In this interview with TheGamblest, Artem Fedin, CEO of aff.studio, shares the mistakes his team made when deciding which casinos get their traffic, and how they decide today: from vetting new brands and reading program terms to keeping brand data accurate and knowing when to move traffic away from a partner.
TheGamblest: aff.studio grew out of an affiliate business that ran its own casino sites. How did you choose which casinos to promote in the early days, and how do you choose them now?
Artem: Our first partnerships came about the way most did at the time, through conferences. Brand teams saw we had traffic and made us an offer. We knew what we’d be paid and very little else. Admin fees, negative carryover and how net revenue was calculated weren’t on our radar yet, so we had no real way to judge whether a deal was fair. Relationships still open many doors in this industry, but a handshake tells you nothing about how a brand will convert your traffic or what the deal will actually return.
As the business grew, we moved to a rules-based placement model. Hard criteria such as accepted countries and payment methods decided which brands could appear on a page at all, and a 100-point quality score then set the order within each list.
Benchmarking competitors’ top positions is another common shortcut, and we still use it as a fast way to surface brands another affiliate has already vetted. Its limitation is that a top spot can reflect proven conversion or a flat fee placement, and from the outside the two look identical.
Today our starting point is our own performance history. Over the years we’ve built a core of trusted partners with proven conversion and retention, and they hold their positions for as long as the numbers support it. We also reserve capacity for testing new brands, which is how that core gets renewed.
Many of these decisions are made under time pressure, though. A regulatory change can cut you off from partners you’ve worked with for years, and replacements have to be found quickly, often in a gray market. At that point, peers who can vouch for brands that convert become the fastest source. Other times the trigger is in your own data: an unexpected keyword cluster bringing traffic from one country around one payment method. That calls for a very specific brand profile, and finding one quickly is one of the reasons CasinoMass exists.
TheGamblest: New casinos launch every month, and all of them want visibility. How should an affiliate decide whether a new brand deserves its traffic?
Artem: The costliest mistake is taking a brand’s own pitch at face value. Every affiliate manager will tell you their brand converts well. Our head of affiliates spent most of her career on the operator side, and she treats those numbers with open skepticism for exactly that reason. Operators have little incentive to disclose real player value, because an affiliate who knows it will negotiate harder.
It also helps to be realistic about what the top of a page is. On established sites, those positions are largely a commercial product. Brands compete for them, often in something close to an auction, and pay a flat fee that leaves the affiliate with no performance risk.
On our sites, a new brand typically starts below the top ten, where a weak result costs little, and partners with an uncertain reputation pay upfront. Over the first month we track conversion rate, average deposit and early player value. Once the results are statistically meaningful, they decide whether the brand stays, moves up or leaves.
Pricing a top spot is a discipline of its own, and the benchmark is what the position earns today. A brand once wanted the first spot on one of our Canadian sites. We tested it in second and third place, and it didn’t outperform the incumbent. It got the position anyway by guaranteeing that we would earn at least as much as the slot was already making, with the brand topping up our revenue share whenever it fell short. In the first month its players generated only a fraction of that, so the brand covered the difference. Over time those players more than paid the guarantee back. The deal only worked because we knew exactly what the slot was worth, and that number sits in the affiliate’s data and nowhere else.
TheGamblest: Before an affiliate sends traffic to a new market or a new partner, what information does it need to make that decision?
Artem: We look at five things before committing:
- Demand and competition. The most useful signals rarely come from keyword tools. Watch for a depositing player from a country you never targeted showing up in your own stats, or competitors that keep investing in the same landing pages.
- Which version of the market you’re entering. A country can be several markets at once, with locally licensed brands on one side and offshore brands on the other, each with its own rules and economics. The regulatory label matters less than the consequences you’d actually face: blocked domains, fines, or partners that can no longer accept your players.
- The terms you can realistically get. A strong market can still be a bad deal. We invested in a US venture where player value was exceptional, but the revenue share terms the plan depended on stopped being offered, and the CPA rates on the table were low. We read the market correctly and the terms wrong.
- Realistic volume and player value for your traffic. Ask every program how many players its biggest SEO affiliate sends from that country each month, and what those players deposit on average. Be careful with numbers from other affiliates’ accounts. We once entered a market because a contact showed us a very strong screenshot, and our own results there never came close. That screenshot reflected someone else’s traffic and someone else’s partners.
- Player value over time. An FTD count shows that a brand converts your traffic. On revenue share, what matters is whether those players are still depositing 60 and 90 days later. Two brands with identical FTD numbers can look very different six months on.
On sources, our own statistics come first, and operators’ figures serve to check assumptions. When time is short, closed affiliate communities are often the fastest route. Members share which partners convert for them and which ones pay late or not at all.
TheGamblest: Brand details change all the time: licenses, payment methods, accepted countries. What goes wrong when affiliates let that information go stale, and how do you keep it accurate?
Artem: Many affiliates treat brand details as content. They get researched once, written into a review and refreshed in a big update every year or two. We worked that way too. Meanwhile brands keep changing: an operator stops accepting a country, drops a payment method or loses a license, and the page keeps promoting it as if nothing happened. Players get turned away at sign-up or can’t find the deposit option the page promised, and the traffic is gone. By our estimate, about half of the traffic we were wasting came from changes at brands that nobody on our side noticed in time.
A few things we’ve learned since:
- Treat what brands declare as a claim to verify. A brand can mark every country as accepted. Residency, physical location and KYC also don’t always line up: a player who lives in one country but is currently in another can register without trouble and then fail verification.
- Speed matters as much as accuracy. When a new brand or payment method appears, the first affiliate with a solid page on it can go without competition for months. The teams that win those races hear about launches from industry contacts, well before demand shows up in keyword tools.
- Watch for clone domains. Mirrors and copycat sites distort a brand’s search volume and confuse players. One affiliate we work with manages a review profile for a brand with several clones and regularly gets emails from players asking it for refunds.
- Automated collection only goes so far. Scrapers get blocked, and an AI agent will repeat a wrong fact with complete confidence. Data that holds up is checked by people following written procedures: what to verify, where to look and how to record it. That’s how CasinoMass is run.
TheGamblest: How do you decide when it’s time to move traffic away from a partner?
Artem: In our experience, picking partners is the easier part. Knowing when to leave one is harder, because by the time a problem is obvious in the monthly report, a lot of traffic has already gone to the wrong place. These are the signals we watch:
- Ratios drift while your traffic stays the same. Click-to-registration, registration-to-FTD, deposit per player and earnings per click. When one of them moves steadily in one direction and your traffic mix hasn’t changed, something changed on the partner’s side. Compare brands against each other on the same page and in the same country, and use earnings per click rather than conversion rate alone: a brand can convert well and still earn you less.
- The funnel breaks at one step. Clicks with no registrations usually mean something broke between your page and their sign-up, such as a country that’s no longer accepted or a dead link. Registrations with no depositors point to the cashier or the wrong audience. Either way the numbers fall to almost nothing within days, which makes these the easiest problems to catch and the costliest to miss.
- Net revenue pulls away from deposits. Compare what your players deposit with what shows up as net revenue. A widening gap means more is being deducted before your share is calculated: fees, bonus costs, or a big-winner policy that removed a player from your stats.
- The terms change. In our study of 963 T&C changes, 23 were retroactive, and 15 of those came from strictly licensed operators. A retroactive change rewrites the deal for traffic you’ve already sent, so every update is a reason to re-price the partner.
- The relationship weakens. Payments that settled in the first two weeks of the month for years start slipping. The affiliate manager changes several times in a year, or replies start taking days. A sister brand from the same group appears on a debtor list in an affiliate community.
One signal is a reason to investigate. We move traffic when a signal persists over a full season and a tested alternative is ready, because one bad month can’t separate a real decline from normal variance.
TheGamblest: When you evaluate a program’s terms, how do you decide whether it’s worth signing?
Artem:
- Work out your effective rate. Get the net revenue formula in writing and calculate what’s left after admin, payment and provider fees and bonus costs. The gap can be brutal. Your player can lose $20 on a deal advertised at 50%, and $3 lands in your account. Once you know your real rate, use it to negotiate.
- Match the deal model to the page’s player value. If players on a page stay active for six months or more, a hybrid or revenue share pays off. If they deposit once or twice and leave, take CPA or a flat fee. Remember that a flat fee is CPA paid in advance: if your traffic underperforms, expect a request for compensation or no renewal. Our own rule is to include some revenue share in every deal.
- Stress-test the clauses that only matter in edge cases. “No negative carryover” often comes with a high-roller policy that isolates big winners anyway. Also check:
– whether all brands on your account are netted together, so a loss on one brand cancels commissions on the others
– whether there’s a minimum monthly FTD threshold
– whether you get paid when your casino player bets on sports - Check the group behind the brand. Ask which other brands sit in the group, which legal entity signs your contract and which license it holds. If a sister brand is on an affiliate community’s debtor list, you have your answer. Whitelists help, but they age fast, and a trusted brand can stop paying within days.
- Look at how the terms have changed over time. Don’t take a license as a promise of fair treatment. In our study of 963 changes to affiliate terms, strictly licensed operators changed terms against affiliates 8 times for every 1 change in their favor, compared with 4.7 to 1 for offshore operators. If you see a clause allowing changes “at any time,” give it extra weight.
TheGamblest: Looking ahead, what will make the biggest difference to how effective an affiliate business is?
Artem: AI has made content cheap and moved the risk into the data underneath it. If your reviews take brand or game details from an AI model, you’re relying on information that other teams collected for their own review sites, at a date you can’t check. Every ranking you publish then rests on someone else’s research, which may have been wrong from the start or may have gone out of date since. As AI writes more of the content, your advantage depends more and more on data that people have actually verified.
Decisions will also become more data-driven. Conversion data is easier to collect than it used to be: operators report it in their dashboards, and tools like AffStata pull every program into one place. The difference will come from how you use it.
The affiliates who make the best decisions fastest will be the ones who can see verified brand data, their partners and their own results together. That’s the direction aff.studio is building in.
