Q&A w/ John Wright, CEO and Co-Founder at StatsDrone

How does it feel to win the Best Tech for Affiliates at the iGB Afffiliate Awards?

The entire team at StatsDrone are thrilled to win and it means a lot to us. All week long at the London Affiliate Conference, we’ve been hearing from affiliates how happy they are with the app. Our reputation is getting known for data accuracy and great customer support so we are happy to hear it and listen to the needs of affiliates. 

It means even more to win against some very tough competition that have been in the industry for longer. As a startup that is trying to make a name for ourselves, this award was worth the past few years of hard work from our team. 

Why did you create StatsDrone and how did you come up with the name?

I used to use an app called Nifty Stats that went out of business in 2017. I’ve always had affiliate program review sites and I remembered the frustration of running affiliate sites and being frustrated by affiliate programs. I felt there was a missing feedback loop needed for affiliates to help on various thing such as the following:

• Notifications of urgent compliance messages
• Changes in tracking software which invalidates older links
• Programs going out of business

Simply put, these messages don’t always end up in your inbox and even if they did, they are easy to not find them whether they end up in spam or are part of the 100s of messages any affiliate would get in a single day. I just wanted affiliates to know when programs closed, when tracking software would change and anything else that would notify affiliates of revenue leak. 

The name of StatsDrone was a mix of stats plus something else. Overall I wanted a name that nobody had ever used online or in social media so when seeing if statsdrone.com was available, it was. In 2017 I was starting to fly drones and the line of thinking was that drones could be controlled and in the future they could be automated. You can get an aerial view of your stats and we wanted the app to give the best insights to affiliates.

What does the StatsDrone app do for affiliates?

The app is like Quickbooks for affiliates. It can pull your stats and save them in one location. So if you wanted to know how much money you made yesterday, or month to date, you had quick access to this and could see all your stats before you wake up. These stats are things like account balance, clicks, FTDs (or NDCs), deposits, withdrawals, revenue share, CPA, sub affiliate and total commissions. The app also gives various KPIs like earnings per click (EPC) and effective revenue share (ERS).

In the past year we have added some CRM and Business Intelligence tools. These include invoice generator, account notes and deal manager on the CRM side. For BI we have the ability to tag campaigns and brands as well as data alerts and notifications. That is you can get an alert if your FTDs is less than or equal to a certain amount or when you reach a milestone like 20 FTDs in a month.

You run an affiliate focused podcast, what insights can you share from some of your guests?

I love doing the affiliate podcast because I get to have talks with talented people that as directly and indirectly in the affiliate marketing space. I often get to chat with a lot of smart SEOs that all have their unique view of SEO and affiliate marketing.

It is hard to summarize the past year of insights but one theme that seems to be common is that it is perhaps 1% of people that have great success because they will do the extra work that the remaining 99% won’t do. That is people won’t do any planning or create strategies for their business. It eventually boils down to work output but also being consistent. I think everyone is impatient and they want the most money for the least amount of time put in. You got to be patient and work to make real progress.

What do you see changing in the future for affiliate marketers in the iGaming space?

I think a lot has already changed but I also believe there are a lot of affiliates sitting and watching the competition waiting for the next trends to happen. If you are not innovating and doing research to see what else you could be doing in your business, you might be caught out of position.

The 3 things I see changing in affiliate marketing which applies to iGaming is this:

1. Data & Business Intelligence
2. Video
3. AI

Perhaps you can put Data and Business Intelligence into the same category as AI but I”ll separate for now.

Simply put, there is a growing interest in B2B and data companies as these are ones that are starting to become acquired.

I’ll jump to AI because AI has helped content be produced at an immense rate never seen before. AI has so many applications and you really need to listen to what people are doing with AI and be researching it.

Video can be part of AI but I talk about video because this is what separates a lot of people. Video is content and it is tougher for people to do. Unless you are hiring people to make your videos, it still requires effort and many people are not willing to get in front of a camera.

Video and streaming is a big part of any industry niche and I think more people will rely on video for helping them with buying decisions. At the end of the day, people want to buy from people.

What can we expect from StatsDrone in the near future?

We are working on a lot but most of 2024 will be focused on adtech. We think the next thing we need to solve for affiliates is have better link tools that can not just cloak their tracking links but help them avoid revenue leak.

We think pixel and S2S tracking will become more important as time goes on and we are excited to help affiliates integrate this and make a complex thing become easy for them.