to get an ROI from it. You've got to fix it.”

“We want the industry to have more API, but API is unfortunately not standard across all software, which drives me nuts.”

“I do think we should kind of care and self-police before the policing gets done on us, where we're dealing with the consequences of our lack of being proactive.”

“This year is the era of agents. Last year was the era of vibe coding. You can build anything.”

Key takeaways

The trust problem exists on both sides
John says affiliate shaving gets plenty of attention, but affiliates can also take advantage of operators through aggressive deals or promises that are not fulfilled.
“It's a problem on both sides of the fence.”
For him, the wider issue is that operators no longer fully trust affiliates, while affiliates do not fully trust operator data.
Big data could make performance harder to hide
John believes shared benchmark data could show affiliates which operators actually deliver the strongest conversion rates and player value.
“People can't hide from the data.”
If affiliates can see where traffic performs best, operators may have stronger reasons to improve CRM, payments, VIP programmes and other weak areas.
Operators need to worry about ROI, not just losing affiliates
John argues that poor player value eventually makes traffic uneconomical regardless of how many affiliates an operator works with.
“You shouldn't be worried about losing affiliates. You should be worried about your cost per click. You're not going to get an ROI from it.”
Better visibility could shift conversations away from traffic volume and towards actual commercial performance.
Affiliate technology is still too fragmented
John says the industry needs better API access, but different platforms still structure their data differently.
“We want the industry to have more API, but API is unfortunately not standard across all software, which drives me nuts.”
Nousviz aims to make it easier to bring data from multiple affiliate and external tools into one place.
The industry needs to self-police serious player complaints
John highlights self-exclusion complaints as an area he believes deserves more attention.
He argues that the industry should address these issues before external pressure forces change.
“We should kind of care and self-police before the policing gets done on us.”
AI agents could reduce the need to build large internal tech teams
John calls 2026 “the era of agents” and sees them helping companies get data, support and analysis faster.
“Done-for-you services with agents. Agents are going to be the key driver.”
For him, the opportunity is not simply replacing people. It is helping affiliates and other companies use better technology without having to become technology companies themselves.

About the guest

John Wright

Co-founder, StatsDrone

John Wright is the co-founder of StatsDrone, a platform dedicated to helping iGaming affiliates manage their revenue and attribution data. He is an entrepreneur focused on product-led growth and navigating the evolving complexities of the SEO and B2B landscape.

LinkedIn profile

Extended summary

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(00:00 - 00:29) John: This year is the era of agents. Last year was the era of vibe coding. You shouldn't be worried about losing affiliates. You should be worried about your cost per click. It's just, you're not going to get an ROI from it. You've got to fix it. We want the industry to have more API, but API is unfortunately not standard across all software, which drives me nuts.

Surya: What do you think affiliates need to do in the second half of 2026 to really build that trust? John: There are situations where an affiliate will charge for listing fees in different geos and not honour them. And you as an affiliate manager, what do you need to do? You need to have a... (00:37 - 01:13) Surya: iGaming Real Talk is launching the next series.

This is the fourth event out of the 11 events we are doing this year, and I'm very excited to bring you the insights from the expo floor. This time on affiliate and operator relationships, as well as what's missing in the industry. What's the trend? What are we looking at when it comes to 2026, 2027 and beyond in terms of trends, AI and everything else? This series is brought to you by Evoverse. They offer custom crypto casino solutions, as well as source code.

This series is also brought to you by Wicked Games. They create slot games that slap. (01:18 - 03:20) Surya: Hello and welcome back to another episode of iGaming Real Talk. Today we are here at AffPapa Conference in Madrid. I have John with me. Actually, he was the first-ever guest when I started the podcast one year ago. He was the first one to accept and also give me a little bit of confidence at that time. I was just starting off. He didn't have to do it, but he did it.

So I like John very much for that, and also because you were my first guest. So I have a thing for that, you know. John: And now you have the best setup, where I'm super jealous. I've been doing podcasting for three years and it's just like, I should be doing this. But you know what? I'm happy to let you. You're going to teach me some skills after. Surya: Well, I mean, for you podcasting is more like driving some conversations. You do have StatsDrone. You do have Nousviz.

John: Nousviz. Surya: Yes. I struggle a lot, but Nousviz. John: That's okay. Surya: Right. So, I mean, it's not the main thing. But for me, podcasting is the main product or whatever we're doing. So there is a bit more focus on it. But I learned a lot of things from how you do it as well in the beginning. I do watch a lot of podcasts. I watch a lot of Joe Rogan these days. Also Steven Bartlett. I like him. John: Diary of a CEO. Surya: Diary of a CEO, yeah.

Recently, when I was on the flight, I was watching the one with MrBeast. It was really insightful as well. John: He's pretty smart. People don't give him credit for what he's done. He takes his videos and he's like, “I need to analyse it. I get the data. And how am I making it better?” There's just no compromise with that guy. Surya: Yeah. I mean, I didn't realise he was that smart and that big. I know MrBeast.

Everyone probably knows him, but I never thought of him like that. When I started watching the podcast, I was like, wow, this guy. And he's very young as well. John: He's a hustler. He works really hard. I think a lot of people just say, “Oh, they got lucky. Right place at the right time.” I'm a data guy, but he's literally like, his data is everything. Surya: Yeah. Data is right there. John: And most people don't use it. Surya: Yeah.

So let's jump right into our affiliate topics. (03:22 - 04:18) Surya: The theme for this series, as well as for this event, is focused on affiliates, operators, that part of the industry. I've been doing more B2B platforms, dashboards and those kinds of chats a lot. So right now the focus is mostly on affiliation, which is also your area of expertise.

You talk a lot about shaving, and I know behind the scenes as well, we've discussed this a lot of times many months ago, before you were updating your website and things like that. So what's the latest on shaving? John: Good question. What I think is probably going to happen is we are going to get some analysis, but we need to be very careful about how we share that and get it back to the market.

We don't want to be targets for both litigation as well as people just hating us. One of the biggest problems that we could experience is companies saying, “Why are we allowing StatsDrone to get the data from these affiliate programmes if it's going to be used to document what they're doing?” Surya: Oh, really? (04:18 - 05:33) John: Yeah. And I hate to say this as a statement, but I'll say it anyway.

There are different ways an operator is doing, I don't want to say ethical shaving because it's like, what do you mean ethical stealing? That doesn't make any sense. But there are fees and there are different ways costs come out of the whole equation. And when an operator puts it into the big bucket, affiliates are just asking for the max. And you kind of want to argue, well, they should do it anyway.

But when you hear numbers like 50% plus €800 CPA, you're like, where's the profit for the operator? It's a problem on both sides of the fence. We have affiliates that are taking advantage of operators. That doesn't get talked about enough. And I hate to say it, I think because the space has gotten so rough that the trust is really broken.

No one's trusting the data coming from operators, and operators are starting to lose trust in affiliates, going, “How do I know that you're not really just trying to take advantage of us with these deals, where what we get and what you say we're going to get are the same thing?” It's a really fragmented conversation. I think the only thing that's going to solve it short term is companies, like we're trying to do it, but we won't be the only ones, using big data.

Can we show the conversion rates of affiliate sites and operators to the whole market so everyone knows where they stand and knows where to send their traffic? And go, you know what, stealing or not stealing, I'm getting the best ROI. You just need to focus on that. (05:33 - 07:05) Surya: But you would need the support of operators, or would you be doing it in some other format? John: Well, I'll just be honest and tell our playbook.

We've been wanting to do this for a long time, and that's part of what we've got with Nousviz. Can we provide a platform for affiliates to not just get their data, but could they share a copy of it anonymised back to us? And then we give them the benchmark data back in return. We start with affiliates. But when we share this with operators, operators are like, “I really want this data.” So the way they can get it is two ways.

One is by participating in this new data collection or by simply paying for it. But we believe that if we get it from affiliates, affiliates are where a lot of the real data sits. And we don't need 100% of all the datasets to say this is what the industry is. We just need enough of it to say this is a high confidence that this data is true. All we need is to know when operators are growing because they added a new CRM or maybe they lost a payment gateway in Canada.

They don't want the market to see that. But when we see it, we're all going to react. So if you don't fix your stuff, you don't improve your product, eventually affiliates are going to have that visibility. They will re-rank their traffic, and operators will re-rank what they focus on from an operations point of view. Is CRM important? We know it's important. But what about your VIP programme?

What if we told you that you're not just the fourth-best casino in Canada, but the number one has four times the player value? You have a lot of things to fix. You shouldn't be worried about losing affiliates. You should be worried about your cost per click. You're not going to get an ROI from it. You've got to fix it. (07:05 - 08:17) Surya: So do you think this is the solution for both sides in order to bring the trust back into the equation and offer a chance for fair play?

John: Yeah. I think that's going to bring people together as a conversation. And I think the secondary part of it will be not just our tools, but people building tools on the operator side too. The big data, I think, is going to bring the operators and affiliates a bit more together, where people can't hide from the data. Then the other part is the tools. The tools that make operators more accountable to affiliates, but also vice versa.

Think about tools like Humble, where they show the rankings of geos. I hate to admit it, but there are situations where an affiliate will charge for listing fees in different geos and not honour them. And you as an affiliate manager, what do you need to do? You need to have a VPN to go to all those different geos. And are you really going to do this once a day? I think a tool like Humble or PartnerMatrix Intelligence, they kind of do these things for them.

So it's really unfortunate that we have tools to detect these types of behaviours. But I think what we're going to have is tools that become normalised, combined with the big data, where everyone's like, “All right, here's the big data. I know what everything's like.” The tools are going to become more done-for-you, in my opinion, as a service. (08:17 - 09:29) Surya: Okay. And that's what Nousviz does?

John: We're not going to be doing that for everyone, so I'll be honest right now. We're not going to replace PartnerMatrix Intelligence or Humble or Ahrefs. But what we will do is try to make it easier to say, well, if there's an API key and someone wants to put all this data into one place, we can do it.

If they have their affiliate programme with PartnerMatrix, ReferOn, Trackier or AppNuke, then we can at least say, if they don't have those BI tools ready to go for their affiliate managers, we'll make it easy for them to say, “Here's your API keys. Here's all your affiliates. Here's the campaigns. Here's when the campaign player value drops and when you need to react to it.” To say, you know what, when do we kill a deal? This is when we at least consider it.

Those tools aren't native to the platforms yet. But even when they become native, the secondary part is like, well, can I combine all this outside data inward? And it's going to be Ahrefs, Humble, and even some of our tools. So we won't solve all the problems. But what we want to do with Nousviz is make it easier for all the data to live in one place. Store it on your server so you don't have to worry about us looking at your own data.

And I think the changes in tech and AI are about owning your own data. (09:29 - 10:50) Surya: Okay. That's very interesting. I also bumped into the StatsDrone Affiliate Software Report recently. I've seen some posts as well, and there are some interesting data points that were mentioned. Can we talk about that? Can you give us the top two insights that were derived from the report? John: That's a very tough question.

What we are doing right now is, we were building this first just to share with the industry, and we're surprised at how activated they were on it. Surya: Okay, great. John: Yeah. It's marketing for us. But then we started cutting up the data, going, what are the most connected, not just the most used software, but the most connections used by affiliates? We haven't even published that yet. There's a secondary part, who's using API versus credentials?

We want the industry to have more API, but API is unfortunately not standard across all software, which drives me nuts. Then there are the different nuances within. Not all platforms have standardised data. We just added a bunch of new datasets. So we are going to start publishing more. What you see is the surface level, but we are going to go deeper. And we're just like, you know what, we like sharing data because people start talking about it. I'm not going to lie.

It is marketing and it helps us. But it opens conversations, and we're having fun just going, the more of this we share, the more people want to talk to us. And we're geeks, right? We've got a podcast, and we geek out, and we love doing it in person. (10:50 - 12:00) Surya: That's very interesting. I look forward to the second edition as well and the insights from it.

One of the key things that I learned was which platforms are having really high growth in the recent past year or so. And also the number of platforms. I was surprised to see there were 51, at least from your report. Maybe there's more, we don't know, but at least from your report there are 51 affiliate platforms, which was a data point that I could refer to in my podcast.

We did a podcast with ReferOn the other day, and I was referring to your report because it was useful in that sense. I don't think there was another report as such which could give this overview on the affiliate space. So that's really good work. John: Awesome. I appreciate that. It's cool to share. And like I said, it opens up conversations. I think we can take it to a deeper level and relate it to what tools and features they have.

We actually want to do that as the next step. How do operators decide what tools to use, and how do affiliates expect and demand that if ReferOn does something new and innovative, let's say tracking links at scale, this needs to become a standard? When it's not a standard today, okay, we accept it. But at some point in time, affiliates are going to gravitate towards those features to say, “If you don't have this, I can't work with you.” And that does happen.

That's a real negotiable. Surya: Absolutely. (12:00 - 13:34) Surya: There's also the casino complaints report, which is very interesting on the operator side. What are the main complaints we see, the top two? John: Oh, there's actually more that I haven't even spent time looking through the data. There's self-exclusion. There's bonus hunting fraud. There's like 10 of them. I didn't even realise that. I didn't realise it until I just said, how many ways can I cut up this data?

This was obviously using AI. So I aggregated the data from CasinoMeister, AskGamblers, Casino Guru and Casino Reviews. Then basically I said, okay, I had the core dataset. Then I said, how was Casino Guru different from AskGamblers? And it's actually very different. I didn't realise that complaints aren't all equal because everyone chooses how they want to process that. Then, where are the complaints by type? Once I put that data together, I was like, there's stuff here.

And the stuff that I personally care about is the self-exclusion stuff. That's not good. That makes our industry look bad. I actually think more data or spotlight needs to be shined on that to be like, yeah, we should have fewer of these problems. We see those growing because the industry is growing. Okay, that's good.

But we don't want to see this problem growing because eventually some reporter is going to take the data we're building and use it against the industry and say, “Look at how irresponsible we are.”

And yeah, I do think we should, even though we have a grey market and that's a whole other topic, I do think we should care and self-police before the policing gets done on us, where we're dealing with the consequences of our lack of being proactive and trying to push the industry forward. (13:34 - 15:28) Surya: Yeah. It's quite interesting. There's a lot of data to chew on. I think this is the first step towards having those insights and discussions.

I look forward to exploring that one. I didn't explore that one much. The affiliate software report is what I explored. But before we close this mini podcast, what do you think affiliates need to do today, in the second half of 2026, to really build that trust from their side, at least in those long-term relationships? John: The answer I wanted to give, and I'm still going to give the same answer, is get a better grasp of their data and understand what's going on.

But where I think we are today, and I think it's kind of urgent, is this year is the era of agents. Last year was the era of vibe coding. You can build anything. You can still build everything today, but where and when do agents work? It's not to say we're using agents to replace people, but we need to get better at everything. Better at customer support, customer success.

This is for everyone, for us as a SaaS company, for affiliates, because affiliates have to work with operators and affiliate managers. And on the other side, we expect them to work more with players, owning their data and actually having conversations with players as if they are the VIP manager. This is actually going to become a thing where they will have player account management as powerful as tools like Fast Track and Optimove. Get a better handle of the data.

They've been wanting it for a long time. But what I think I've been hearing on the ground level for years is, “We know we want to do it, but we have to run a company, and to have to be a tech company as well is trying to do two things.” And if we can take that tech company responsibility away from them, we can make it easier for them to just grow. They're just begging for it. Done-for-you service. “I just want to get up and running.

I want my insights as fast as possible without having to invest in the BI team and the database engineers.” I think we're seeing some cool stuff being brought on the market. Done-for-you services with agents. Agents are going to be the key driver. (15:28 - 17:19) Surya: Are you not scared or afraid in that sense? Because you're in a SaaS business. With AI right now, it's very easy to build things. So how can you still be relevant? John: Great question.

We get asked this from investors all the time. We actually just got chewed out by... Surya: Really? John: We pitched to a company. “My 12-year-old neighbour could build this.” I'm like, we're lucky. And I'm not saying we're immune to being made obsolete. I feel at StatsDrone, the amount of work it takes to replicate what we do, it's very intensive. As a couple of examples, let's use Salesforce as a company. Salesforce has CRM. They have Tableau, and they also own Slack.

Out of all those three, the one I feel safest is Slack. I build a Slack, and you're using Slack, and everyone here is using Slack. Do you think I'm going to convince everyone to just drop Slack? It's like asking them to leave WhatsApp or Telegram. It's a network effect. Whereas the CRM, if we can make it better, cheaper and everything you want, that's at risk. Tableau, that's actually what we're doing with Nousviz.

We're going to be going after this type of market and go, how do we make it such that you don't need to spend 40 hours in a single week learning Tableau? There will be changes. I think for the tools that are going to be at risk, they have to go to another level. I need to provide more value without charging a more-value price. Things will get cheaper. But there are some companies that will be not fully immune, but mostly immune because they have a network effect.

So the new equation is, what is your moat? We're hoping that we've already had the moat by luck, accidentally. But we're hoping that we're building more tools that are moat-like for us, but benefiting everyone without saying, here's the premium price tag to go with it. We want that. But I also think we'd be very silly to not look at where the market's going. And yeah, if you can vibe code it, we need to compete. (17:19 - 18:30) Surya: Cool. That's good to know.

Thanks for coming on board again and sharing your insights, sharing the latest things, as well as the new brand, Nousviz. I always struggle to pronounce it, but I learned finally it's Nousviz because I was trying to do it now. John: And we understood that from a branding point of view. I knew people would get it right and wrong. Seventy-five percent of the time, we'll get it wrong. That's okay.

Surya: You can do a little interview over here or somewhere like, “Pronounce our branding.” That could be a funny video. John: We're also playing on the word because “nous” is a French word that means “we.” But in Greek, it means mind. So we're like mind visualisation. But we can actually be like, well, we have a newsletter, “What's Nous?” So it's interesting. We're playing around with it. But trying to build a brand is tough. Surya: Yeah.

But you can turn that into a campaign. John: Yeah. And we're going to have fun with it. Surya: Cool. Well, again, thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you next time, probably at some other conference. Thank you for watching as well. Do follow John, as well as what he's doing with Nousviz and StatsDrone. Some really interesting things are coming up. Thanks, John. John: Thank you for having me. Surya: Thank you for watching.

Do share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll see you on the next one.

(00:00 - 00:29) John: This year is the era of agents. Last year was the era of vibe coding. You shouldn't be worried about losing affiliates. You should be worried about your cost per click. It's just, you're not going to get an ROI from it. You've got to fix it. We want the industry to have more API, but API is unfortunately not standard across all software, which drives me nuts.
Surya: What do you think affiliates need to do in the second half of 2026 to really build that trust? John: There are situations where an affiliate will charge for listing fees in different geos and not honour them. And you as an affiliate manager, what do you need to do? You need to have a... (00:37 - 01:13) Surya: iGaming Real Talk is launching the next series.
This is the fourth event out of the 11 events we are doing this year, and I'm very excited to bring you the insights from the expo floor. This time on affiliate and operator relationships, as well as what's missing in the industry. What's the trend? What are we looking at when it comes to 2026, 2027 and beyond in terms of trends, AI and everything else? This series is brought to you by Evoverse. They offer custom crypto casino solutions, as well as source code.
This series is also brought to you by Wicked Games. They create slot games that slap. (01:18 - 03:20) Surya: Hello and welcome back to another episode of iGaming Real Talk. Today we are here at AffPapa Conference in Madrid. I have John with me. Actually, he was the first-ever guest when I started the podcast one year ago. He was the first one to accept and also give me a little bit of confidence at that time. I was just starting off. He didn't have to do it, but he did it.
So I like John very much for that, and also because you were my first guest. So I have a thing for that, you know. John: And now you have the best setup, where I'm super jealous. I've been doing podcasting for three years and it's just like, I should be doing this. But you know what? I'm happy to let you. You're going to teach me some skills after. Surya: Well, I mean, for you podcasting is more like driving some conversations. You do have StatsDrone. You do have Nousviz.
John: Nousviz. Surya: Yes. I struggle a lot, but Nousviz. John: That's okay. Surya: Right. So, I mean, it's not the main thing. But for me, podcasting is the main product or whatever we're doing. So there is a bit more focus on it. But I learned a lot of things from how you do it as well in the beginning. I do watch a lot of podcasts. I watch a lot of Joe Rogan these days. Also Steven Bartlett. I like him. John: Diary of a CEO. Surya: Diary of a CEO, yeah.
Recently, when I was on the flight, I was watching the one with MrBeast. It was really insightful as well. John: He's pretty smart. People don't give him credit for what he's done. He takes his videos and he's like, “I need to analyse it. I get the data. And how am I making it better?” There's just no compromise with that guy. Surya: Yeah. I mean, I didn't realise he was that smart and that big. I know MrBeast.
Everyone probably knows him, but I never thought of him like that. When I started watching the podcast, I was like, wow, this guy. And he's very young as well. John: He's a hustler. He works really hard. I think a lot of people just say, “Oh, they got lucky. Right place at the right time.” I'm a data guy, but he's literally like, his data is everything. Surya: Yeah. Data is right there. John: And most people don't use it. Surya: Yeah.
So let's jump right into our affiliate topics. (03:22 - 04:18) Surya: The theme for this series, as well as for this event, is focused on affiliates, operators, that part of the industry. I've been doing more B2B platforms, dashboards and those kinds of chats a lot. So right now the focus is mostly on affiliation, which is also your area of expertise.
You talk a lot about shaving, and I know behind the scenes as well, we've discussed this a lot of times many months ago, before you were updating your website and things like that. So what's the latest on shaving? John: Good question. What I think is probably going to happen is we are going to get some analysis, but we need to be very careful about how we share that and get it back to the market.
We don't want to be targets for both litigation as well as people just hating us. One of the biggest problems that we could experience is companies saying, “Why are we allowing StatsDrone to get the data from these affiliate programmes if it's going to be used to document what they're doing?” Surya: Oh, really? (04:18 - 05:33) John: Yeah. And I hate to say this as a statement, but I'll say it anyway.
There are different ways an operator is doing, I don't want to say ethical shaving because it's like, what do you mean ethical stealing? That doesn't make any sense. But there are fees and there are different ways costs come out of the whole equation. And when an operator puts it into the big bucket, affiliates are just asking for the max. And you kind of want to argue, well, they should do it anyway.
But when you hear numbers like 50% plus €800 CPA, you're like, where's the profit for the operator? It's a problem on both sides of the fence. We have affiliates that are taking advantage of operators. That doesn't get talked about enough. And I hate to say it, I think because the space has gotten so rough that the trust is really broken.
No one's trusting the data coming from operators, and operators are starting to lose trust in affiliates, going, “How do I know that you're not really just trying to take advantage of us with these deals, where what we get and what you say we're going to get are the same thing?” It's a really fragmented conversation. I think the only thing that's going to solve it short term is companies, like we're trying to do it, but we won't be the only ones, using big data.
Can we show the conversion rates of affiliate sites and operators to the whole market so everyone knows where they stand and knows where to send their traffic? And go, you know what, stealing or not stealing, I'm getting the best ROI. You just need to focus on that. (05:33 - 07:05) Surya: But you would need the support of operators, or would you be doing it in some other format? John: Well, I'll just be honest and tell our playbook.
We've been wanting to do this for a long time, and that's part of what we've got with Nousviz. Can we provide a platform for affiliates to not just get their data, but could they share a copy of it anonymised back to us? And then we give them the benchmark data back in return. We start with affiliates. But when we share this with operators, operators are like, “I really want this data.” So the way they can get it is two ways.
One is by participating in this new data collection or by simply paying for it. But we believe that if we get it from affiliates, affiliates are where a lot of the real data sits. And we don't need 100% of all the datasets to say this is what the industry is. We just need enough of it to say this is a high confidence that this data is true. All we need is to know when operators are growing because they added a new CRM or maybe they lost a payment gateway in Canada.
They don't want the market to see that. But when we see it, we're all going to react. So if you don't fix your stuff, you don't improve your product, eventually affiliates are going to have that visibility. They will re-rank their traffic, and operators will re-rank what they focus on from an operations point of view. Is CRM important? We know it's important. But what about your VIP programme?
What if we told you that you're not just the fourth-best casino in Canada, but the number one has four times the player value? You have a lot of things to fix. You shouldn't be worried about losing affiliates. You should be worried about your cost per click. You're not going to get an ROI from it. You've got to fix it. (07:05 - 08:17) Surya: So do you think this is the solution for both sides in order to bring the trust back into the equation and offer a chance for fair play?
John: Yeah. I think that's going to bring people together as a conversation. And I think the secondary part of it will be not just our tools, but people building tools on the operator side too. The big data, I think, is going to bring the operators and affiliates a bit more together, where people can't hide from the data. Then the other part is the tools. The tools that make operators more accountable to affiliates, but also vice versa.
Think about tools like Humble, where they show the rankings of geos. I hate to admit it, but there are situations where an affiliate will charge for listing fees in different geos and not honour them. And you as an affiliate manager, what do you need to do? You need to have a VPN to go to all those different geos. And are you really going to do this once a day? I think a tool like Humble or PartnerMatrix Intelligence, they kind of do these things for them.
So it's really unfortunate that we have tools to detect these types of behaviours. But I think what we're going to have is tools that become normalised, combined with the big data, where everyone's like, “All right, here's the big data. I know what everything's like.” The tools are going to become more done-for-you, in my opinion, as a service. (08:17 - 09:29) Surya: Okay. And that's what Nousviz does?
John: We're not going to be doing that for everyone, so I'll be honest right now. We're not going to replace PartnerMatrix Intelligence or Humble or Ahrefs. But what we will do is try to make it easier to say, well, if there's an API key and someone wants to put all this data into one place, we can do it.
If they have their affiliate programme with PartnerMatrix, ReferOn, Trackier or AppNuke, then we can at least say, if they don't have those BI tools ready to go for their affiliate managers, we'll make it easy for them to say, “Here's your API keys. Here's all your affiliates. Here's the campaigns. Here's when the campaign player value drops and when you need to react to it.” To say, you know what, when do we kill a deal? This is when we at least consider it.
Those tools aren't native to the platforms yet. But even when they become native, the secondary part is like, well, can I combine all this outside data inward? And it's going to be Ahrefs, Humble, and even some of our tools. So we won't solve all the problems. But what we want to do with Nousviz is make it easier for all the data to live in one place. Store it on your server so you don't have to worry about us looking at your own data.
And I think the changes in tech and AI are about owning your own data. (09:29 - 10:50) Surya: Okay. That's very interesting. I also bumped into the StatsDrone Affiliate Software Report recently. I've seen some posts as well, and there are some interesting data points that were mentioned. Can we talk about that? Can you give us the top two insights that were derived from the report? John: That's a very tough question.
What we are doing right now is, we were building this first just to share with the industry, and we're surprised at how activated they were on it. Surya: Okay, great. John: Yeah. It's marketing for us. But then we started cutting up the data, going, what are the most connected, not just the most used software, but the most connections used by affiliates? We haven't even published that yet. There's a secondary part, who's using API versus credentials?
We want the industry to have more API, but API is unfortunately not standard across all software, which drives me nuts. Then there are the different nuances within. Not all platforms have standardised data. We just added a bunch of new datasets. So we are going to start publishing more. What you see is the surface level, but we are going to go deeper. And we're just like, you know what, we like sharing data because people start talking about it. I'm not going to lie.
It is marketing and it helps us. But it opens conversations, and we're having fun just going, the more of this we share, the more people want to talk to us. And we're geeks, right? We've got a podcast, and we geek out, and we love doing it in person. (10:50 - 12:00) Surya: That's very interesting. I look forward to the second edition as well and the insights from it.
One of the key things that I learned was which platforms are having really high growth in the recent past year or so. And also the number of platforms. I was surprised to see there were 51, at least from your report. Maybe there's more, we don't know, but at least from your report there are 51 affiliate platforms, which was a data point that I could refer to in my podcast.
We did a podcast with ReferOn the other day, and I was referring to your report because it was useful in that sense. I don't think there was another report as such which could give this overview on the affiliate space. So that's really good work. John: Awesome. I appreciate that. It's cool to share. And like I said, it opens up conversations. I think we can take it to a deeper level and relate it to what tools and features they have.
We actually want to do that as the next step. How do operators decide what tools to use, and how do affiliates expect and demand that if ReferOn does something new and innovative, let's say tracking links at scale, this needs to become a standard? When it's not a standard today, okay, we accept it. But at some point in time, affiliates are going to gravitate towards those features to say, “If you don't have this, I can't work with you.” And that does happen.
That's a real negotiable. Surya: Absolutely. (12:00 - 13:34) Surya: There's also the casino complaints report, which is very interesting on the operator side. What are the main complaints we see, the top two? John: Oh, there's actually more that I haven't even spent time looking through the data. There's self-exclusion. There's bonus hunting fraud. There's like 10 of them. I didn't even realise that. I didn't realise it until I just said, how many ways can I cut up this data?
This was obviously using AI. So I aggregated the data from CasinoMeister, AskGamblers, Casino Guru and Casino Reviews. Then basically I said, okay, I had the core dataset. Then I said, how was Casino Guru different from AskGamblers? And it's actually very different. I didn't realise that complaints aren't all equal because everyone chooses how they want to process that. Then, where are the complaints by type? Once I put that data together, I was like, there's stuff here.
And the stuff that I personally care about is the self-exclusion stuff. That's not good. That makes our industry look bad. I actually think more data or spotlight needs to be shined on that to be like, yeah, we should have fewer of these problems. We see those growing because the industry is growing. Okay, that's good.
But we don't want to see this problem growing because eventually some reporter is going to take the data we're building and use it against the industry and say, “Look at how irresponsible we are.”
And yeah, I do think we should, even though we have a grey market and that's a whole other topic, I do think we should care and self-police before the policing gets done on us, where we're dealing with the consequences of our lack of being proactive and trying to push the industry forward. (13:34 - 15:28) Surya: Yeah. It's quite interesting. There's a lot of data to chew on. I think this is the first step towards having those insights and discussions.
I look forward to exploring that one. I didn't explore that one much. The affiliate software report is what I explored. But before we close this mini podcast, what do you think affiliates need to do today, in the second half of 2026, to really build that trust from their side, at least in those long-term relationships? John: The answer I wanted to give, and I'm still going to give the same answer, is get a better grasp of their data and understand what's going on.
But where I think we are today, and I think it's kind of urgent, is this year is the era of agents. Last year was the era of vibe coding. You can build anything. You can still build everything today, but where and when do agents work? It's not to say we're using agents to replace people, but we need to get better at everything. Better at customer support, customer success.
This is for everyone, for us as a SaaS company, for affiliates, because affiliates have to work with operators and affiliate managers. And on the other side, we expect them to work more with players, owning their data and actually having conversations with players as if they are the VIP manager. This is actually going to become a thing where they will have player account management as powerful as tools like Fast Track and Optimove. Get a better handle of the data.
They've been wanting it for a long time. But what I think I've been hearing on the ground level for years is, “We know we want to do it, but we have to run a company, and to have to be a tech company as well is trying to do two things.” And if we can take that tech company responsibility away from them, we can make it easier for them to just grow. They're just begging for it. Done-for-you service. “I just want to get up and running.
I want my insights as fast as possible without having to invest in the BI team and the database engineers.” I think we're seeing some cool stuff being brought on the market. Done-for-you services with agents. Agents are going to be the key driver. (15:28 - 17:19) Surya: Are you not scared or afraid in that sense? Because you're in a SaaS business. With AI right now, it's very easy to build things. So how can you still be relevant? John: Great question.
We get asked this from investors all the time. We actually just got chewed out by... Surya: Really? John: We pitched to a company. “My 12-year-old neighbour could build this.” I'm like, we're lucky. And I'm not saying we're immune to being made obsolete. I feel at StatsDrone, the amount of work it takes to replicate what we do, it's very intensive. As a couple of examples, let's use Salesforce as a company. Salesforce has CRM. They have Tableau, and they also own Slack.
Out of all those three, the one I feel safest is Slack. I build a Slack, and you're using Slack, and everyone here is using Slack. Do you think I'm going to convince everyone to just drop Slack? It's like asking them to leave WhatsApp or Telegram. It's a network effect. Whereas the CRM, if we can make it better, cheaper and everything you want, that's at risk. Tableau, that's actually what we're doing with Nousviz.
We're going to be going after this type of market and go, how do we make it such that you don't need to spend 40 hours in a single week learning Tableau? There will be changes. I think for the tools that are going to be at risk, they have to go to another level. I need to provide more value without charging a more-value price. Things will get cheaper. But there are some companies that will be not fully immune, but mostly immune because they have a network effect.
So the new equation is, what is your moat? We're hoping that we've already had the moat by luck, accidentally. But we're hoping that we're building more tools that are moat-like for us, but benefiting everyone without saying, here's the premium price tag to go with it. We want that. But I also think we'd be very silly to not look at where the market's going. And yeah, if you can vibe code it, we need to compete. (17:19 - 18:30) Surya: Cool. That's good to know.
Thanks for coming on board again and sharing your insights, sharing the latest things, as well as the new brand, Nousviz. I always struggle to pronounce it, but I learned finally it's Nousviz because I was trying to do it now. John: And we understood that from a branding point of view. I knew people would get it right and wrong. Seventy-five percent of the time, we'll get it wrong. That's okay.
Surya: You can do a little interview over here or somewhere like, “Pronounce our branding.” That could be a funny video. John: We're also playing on the word because “nous” is a French word that means “we.” But in Greek, it means mind. So we're like mind visualisation. But we can actually be like, well, we have a newsletter, “What's Nous?” So it's interesting. We're playing around with it. But trying to build a brand is tough. Surya: Yeah.
But you can turn that into a campaign. John: Yeah. And we're going to have fun with it. Surya: Cool. Well, again, thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you next time, probably at some other conference. Thank you for watching as well. Do follow John, as well as what he's doing with Nousviz and StatsDrone. Some really interesting things are coming up. Thanks, John. John: Thank you for having me. Surya: Thank you for watching.
Do share your thoughts in the comments below, and I'll see you on the next one.