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john wright interview

Interview With John Wright, Co-Founder at StatsDrone

The evolving nature of iGaming is reflected faithfully in affiliate marketing, an industry so prone to shifts and changes that describing it as dynamic would be an understatement. For some, however, navigating market trends, the ever-changing consumer behaviour, and steep competition comes naturally.

John Wright, co-founder of StatsDrone and an overall affiliate marketing wizard, is definitely one of them. We invited him for an interview and asked him to share some of his insights. From the complex process of how technology shapes player behaviour and benefits the consumer to industry trends for the year ahead, the conversation with John is a must-read for anyone looking to stay ahead of the affiliate marketing game.

AskGamblers: Hi, John, and thank you for responding to our invitation. Let's start with your company and tell us a bit about it and the tools needed for the iGaming affiliate space?

John Wright: StatsDrone was built out of a few stories. The first story was about being an affiliate manager and realising that some affiliates prioritised the highest revenue share commission possible but would promote low- quality brands. I realised if they could have their numbers reorganised, they would realise where to send more traffic.

The second story involves me running iGaming affiliate sites and realising there were more problems at hand. I used to use Stats Remote, which was one of the leading affiliate stats apps on the market. I could get all my affiliate commissions into this app, but I felt it was missing some key features.

Those features were to do with revenue leak. If a program went out of business, Stats Remote wouldn’t tell me what happened and why. If a program stopped paying affiliates, you would only learn about this from talking with your affiliate friends but sometimes you would learn about the months down the road. That is months of sending a lot of valuable traffic that isn’t converting.

Other times, programs would change affiliate software and render your old tracking links as useless. Revenue leaks were happening everywhere and it was why I felt passionate enough to do something about it and take my affiliate revenue and start to build a stats app to create something needed for all affiliates.

AG: In what ways are B2B companies having a trickle-down effect of ultimately benefiting the players, and can you give some examples?

JW: I have a theory that many other people in iGaming agree with. That is online casinos that implement the right B2B tools in their business, will have a positive impact on players.

Just take all of the complaints from players. When players are being treated badly and unfairly, the casinos are often at fault here. What we don’t have evidence of is whether these operations are investing less in their program. When I say investing, I’m talking about things like their VIP program, their fraud department, their CRM tools, their design, their customer service, etc…

It seems like the players that love certain casinos, most of those casinos we probably can tell they do invest in these areas and B2B tools.

A few quick examples:

CRM tools: Optimove and Fast Track help casinos stay on top of their players with the right messaging and makes them feel important. Great for retention.

Bonus abuse tools: Greco, helps operations create optimal bonuses that real players love and bonus abusers don’t. Quite often, casinos that are going out of business are getting hit badly by bonus hunters and I’m certain that many casino complaints are filed by bonus hunters who are not happy with the outcome of their complaint.

VIP: I don’t think there are many VIP tools on the market other than CRM tools, but I know companies like WarriorLab do VIP consulting. I’ve talked to them, and they’ve told me that most VIP programs are just made up as they do. It is the responsibility of one person and nobody is comparing notes across multiple companies.

All of these B2B tools lead to healthy online casinos. When casinos don’t go out of business, it means they have a great product and that ultimately benefits players.

When online casinos close, sometimes owed money isn’t paid out. I think consistent negative complaints against casinos is a signal that a casino could be going out of business and that doesn’t benefit anybody.

AG: You do some volunteer work in responsible gambling. Can you share how you got involved?

JW: I worked with Duncan Garvie, who ran ThePOGG for many years as an ADR. He set up BetBlocker, which is a responsible gambling tool. The reason for creating it happened because of a discussion we had where he was frustrated seeing many casino complaints come in from problem gamblers.

Duncan didn’t like the tools on the market, which required registration and payment. He believed that it was important to make the app anonymous without registration and also without payment.

This would allow for the least amount of friction to allow a problem gambler to try the app and block any casino if they felt they needed help.

So I help anyway I can with the charity and I’ve done all their main designs to date for the app, the website and now many booths thanks to industry partners like SBC Events and Clarion Events at ICE and iGB Affiliate.

AG: What attributes do you think are important in an iGaming affiliate site today?

JW: Since I do a podcast on affiliate marketing, I’ve been very fortunate to interview a lot of amazing SEO people including Dragan Berak, Sean Bianco, Karl Hudson, Victor Karpenko, Lily Ray and many more.

Based on my years of experience in doing podcasting and talking to many affiliates as customers, I strongly believe product is the answer as what is important in an iGaming affiliate site today.

I think many people don’t understand the description of what a product person does. My simple answer is they simply keep caring about the product and are always looking at an affiliate site from a quality perspective.

If you take AskGamblers as a case study, it is one of the best examples of products in iGaming affiliation today from literally the past 10 years.

AskGamblers has a quality forum, different reviews, a unique design and, of course, casino complaints. This product, in my opinion, makes AskGamblers one of the most valuable casino affiliate sites ever.

I think if you think about what a good product is or which companies care about products, this is what most affiliate sites should be aspiring towards.

AG: What industry trends do you think will awaits us in 2025 and beyond?

JW: I think Google is going to give less traffic to affiliates and will prioritise traffic to things that have more products.

I believe for the first time in a long time, iGaming will start to become data-driven. This will happen as a result of the growth of companies that implement these strategies as well as people noticing B2B companies that are growing.

For example, when StatsDrone grows and gets discussed amongst affiliates, they realise what we can do to help. The same is true for all the other B2B tools that are hitting the market, including ones like Blask, for example.

AG: Finally, share a bit about what StatsDrone is working on, and what can affiliates expect in the year ahead?

JW: We are working on some research tools that we think can change things for affiliates. A few of these things are creating a global list of all iGaming operators along with their bonuses and bonuses in any language. We want affiliates to be able to think about searching for brands they want to promote.

The second project we are working on is affiliate research so any affiliate can understand the nature of how other affiliates link and promote any casino. I think the value is in not just the data but the analysis of the data.

There are a lot of signals out there that I think are useful for affiliates and we want to aggregate this so affiliates can understand where they believe they should funnel more of their traffic and where to invest more in their sites.