B2B Affiliate Marketing with David Shapiro

affiliate Commerce is definitely having its moment right after we said a long time of of existing but not necessarily being considered not necessarily getting the best valuations in the marketplace you're seeing companies in the space now receive huge valuations huge multiples and there's a good reason for it because it's a great way to diversify your Revenue base just like we're talking about if you're forecasting a 10% decline in ad Revenue say on your site but you could more than make it up by adding affiliate right

why would you do it in every content site is doing this they're all adding affiliate because it's it's a no-brainer M before they didn't have to and now everyone's focusing on it and the rise of creators has helped a lot too right because that's the creative model definitely made it go go more mainstream and then to your question about business intelligence yeah as this has gone more mainstream and as more and more people are doing this now everyone wants to optimize it and you're sitting in

the perfect spot and I think we are as well I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate B I the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by sta so welcome to the affiliate bi podcast today we're chatting with David Shapiro who's the CEO and co-founder of affiliate.com which when I first heard about the project I was like a mo to a flame I had to know more David's an investor and adviser to many businesses that cover marketing so David welcome to the show

thank you thanks for having me great to be here so first question right off the bat I I'm sure when people hear philly.com they got some ideas like what is this so I want to pass it back to you and tell us what the company does yeah happy to and again thanks for having me here we're not an affiliate Network at all although we work with every major affiliate Network around the world we're a B2B SAS data and Technology business we have a massive database of

over billion well over a billion e-commerce products from over 16,000 Merchants around the world we're essentially tracking everything that's for set on the internet and we take all that data we normalize it and we make it available to all kind Publishers in a variety of ways so for example Publishers might use our platform and apis to power content sites shopping and coupon sites Chrome extensions influencing platforms AI offerings yeah and more anybody who needs access and wants to make it easy to source and find products

merchants and monetize them I'll give you an example in our in our e-commerce search engine you could search instantly every Merchant in the world that's wearing that sweatshirt you're wearing John until and I can tell you in a second a Split Second Split Second Split Second every Merchant who sells it what the price is when it goes on sale when it goes out of stock so you could imagine if you're an influencer platform or let's say you're a Creator and you want to promote that sweatshirt

you got to figure out you know what merchants sell it what the price is what the commission is offered by that then you got to grab the links by the way this isn't a reason why most Publishers will only promote links to one Merchant for every product because it's just it's so much work to figure it out we automate all that so then imagine the Creator wants want to find that sweatshirt on our platform they can do it in a second it's actually not our platform

we power other platforms so if you're a Creator platform who wants to offer affiliate Commerce to creators you want to make it easy for them to find products to grab links to them keep the links up to date keep the prices up to date Etc so that that's what we power for lots and lots of Publishers of all kinds so you're like one of those rare products or services that kind of connects both sides of the fence you got Publishers and Affiliates on one side you've

got the operators the service providers networks um there's not many that you could actually say will actually connect things yeah so we're we don't do any scraping we work directly with all the networks and like I said over 16,000 Merchants we drive them a ton of traffic and we don't charge them we're customers who pay us or our Publishers but we drive Merchants a ton of traffic we make it easy for merchants to get discovered and imagine there's so many Merchants it's like opening a store

on the North Pole and they're wondering what like where are all the people right if you're a smaller mer Merchant a longtail merchant right how do you get found how do you get Affiliates and creators to sign up for your site to promote your site we help with that we make put all wors on the same footing we make it easy for them to get found in fact sometimes we could just automatic promote them so for example if a product goes out of stock at Target

and we see it's available at you know John sweatshirt shop.com if the publisher wants we'll just automatically switch that link for them and promoe another Merchant so you mentioned a couple different examples of the types of compan companies that are using your service I think you said there's Chrome plugins AI what were some of the things that you didn't expect that just came out of nowhere you're like I guess this is a good use case and it was more like a pleasant surprise of how useful

and dynamic this is yeah it's a great question I'm curious to hear about how you deal with this in your business but the affiliate Commerce ecosystem is definitely having its day right you and I have been in this industry for a long time and for a long time it was uh called the less highbrow less wellth thought of industry within the broader digital marketing industry no longer right it's everyone wants to talk about this now you see businesses like mle just got sold for a huge

sum shop my just a couple days ago announced a massive raise at a I think a year ago they were valued at $80 million less year last March they just did a raise value of themselves at 400 million so there's just a massive focus on all things affiliate Commerce and we're seeing that and because of that every type of publisher broadly defined everyone who has eyeballs they platform creators websites shopping sites Chrome extensions browsers every type of publisher who has eyeballs of any kind is trying

to figure out how do they make money from money from money from affiliate I have a are you think that as well in your business yeah it's like even for what we do I'm just surprised at how many rabbit holes we can go down if anything I think our biggest problem as a company is we have too many different opportunities like we have companies coming to us all the time going can you build this and the answer is yes but then it's we've got five Super

interesting projects that we can pivot to and it's we have to decide or Define what our mission and vision statement is but uh just seeing how Affiliates use the app and learning from them I just feel like it's just the early days like it's like we're on level one of a 100 levels of data analysis of just even focusing on only analysis yeah I I totally agree with you we're publisher gnostics so we work with any type of publisher but you're right any sort of startup

you got to focus really focus on on what you want to deliver we're like is said we're very focused on on on making our platform agnostics to support any any kind of culture so Creator AI platforms are just are huge right now right and it make perfect sense right okay I got a question that it's not scripted and it's just from Thinking Out Loud from having this quick chat on the on the online gambling side they have these things on the operator side called pams or

I think they're player account management and what I've realized is that for affiliate marketers that they don't really have these things on their side like you might have a CRM you might have a newsletter but you don't really have this login system and I think the login systems that do exist today are things like maybe a Chrome extension maybe it's like an app so I think in affiliate marketing we're starting to see more of these things there do you think some of the tools that you

have could actually be like a a weird hub for these player account management it's a good question you're talking I think you're talking about can can you customize an experience all the way down to the user level exactly and you certainly can I I was speaking with a a browser essentially a browser that they manage homepages on browsers and they want to create a custom experience for each person so if you're interest if you're a New York Jets fan you might want to see just Goods

it's the New York Jets whereas if you're a hockey fan you can see hockey stuff or a golfer or if you like shoes right so the notion that every person could easily customize the shopping experience that they get right maybe they want to see coupons or product on sale in a certain type of product our platform does that easily that's very routine for us but absolutely uh the best companies are definitely going to that level you see even Creator platform that level where they could really

customize what they're showing to each and every fan of of of a Creator would you say that the data that you have like on a scale of 1 to 10 would you say where are you in the personalization not just on your company but how you can use your data to help other companies with personalization I I think this is ear days but I want to know what your take is yeah this is a big growth there we're not a publisher anyway so we power lots

and lots of other Publishers over 10,000 sites our service but our job is make it as easy as possible for them to take our apis take our data and offer it spin it out and offer to their users and we're seeing people do all sorts of personalization all the way down the individual for individual for individual for sure are you running your own analytics on the data sets you have like where you're basically saying what is the growth of the inventory what what is becoming more

in demand what's what's increasing what's shrinking I'm imagining with a large database of inventory you could actually just run python on this all day long yeah so it goes to exactly what you said before just choosing your battles where you want to focus but we we're collecting a massive amount of data on products well avability on products and not just products all the underlying data for each and every product it's massive all of which is updated every day on the flip side to your point we're

seeing what product are popular what products are trending what people are clicking on there's a lot we plan to do with that in the future we're not right now just because there's so much demand for our our aprs and we're focusing on that but it's The Logical next step and it's what customers are asking for right they want to Once once they like if again if you're a Creator platform imagine this and you could tell your creators hey here's trending products so we are doing that

for customers and let the kidos promote it and that it would just drive more Revenue drive more sales for them yeah I I could just imagine from putting my SEO hat on is you would have a field day with this data because then you could publish like probably daily case studies or just daily data sets where media is always looking for Unique data to to tell a story it's defin and it's definitely daily because things change every day products come in and out that as well

don't you that scale I'm sure a little bit what I find is just it's really interesting seeing all the companies going yeah I can't find this data so I'm just going to create a company and like literally build the data sets or literally use other platforms that have data and basically refine it once more to basically create that data set and get that story yeah and and merch by the way want this data as well uh we're focused on Publishers at the moment but Merchants very

much want this data well yeah do you see with a lot of the tools on the market that things are becoming more accessible for Affiliates where you don't need to have 10 people like to be a big company you don't need losss of investment like you can actually jump in yeah that's a great question question question what I see the best companies doing is focusing on what they're good at let's say a lot of Chrome extension owners are really expert at media buying right user acquisition

creators are really excellent at creating content and con Their audience none of these people want to deal with all the backends of what your platform offers right reporting analytics or what our platform offers of merchant product Discovery keeping links working Etc so they're using companies like us and that frees up their time so you can do a lot with not a ton of people right you don't need our system automates it completely your offering I know automates automates all the analytics and Reporting completely as much

as we can it's a it's not a fun job of what we do but I guess it's we both have our own stories about finding a gap in the market and going okay it's on paper it didn't look like a sexy uh road path but I want to throw that question back to do you see a stronger interest in the last five years where investors are going I want the the picks and shovels of the industry it's not like I'm a publisher or big publisher that's

doing 50 to 100 million per year it's these weird companies that maybe aren't easy to explain what we do but then they're like wait a minute there's value and power here yeah first of all there's a massive long tail right I think there's something like 800 million WordPress sites right every one of them could use your service or or my service and that's just websites right there's so many different types of Publishers and like we talked about before as affiliate Commerce has really gone and everyone's

focusing on it everyone's trying to figure out how to how to be most optimal how to drive Revenue the best way they can Etc and they're looking at services like yours and mine for sure is that a coincidence that I'm doing what I'm doing right it's we see this happening we saw this happening and this is why we're in this business I imagine it's the same with you that's why I appreciate being able to have you on and just ask the questions and go how do

I get better at trying to predict the future it's by working with companies that indirectly they're in front of that future but they're also uh creating it yeah the last thing a Creator or a small website owner even big website owners want to do is deal with all this stuff that we're talking right it's just it's not therefore for nor should it be because they would spend someone's gonna do it themselves they would probably spend 10 times what it cost to license your service and it'd

be a lot easier to work with you same thing with us yeah I'm sure you get this all the time it's oh we're going to build this inhouse and then a couple months later they're actually I don't really want to do that anymore like I said yeah the best companies are not even trying because they're focusing on what they're good at and can you imagine a Creator trying to deal or an influence influencer platform wanted to deal with this they just they don't want to and

they shouldn't yeah pivoting a little bit talking about first-party data and it's something I've been writing about recently I think first-party data is becoming more important from a different context that Google's been trashing affiliate sites so this has been going on for the last year and a half and I think think has put more emphasis that people need to find clever ways of owning their own data so what's your take on not just first party data but how this relates to both being a publisher and

then going what other data in inventory can I have yeah so this is a big question is a great question look you're right that that everyone every publ has known for years not to be red just on Google but it's easy to get addicted to it so most Publishers were right most Publishers were so not most so many publishers are focused and and re we're totally relied by SEO as that went completely not completely way but in a huge way that went away in in the

last year right I I've talked to lots of sidu whose traffic drop 70% 80% literally overnight imagine waking up in the morning and 80% of your business is gone but it's because they were relying on SEO now the Tropic didn't go away entirely it just went away to those sites so obviously if there's losers there's winners right so who are the winners in this we saw ugc sites there huge winners red right as an example creators AI offerings right I just go to Google and do

a search many of your answer you'll get right in the AI offering at top so they're winners right the content sites have to react to this right and they're now saying how do we diversify they've always known they should do this but now they have to do it so it's not even a choice and a lot of people are doing a very good job of it people are driving traffic to their sites from from YouTube from social newsletters is was always big but it's now much

bigger things like that are definitely taking a center stage yeah it just reminds me because I had Noel spagna from the mly Fool on recently and of course what do they have they are an affiliate program and a publisher but a publisher that has subscriptions and I just think about how many public affiliate companies I've read where they sold that arm of their business while all this Google Mayhem is going on I'm like that actually might have been the most valuable part because the subscription is

even if it's small Revenue you have first party data yeah we one of the solutions that we offer is a price watch solution where any publisher could just add a capability for users to get notified if product goes on sale or the price drops or whatever it's super useful one of the things publes also love about it is it requires the user to put it in the email to get notified when the price drops it's a great way to collect the email I know many Publishers

who don't rely on SEO at all right Publishers who have extraordinarily profit businesses and it's entirely based on social so there are ways to do it it's just it's hard and it's very hard if you grew up relying on on SEO okay I got a a challenging question and I'll see if I can word this properly so what I've seen in the past like 10 15 years like Affiliates that would be doing let's say Twitter X or Facebook or Instagram they're basically putting offers like just

tracking links on on a post but obviously it goes with the saying there's a lot of problems there's no Geo targeting that data can expire it's very easy to have that data itself becoming incompliant or incompliant in a different AR would you say that the inventory stuff that you're working on might have a weird future connectivity into social platforms where it's like you've got these more native ads built in do you think there's a future there or is this coming yeah it's here now for sure

not so much at the social media company level like Tik Tok or Instagram but it's at the companies that are working with them so linkoln is very popular now a lot of the companies we're talking about Shai ltk goes on and on are using are using linen bio right because that's what Tik Tok allows that's what Instagram allows um but they're also incorporating all these new technologies into these offerings to make them better you'll see the some of the social media platforms try to do it

directly uh themselves as well but everyone is is all creators are relying on these platforms right and how do they monetize off of them they're selling directly on on them or they're driving traffic off of them and Link and bio is sort of obvious way to do that I guess we're talking more about like Pro programmatic advertising where it's like how can you make this programmatic automated at scale and then of course there's got to be some personalization in there at some point yeah so most

of these customers of ours will use our redirect link right so we could then tailor the results for whatever the publisher wants could be tailored to the person's interest to go can be tailored whatever they want but you need a way to be able to identify the user what user interested in and then Ser them up relevant a relevant offer like you said the old way of just throwing up so everyone sees the same thing wherever they are in the world it it doesn't work a

lot of Publishers I talk to ignore different Goos they might say oh 10% of our traffic comes from Scandinavia we're gonna just ignore that it's not worth it but 10% of Revenue is huge percentage of their right especially it all drops to the bottom line if you could figure it out would you say that tracking links could be one of the biggest pain points in affiliate marketing and I'll give you the the brutal example when I use atrs and I look at who's linking to FTX

using an affiliate link and I can find you probably about a couple hundred Pages like it's been a couple years FTX has been out of business but the internet is filled with dead tracking links or ones that expire or probably ones that are actually just like their dead weight without people even monitoring what's behind it do you see a future where links are going to get smarter and there's going to be better tools yeah so for sure getting smarter but I I don't it's a problem

what you said there's a lot of problems with the affiliate marketing ecosystem a lot of things have not evolved over the last 20 years say we did an analysis of a site and 20% a very popular well-known publisher on new newssite and 20% of their links went to dead pages so imagine if 20% of your links and it's pretty much all of their longtail content when it's content it's reviewing products right you do a review of the best sunscreens for the summer and then six months

later 20% of those pages are dead that's a again it's a huge Revenue hit but imagine the E that hit because they would all if those L work it would all drop to the bottom line it's probably 100% or more Revenue even Improvement and that's just an example Merchant and product Discovery is another huge issue it's an issue that we solve right letting people find products that are for sale letting showing multiple merchants not everyone L to shop at the same Merchant so the best companies

are now shown giving people choice Google actually talk about SEO Google's guidelines SEO guidelines recommend to Publishers and give Publishers credit if they show multiple Merchants who sell a product because Google's view is that you should get as a consumer Choice which is great so there's a lot of reasons why you want to show multiple Merchants to your users yeah it sounds like actually the discovery and the knowledge base is actually a we a major problem that most people haven't been able to articulate like we've

experienced this on our side where I have customers that use our app and they're like what other brands could I promote or recommend I know how to to reverse engineer that but that that that answer changes with time I can't just give you the same answer in two months from now yeah imagine even on the price of something shopping extensions do a good job of this if you're about to buy imagine you're about to buy something from Target and we could show it's $10 cheaper at

Walmart or vice versa right there's real value there right that that and a lot of companies are not focusing on this but it's moving in that direction because they should be and it's not hard to do anymore and would you say that I feel like I'm asking an obvious question from your point of view but that with the whole ecosystem of Publishers and networks that people are going to want more done for you Services no one's going to re reinvent your wheel so they're going to

use like these tools to go how do I make life easier for a publisher like a quick example if you're an influencer do you really want to be dealing with multiple networks or multiple programs or do you want something yeah something yeah something yeah Consolidated yeah it it goes to your the value of your business too making things easier for for Publishers is huge tell me if I'm right when I think about your business I imagine there's may I could be wrong tell me you'll tell

me there's they two broad subsets of customers who might use you one is customers who who you just want to make their life easier and they take the they use you for reporting analytics understand picture of their business Etc and that's very valuable and that's great uh the second set of customers is doing all that but then they're also using the data they get from you to drive their business right to to drive Revenue maybe they're using it to improve their media buying for example right

they see what's working in real time they could they could improve their media buying that's when you start adding tremendous value and that's what we see customers or Publishers are looking for right tools like yours and ours that can help them Drive their businesses yeah and just to add to that what I've learned I think this is the the luxury of us being in the space we we are in because people say you're not competing with me and you're a service provider so they start opening

up and sharing what works or doesn't work or their strategies and I just think it's infinite rabbit holes to go how deep can you go on data like I I've got one affiliate customer over here in the corner that basically would say actually our sales are relevant in the UK based on the weather you have worse weather and it's like the sales go up and that sounds obvious but you just think does that make a difference of when you want to actually activate your paid marketing

campaigns and for some of these people the answer is completely yes yeah absolutely we see that on the publishing side and also on the merchant side right because merch might say oh you're recommending our competitors but we're actually driving traffic to them so you see both ways it's the same thing with what you talking about on the publisher side right we work with a lot of influen and platforms right I want them mod to succeed and it's great I don't it's not like I favor one

over the other do you think we're in the era now of big data in affiliate marketing are we here or do we need a couple more years what do you think I I think it's a bit of both I think we're early days I know when trying to analyze things from like a certain publisher side like with our customers going we don't see the data of our users but imagine if we could and get them to submit the data in a centralized database and give that

as feedback what I do know about some affiliate managers is they're always asking their Publishers going how am I how's my program doing in relation to our competitors and I think this data has been around in other Industries outside of affiliate marketing But the irony is that affiliate marketing we think is should be super Advanced but I know the I gaming space it's early days I think most people they they don't have the answers that's what I think I think it's coming and in ways it's

already here but it's definitely early right the amount of data that we're harnessing that we're now sharing with Publishers and Merchants and and you're doing the same is huge but it it takes time A lot of of of merchants and Publishers I just have been doing things certain ways for years right years and years I'm still surprised for example when it's a little bit off topic but when I see very big Publishers very big creators some of the most pular creators in the world apply to

Merchants and they get get rejected or they get Auto rejected right there's improvements that need to happen throughout the ecosystem and data Big Data certainly one of them and but it's coming you can see it and and I already see a lot of companies using it maybe I'll ask the generic AI question but I think everyone's been trying to rush into AI but would you say from your point of view that you as much as you probably have maybe an AI strategy that because you're maybe

a heavier data company that you could actually just focus on being that and people if they want to be Ai and process data that can actually come to you what's your take on it yeah so AI is great for us because like I said we're publisher gnostics so we'll be powering lot of these companies but it's a big threat it's a huge threat to a traditional content right if again if you're just look at the Google results and the AI answers will get on on the

C page right you don't need to necessarily go to content site anymore sites have to figure out how they rest the traffic if not they're in big trouble for sure but like I said the traffic is not disappearing it's just going to other places so for us we're in a good position but if you're a Content side yeah you got to figure out how to diversify your traffic yeah I my quick answer to that is either you need to be a product or you need to

be a data company that has unique data sets or you need to be media where you're just capturing attention and whether it's entertainment or infotainment I think it's those three pillars are what affiliate marketing already is right now yeah so I agree with that but I'm not negative on content sites like I said there are hundreds of millions of content sites that that all make a living right people make a living on these sites right and they're fine right there's challenges of course but it's not

like they're going away they have to figure out certain things like how do the rest for the traffic but it it it's it's amazing to me and I'm always reminded I know it's obvious but it's amazing how big the world is every time when I think I I see it all I'll see another T of companies or several Publishers that are massive and I'm like how have I not heard of them they're huge right it's should it's a very big world and content sites are have

challenges like we said but they're doing fine like we're still in business I I was talking to a big publisher a big content site that's forecasting 10% year-over-year declines in Revenue in probity it's just what they're expecting to happen but they're also diversifying in other ways to grow their businesses I think that's what you'll see the smart comp sites doing and what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence affiliate Commerce is definitely having its moment right after we

said a long time of of existing but not necessarily be considered not necessarily getting the best valuations in the marketplace you're seeing companies in the space now receive huge valuations huge multiples and there's a good reason for it because it's a great way to diversify your Revenue base just like we're talking about if you're forec in a 10% decline in ad Revenue say on your site but you could more than make it up by adding affiliate right why would you do it and every comp site

is doing this they're all adding affiliate because it's it's a no-brainer made before they didn't have to and now everyone's focusing on it and the rise of creators has helped a lot too right because that's the creative model definitely made it go go more mainstream and then to your question about business intelligence yeah as this has gone more mainstream and as more and more people are doing this now everyone wants to optim it and you're sitting in the perfect spot CH and I think we are

as well yeah it's it's B Tob boring to boring but some reason Bing uh became uh cool again it it it definitely feels like that in in at this in the affiliate comp for sure yeah David thank you so much for doing this I want to pass it back how can people get a hold of you david. affiliate.com all right and I'll include uh LinkedIn for good measure and it goes with that saying we'll have affiliate.com in the the show notes thanks a lot for doing

this joh good seeing you go take care thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a raing and review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners