Blockchain & KYC in affiliate marketing with Jean-Michel Azzopardi

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Blockchain & KYC in affiliate marketing with Jean-Michel Azzopardi
Host: John Wright
Guest: Jean-Michel Azzopardi
Published: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 21:32:00 +0000
Duration: 43:15

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: The only way to properly prevent deepfakes across multiple platforms in multiple jurisdictions with multiple parties owned by many different people in a way that's trustworthy and no party can screw over one another is a blockchain. There's no other solution that's perfect for that. And I say that knowing that blockchains are useless for 90% of use cases, which is why 90% of projects fail because they integrate a blockchain for the sake of integrating a blockchain. The same way they're now integrating AI for this recommend creating AI.

[00:00:36] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: I'm John Wright, and you're listening to Affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by StatStrome. Welcome to the affiliate bi podcast. Today, I'm speaking with Jean-Michel Azopardi. He's an advisor and a lot of different companies in FinTech, blockchain and cybersecurity. And he's also speaking on a lot of conferences on those very topics. So Jean-Michel, I'm going to pass it back to you and tell us more of what you do.

[00:01:05] John Wright: Thank you so much for allowing me, John. What do I do? That's always a difficult question to answer. I guess, thanks for the audiences, but the sort of short summary of it is I'm the advisor to a few different startups and the blockchain space, like you just said, and I help them with things from

[00:01:31] John Wright: growth marketing to technical compliance, to cybersecurity preparation, to a range of different things. I'm lucky to say I'm privileged enough to be able to work only with companies that truly align with what it is I want to do as an individual. That means finding customers is always difficult, but it means wants you to have the fittest. Right. And what is your story? How did you get into Bitcoin and blockchain and where did this all begin? Well, okay. So it began when

[00:02:08] John Wright: I had put her there. I took a 2011 when I was following the junior science story back then.

[00:02:19] John Wright: So junior science had leaked a deal with that together with Bradley Manning back then. Now, Chelsea Manning, who was an employee of the NSA. I want to say I want to put NSA or military.

[00:02:40] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: She leaked a video called Catherine murder, which was published on lively that no longer exists now. And Catherine murder was essentially a video of an Apache export gunship mowing down a couple of the

[00:02:57] John Wright: Reuters reporters who were mistakenly taken for soldiers. And following that,

[00:03:06] John Wright: um, this, this, this guy, it's just bags over in his car. Um, tries to hurt these people who've been gunned down by this, by this helicopter and, uh, and they light up the car. Like it's a like, like it's a video game and there's kids in the back and obviously everyone gets decimated. And,

[00:03:27] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: uh, I, I, you know, I thought of the story and it, it, it really hit home to me that, you know, the world doesn't work the way you think it does. You know,

[00:03:39] John Wright: Western media portrays a very different, um, image to what, what actually happens in reality, right? Because as soon as this video went live, uh, these are just, um, pulled, pulled all ties from WikiLeaks. So WikiLeaks was the, was the news organization back then, which, um, together with Julian Sanchez and Glenn Greenwald, fire member, correct? It's from where he's at the hopping also the Washington, like in the, I always mix them up. Um, they published it via WikiLeaks and

[00:04:14] John Wright: these are just says, Hey, listen, you can't take any more donations. Uh, we're, we're, um, uh,

[00:04:20] John Wright: cutting you off completely. I visa and the WikiLeaks announced we're taking payment in this thing called Bitcoin. What the hell is Bitcoin? Uh, rabbit hole ever since to say that.

[00:04:35] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: I wasn't quite expecting a bad story in that answer, but I mean, it's, uh, you know, it's an interesting reality. I mean, that's probably one of the first major instances of people hearing about Bitcoin. Um, I'm sure maybe there's a lot of people that went down that rabbit hole for that reason. And I kind of wish, uh, I paid more attention to it back then. I think it was years later that I started writing articles about casinos accepting Bitcoin. And even then I did pay attention to it and I just said, eh, it's, uh, just another payment method. I didn't think much of it. I mean, back then it was, I, I didn't think much of it either, but

[00:05:12] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: funnily enough, I mean, in hindsight, like that was the first actual use case for Bitcoin, you know, when it took the world like eight years to realize that, Hey, listen, we can use this thing for international payments, but we had the information back day. It was there. It was clear in front of us. Um, WikiLeaks weren't doing anything wrong or doing anything illegal per se. It was, uh, it was, uh, you know, just, just the, the influence of foreign government that, that, that, that, um, sparked the, the, the change. But to that point,

[00:05:45] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: um, and to sort of, um, rather share my, my, my equal ignorance, I guess, as it were, um, uh, as soon as I found out about this Bitcoin thing, I mean, I'm like, I was a,

[00:05:58] John Wright: was an attack key, right? To some extent or degree. Um, let's say that I could, the simple way to explain it is, uh, whenever something goes wrong in the house, um, in the families, in the families tech world, like I'm the guy at the net where since I was 10,

[00:06:14] John Wright: not much has changed now. Um, uh, so, so, you know, back then I had just taken on a, um, a loan for a PC with Epic tower had like an ND hex core. It's like people with two gigahertz with six cores with like four, with like four gigs of RAM. I had another next of X 6950, like beast, the beast, the PC. And, and I went to buy that. I said, that I said, um,

[00:06:41] John Wright: I want to line this magic intimate money. And he's like, uh, okay, what's it going to cost? So I'm like, okay, it's my PSU is like a thousand watts. So, you know, probably like about as much as an AC running, uh, and the 24 seven and back then the, the, the bins were, were ridiculous. They expensive. There were three times what they are now. So he's like, uh, and then there's, there's no way that's going to have to go funky side basically. And I unfortunately, listen, um, but same thing I always say is, is, uh, even if I hadn't, I would have probably spent bad on some kind of Honda civic and my heritage, right. These anyway, that's face.

[00:07:18] John Wright: You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I mean, what would you rather have a 10,000 Bitcoin or two pizzas? Exactly. Like back then it was, uh, it was, uh, you know, like it was just an idea. It was people don't understand just 15 years ago, even like saying the word epic in public was, it was really weird. It was like, that's something that you only do, you know, over team speak or ventrilo or, or, or, you know, you don't do it in public. Cause if you do, people are going to look at you weird. Now there's, you know, one of the biggest companies in the gaming and it's just

[00:07:55] John Wright: all that, you know, and, and everyone's kids play board. So the, the world is like drastically shifted. And the same thing has happened with, with Bitcoin. This used to be something that either you do, you meet someone really randomly. You have no idea how, but you realize that there's a set of unspoken ideas and roads that align you at least pre 2017.

[00:08:22] John Wright: That's what things were. I think post 2017 things are very different.

[00:08:26] John Wright: So obviously, I mean, we know what it's done today. I mean, in that last 15 years, but when did it click for you that you said, Hey, this thing could actually get really big and it's actually going to do more than just be another payment method. It's actually going to change the world. How long did it take for you to start to have this realization that I need to spend more time on this? First time my mother came to me and said, Hey, John, what's Bitcoin? I know you've been looking at it for some time, but my friends are talking about it now. What is it? Where's, what does it do? How does it work? What does, what does it matter? That for me was the, was the aha moment. You know, when, when

[00:09:02] John Wright: gen pop, as it were, like the tight thing, but the world, you know, when, when gen pop start asking questions, it means it means it's important. It means it's extremely immature, extremely, because in reality, gen pop should have no idea about how the tech works. Like no one knows how large language models, machine learning, deep learning, neural nets. No one knows how that shit works. They just use Google and it works. And that's because it's mature. But in the beginning, in the beginning was, how do I create an email address?

[00:09:39] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: That's what it was, you know, and that for me was the same kind of moment, just,

[00:09:44] John Wright: yeah, few years, many years apart. Yeah. I remember being at a conference and listening to Anthony Diorio, and he was basically stating that, you know, what the internet was back 20, 30 years ago was the exchange for information. And what Bitcoin and all this blockchain technology was allowing for the exchange of value. And it's something we've never really experienced before. And I think you're right. It's the best analogy is when you go back to the days of like getting started with your first email. I mean, I think there's some listeners here that would just be, what do you mean? It's always been there. But it's the same thing.

[00:10:22] John Wright: No, that's a, that's a, that's a fantastically important point. So during my, my, my last startup, I raised, I raised a little bit of money for, for, for blockchain project and a couple of million euros. And we set out to build the internet of value. Right. So, and in doing so, we created some really cool tech. Like we created a blockchain diagnostic platform. And that's the, the century says like, it doesn't matter what chain you use, just stick to us and we'll fix

[00:10:57] John Wright: the chain part down for you in a way where you own own custody. But more importantly,

[00:11:05] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: we dove into like what really differentiates web two and three. Right. So web two had its sort of, is at its peak at the moment. You can like, let's go back actually, sorry. Web one, you could Google search, you could find enlisting of a business that you've never met without speaking to anyone and know that they exist. Right. With a web two, you can order food from somebody you've

[00:11:42] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: never met, pay with money you've never touched and have it delivered by somebody you've never spoken to. Right. That's the, that's the sort of people, the sort of, the sort of people. And now the reason why, or the reason the shift towards web three is occurring because in the web two model, the, the stream of finance and the stream of data are separate. These are lives separately to Google login. There are two different entities. So, but value encompasses both of those.

[00:12:19] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: So my idea, my philosophy is that the internet value is actually just the encompassing and the,

[00:12:30] John Wright: and they can finance in one data stream. That's interesting. I've never really thought about it that way, where I just kind of treated them as separate. And I think a lot of people see it as separate. They don't see web three as being really the, the sum of web one and web two. And, you know, as if there's like a wall there. I mean, the, the, I think it's where we're at a sort of point in time where, where that the definition of web three has hasn't yet been made in the same way, the definition of the meta bread has hasn't yet all will be at that for many different reasons.

[00:13:12] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: But I think we, we, we sort of all have this unique, we're at a unique point in history where we all have this opportunity to shape what the next version of the internet is going to look like and be like. And it's through, it's through conversations like these that we, that we get these things out. Right. I agree. As an affiliate marketer, you'll want to celebrate your first sale, learn about a drop in clicks and revenue, discover new brands, be notified when programs close, seeing increase in earnings per click, identify underperforming campaigns.

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[00:14:14] John Wright: Next question I have, I'm actually going to modify it based on what we're chatting about right now. The original question was just that kind of ask about these trends where you know, Bitcoin goes through a big peak and all crypto seems to follow it. And then every four years there's a bit of a crash cycle. And I'm kind of wondering, it's, there's also in the background, we've seen a massive spike in AI and we've seen AI companies kind of coexist with blockchain. I'm just wondering what do you see in the future as, you know, we're kind of like maybe on the downside of another crypto winter, but AI is taken up. Do you think these

[00:14:49] John Wright: two are going to always coexist and pick each other up and be part of this acceleration that's just beyond AI? I love this question. So I think that AI is what will, is what will fuel the growth of blockchain. So if we agree that Web3 has multiple pairs, right? As far as technology

[00:15:25] John Wright: goes, there's blockchain, there is AI, there's VR, AR, XR, et cetera. Those are all different examples of, of, of winners of Web3. And we know that each of them are in their relative instance

[00:15:43] John Wright: and that they are evolving at a more rapid base than, than their counterparts 15 years ago. And that was already bloody rapid. Like think about how much time it took to get from a not get through to one or two to the first I thought it wasn't that long, you know? So if we bear all that in mind, and we also understand that technology is inherently agnostic. It's not good or bad. It can be you. It's, it's, it's the actor wielding the gun that determines whether the gun is used

[00:16:22] John Wright: for evil or good. Then we will also, then we can say that deep fakes are always going to become

[00:16:32] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: more and more of a problem. They are already a very big problem in the telco industry with robocalls, for example. And this is a pertinent issue that people are talking about now. It's not, it's not, you know, five years in the future. And we had Cambridge Analytica not too long ago. Okay. You know, while that wasn't technically deep fakes, the next iteration of that is separately using the effects of swing elections. And we're starting to see

[00:17:03] John Wright: countries wake up to it. In fact, there was one country this, I believe that announced earlier on this morning that they're regulating, they're regulating deep fakes and they're going to,

[00:17:18] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: calling them digital. And I want to say the still examples is the legal, is the legal term that they use, but I'll see if I can find that in the meantime. But why is this important? How does this affect blockchain? So, if we can, if we can agree that blockchain and crypto are two completely different things, because they absolutely are. And if you, if you, if you can't, then this, this situation will make no sense to you. But blockchain is essentially just a series

[00:17:55] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: of hashes, a series of hashes layered on top of each other. So blockchain can, in really simple terms, somebody who's never, who's never heard of a blockchain, a blockchain is just a networked database. That's all it is. It's the simplest explanation for blockchain. And when you update one of the instances, every instance also gets updated. Assuming this, you know, it's a, it's a correct request. Simplest expectation for blockchain. You can have a fight. Now on a, on a, on a, um, blockchain can enable value in, in three ways and only three ways.

[00:18:32] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: All those, every value metric blockchain can enable falls under these three umbrellas. Digital identity, daytime integrity, and delivery versus payments. Those are the, everything that it does, the immutability, the transparency, all falls under those, those three things. Crypto is just one use case, but let's say, um, the, the industry took an interesting turn once, once the ICO days sort of came about and the T5 agents came in and the NFT

[00:19:11] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: retards came and did their thing. And that's not the point. That's the people that think that, that, that, um, the value is in, is in crypto can't see the trees because the, can't see the forest because the trees are in the way. The value is within the blockchain. So

[00:19:34] John Wright: the only way to properly prevent deep fakes across multiple platforms in multiple jurisdictions.

[00:19:47] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: Um, with multiple parties owned by many different people in a way that's

[00:19:55] John Wright: trustworthy and no party can screw over one another is a blockchain. There's no other solution.

[00:20:02] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: And, and I say that knowing that blockchains are useless for 90% of use cases, completely useless, which is why 90% of projects fail because they integrate a blockchain for the sake of integrating a blockchain the same way they're now integrating AI for the sake of integrating AI, because there's a bunch of fucking charlatans in this industry or after the money ended. But now when, when I'm not saying don't follow the money, I'm saying the value is, is, is, um, not where people see it. There's one thing I've learned that's very few things in this

[00:20:38] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: industry are as they seem. So would you say that, uh, uh, you know, this whole topic of deep fakes, I find interesting because you're right. Uh, this can change elections. This could basically

[00:20:51] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: make a company succeed at the expense of someone else. This could bankrupt people and companies. Uh, do you see a blockchain being able to help us, um, solve some of these problems of knowing that deep fakes exist and maybe even having apps that someone doesn't have to understand what's behind the tech just to know that, Hey, I can trust that this message is real.

[00:21:13] John Wright: Of course. So you, you, you touched on a really, really important point, right? Which sort of echoes back to what I said earlier, which is the only way that the tech is going to work is if people don't know the tech is there. Right. So they don't have to understand how it works. It just has to work. Um, so there are ways to technically do this. So the problem isn't the tech problem is people. It's always the people. Okay. People are saying, you know, like, uh, you know, 70,000 TPS is nothing on salon. I like, fuck off. When have you ever seen that?

[00:21:50] John Wright: When have you ever seen this that much need for, for, for orange chain direct activities? This is just marketers pushing down, you know, uh, uh, why I think both because they need something to write about, right? And they need something to put behind the sponsor, the sponsored flows. So, um, if you think about things, if you think about things in reality, if you're batching and you're, you're, you're batching multiple times over and over again, within, within one transaction, you can batch another, I don't know, 700 on most chains quite easily. And I've tested

[00:22:26] John Wright: that personally on two, two different chains. Um, so, and that, so, so I think the guy that is a part of the tech isn't the problem that people are. So, um, what we are talking about is essentially a security measure. We agree. Absolutely. It's, it's, it's security and you've kind of, uh, asked a future question I had, which is all about KYC where it's a big problem in B2C. I believe it's a massive problem in B2B, but it's not really being talked about or addressed. And I kind of think that there are companies that will try to solve this with non-custodial style

[00:23:05] John Wright: wallets, but I kind of wonder, you know, what, what are the blockchain implications that are going to solve the same thing? And I think maybe this whole concept of not just only deep fate, but, uh, the fact of like, you know, someone's ability to, I don't know, fraudulently edit documents. I think we're going to need something here that's going to connect, you know, real data sources to say that these are authentic documents. This is an authentic video. And yeah, that people just have to get behind it. I'm happy you, you, I mean, you said that I, I personally couldn't agree more. There's a few

[00:23:40] John Wright: problems with it, um, or, or a few rows blocks in the way, um, which are, which mostly going down to the point I was going to make, which is that security, people don't buy security. People buy complaints. They are two fundamentally different things to put it to you in simple terms. If you're, I don't know, your son is going to play a game with bull, for example. Um, and he needs to wear brushing guards because he needs to play. Then you go to the store, you spend 10 euros and you buy a

[00:24:16] John Wright: kid a pair of shin guards. But if you worry that your kid might actually hurt, you're going to go and spend a hundred bucks by the best shinga, it's not the map. It's a very different perspective. Right? So, so this is, and it's the same thing with security. So people don't invest in security. They invest in compliance with the exception of military, military and space are the only two exceptions to that. Um, so one of the companies I advise, um, is actually, uh, some sovereign identity provider that uses, um, that does exactly what we're, what we're talking

[00:24:52] John Wright: about actually in the, in the best possible in a way. So what they do is they, um, they allow you to create a digital world on your phone. They grab your, you grab your, um, a passport, snap the passport to your phone and that sucks in all the cryptographic inside the information from the chip. That's a government signed, digitally signed ship, which cannot be thrown in it, right? Because it's, it's cryptographically secure and it, and it's combined that with a little liveness check and,

[00:25:26] John Wright: and, um, lets you own your own data and, and, um, the store, et cetera. But, uh, and it does it in a

[00:25:35] John Wright: technically a non-custodial way. So you're holding your own keys, um, which is kind of the dream. So something which we're exploring is, is, um, um, number one is we, we've partnered with,

[00:25:54] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: with the company called trust elevate to extend the service of the state for children. So how do we secure children's personal data online? Like how do I, how do I make sure my kid isn't in some, like you'd let you, you'd let your kid, you wouldn't let your kid go to a play gun with a 45 year old. So why would you let them in a, in a, in a lobby with them? You know, it's, it's, it's kind of weird. So, so then the beauty of this is that it's all sort of done in a zero knowledge way. But once we started exploring payments, um, then the fact that it's non-custodial

[00:26:33] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: becomes a problem because many, many companies legally cannot work with a non-custodial provider. If you're in a regulated market and you're working with, with crypto, um, as far as I know,

[00:26:48] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: very few to no regulated markets allow non-custodial service providers. And that is a huge problem

[00:26:58] John Wright: because we're doing it wrong. Like centralized exchanges technically shouldn't exist. They are,

[00:27:07] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: they are like a stepping stone to what is, to what needs to be. And what needs to be is an atomic exchange where everyone holds their own funds within a separate wallet that they also hold half a key through that since someone else's infrastructure. It's like, think about it this way, as a centralized exchange grabs all your funds and stores it in one big vault. And then Sandbag when Freight comes and grabs some of it and spends it on hookers and blow in Vegas over the week,

[00:27:42] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: right? That centralized exchange. Now regulated exchanges do the same thing. The only difference is they actually do 5% in one big vault and 95% in other worlds around the world. That's the regulatory standard. The way it needs to be is I keep my funds in this, in this, in this, in this, uh, my centralized wallet, but it's in a, it's in a safe deposit box with two keys and I hold one key and the bank holds the other key or the exchange holds the other key. So they can't open it without me. I can't open it. That's how it's going to be. I guarantee you it's a matter of time. That makes sense. And it probably didn't happen over a weekend with, uh,

[00:28:22] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: with the SPF, but maybe it was a couple of years. A couple of years.

[00:28:28] John Wright: Well, I'm going to, I'm going to jump over to the affiliate marketing side. And just as a small segue, I still find thousands of websites linking to FTX with an affiliate tracking link. These are websites that are up to date, legit, and they're still doing it. I'm kind of shocked at how this is a common problem in affiliate marketing. Um, so segueing to problems in affiliate marketing, um, obviously you've got a ton of experience in blockchain and I've always kind of kept my foot in the door just to understand it. And I've always wondered if blockchain and like web three has the power to completely dominate or fully take over the affiliate marketing space in terms

[00:29:07] John Wright: of the tracking tech. Uh, the way tracking works today is anyone can set up an affiliate program. Uh, the operator of the affiliate program can edit, delete data as they wish. Uh, you're kind of at their mercy like you are today with a bank where they delete your account. You just don't exist. Um, but I just find that these tracking tech, like it's kind of like cat and mouse, like Google says they want to kill cookies, but it's not happened yet. And I'm just wondering, like, are we going to approach something where everything I see in crypto, you've got real time data. Uh, there's a lot of trust and I think maybe people want that. And I think the people that already work in the affiliate marketing in crypto, they're kind of used to having it their

[00:29:46] John Wright: way when they go over to our side. Uh, they're just kind of shocked at how horrendous things are. So I kind of want to get your take on that. So that's, uh, that's an area which I've spent a lot of time thinking about really, um, just because I'm, I'm based out of Malta and this is

[00:30:03] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: one of the sort of hotspots for the gambling industry. And as a result, obviously the affiliate industry is, you know, just, just sitting in power. And so, um, I think

[00:30:19] John Wright: there is so much opportunity. It's not even funny. So here are the, the, the problems like you, like you mentioned, right? You're, you're the affiliate is constantly at, at risk. Um, because all of the data is owned by, by the merchant and they have full control over it. And what happens is, um, every, every period, every week, every month, whatever the, the, the merchant would say, um, okay, this is the amount of revenue, which you've generated for

[00:30:58] John Wright: my platform based on this very complicated, um, deal. Sometimes it's, it's a fee upfront. Sometimes it's a fee upfront and ref share, uh, and, and the sort of parameters of these kinds of deals are, are quite, quite a boss. So it creates very, very complicated account. So there can be mistakes that happen, um, into ways. It's either a question of, you know, there's admin mistake from, from the finance department. It's just a genuine, a genuine mistake. Um, or it's, it's the, the merchant is legitimately trying to screw the affiliate. On the other hand, and there's, there can also be affiliate abuse because they can sort of

[00:31:36] John Wright: get the customers, put them through fake customer journeys, understand where the, where the,

[00:31:42] John Wright: sort of power points are, where the customer has one of their, all of their worth, and then run under that. So there's, let's say it, how it is, you know, there's, there's sort of foul play on both sides, but ultimately this is more of a problem for the affiliate. Then there it is for the merchant because the merchant has more power. Right. So, so that means the change. Um, let's talk about what the, what the change can do. Um, like I said, you, you, you, in,

[00:32:16] John Wright: in, in this industry, you reconcile every week or every month, right? So, and sometimes that's by design that is, um, because it, it allows the merchants to sort of loan off of the, take a loan off of the affiliates, which is kind of the abuse in its own way. Um, but blockchain,

[00:32:39] John Wright: before I mentioned the three winners of blockchain, right? Like how blockchain creates value.

[00:32:44] John Wright: No, no, the only, the, the ways it creates this value or the way that these three winners are leveraged are in, are also in two ways, two separate ways. Number one is the reduction of fraud. And number two is the automation of the best tasks. Only, only those two, those, those are the real, over real use, real use case, real cases of the world, every real blockchain use case,

[00:33:21] John Wright: you can point back to those two. So what do we know? We know there's a ridiculous amount of reconciliation that happens between the merchant and the affiliates all the time. But we also know that the merchant, um, is benefiting from the situation and they are in a position where they hold the keys to the castle. Now you need to understand that the nature of man is great. It's great. Literally great. So, um, people don't give away power.

[00:33:53] John Wright: They never, never willingly. That is what's different with, with web and that's, that's what would make successful with three companies. Successful ones will give away power willingly. That's, that's what will make them grow. One example I can think of is p.io. Um, but that's, that's, that's a story of version type. Um, so I think there's a world of opportunity in the affiliates face, but like I said, the issue is people. So what needs to happen is there needs to be

[00:34:27] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: a small consortium of affiliates that together make up the buying negotiating power of one big affiliate and they make one deal. And when the first merchant comes on board in snowball from there, that's what that's interesting. I'm going to have to go back and listen to that a couple more times because there's just a lot there. I mean, obviously in the affiliate space, it's getting weird where maybe this is another thing to touch upon where, um, I think when you said that, you know, people

[00:35:04] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: need to kind of, you know, give up some of that power in order to obtain power or get more market share. Um, I think we're seeing it in extreme amount of consolidation in the iGaming affiliate space where the bigger just getting bigger. I'm just wondering if, uh, if anything's going to change, if that's actually going to become, you know, rather than having, you know, 50 major affiliate groups, it's actually going to be like 10 and they're going to hold all the power. They're going to use that power over affiliate programs and affiliate programs. They're going to have to create their own affiliate sites just to be able to keep their own power.

[00:35:38] John Wright: So that's the, that's the way it will always be. That's the, that's the way the

[00:35:43] John Wright: economy and capitalism works. Unfortunately, the downside of capitalism, right? And is that,

[00:35:50] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: that's, um, eventually it's consolidation, consolidation, consolidation. That's what happens. Um, now I, I personally, I believe we're in, in, in, um, splitting up large companies because it's, it's, it better is the, the, the industry and it better is the world, right? Because I believe that public companies should sell the public, not, not the other way around. Um, but, and, and we have history and prove that, that, that, that, that this works, you know,

[00:36:26] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: like there's a, it's a fantastic series, uh, watched a long time ago called, uh, the medical plus America, fantastic series, like coastal stories of the, of the Carnegie's and the Vanderbilt's and the rocket fighters, um, and, and, um, a chase, et cetera. And, and how these, these massive conglomerates became sort of like buttons in their, in their industry. And then what happened is they got too big and, uh, and, uh, uh, and the Congress came out and said, okay, now we're going to set you up. But what happened as a result, you know, we got, um, General Lecture,

[00:37:04] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: Ken Shevron and one of these, all these companies, okay, which didn't do great for the world now, but we're at the end of that side can write where it's just at a point where it just needs to be repeated. That's my feeling. Like, because I, because I feel like once you stood them up, you get some big things happening in the world for a, for a, for a period of time. And then they need to do it. Then the same thing happens again and you rinse your feet. Yeah. You get innovation and there's actually a lot of chatter that, uh, this could be happening to Google where there's a lot of people in the SEO space that believe that there's going to be more of this, uh, fruit, so to speak, of having this situation like, you know, Google being,

[00:37:44] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: maybe not split up, but maybe having it such that they're not the dominant market share. And they think there'll be more innovation if this does happen. It needs to be split up. It should have been split up five years ago. Same thing with metal. Same thing with Amazon. It should have Amazon, not five years ago. Amazon is kind of right now because that was because they, they, they, I think it took Amazon like nine or 10 years to deliver all the profits for the first time. So it took them a long time, but those guys got their best with back and everyone's happy. You know what I mean? It's like, it's, it's, it's, you know, they, the, I think,

[00:38:18] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: I think a lot of what's been lost in the business world is, is, is, is service to the public. Right. I mean, if you're, even if you're, if you're a whatever business you are, you're in service to someone that person's your, your customer, you know, and services, I think is, I think a word that, that's, um, that people sort of take, take lightly or, or look at wrongly. And that's why what I think would, would, would make word for your company successful, the difference, the difference in understanding the importance of service. All right. Another question is let's assume you were going to build this affiliate tracking platform. Uh, what blockchain would you

[00:38:57] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: build it on and how would web three integrate with this? Um, I would make the platform blockchain agnostic. Um, so my rationale and reasoning is that there's no one blockchain to rule them all. Blockchains are like vehicles and you need different blockchains for different kinds of journeys, right? Like a slow would be the super, but if you, if you stick it on, on, on, uh, you know, in the sea, you're going to have a bad time, you know, so, um, uh, affiliate marketing on chain is that is a particular use case, right? Whether you need, you need high PPS, you need,

[00:39:35] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: uh, low, low transaction costs and you need, uh, relatively high availability, but not too high and you don't need too much security. You don't need the security levels that you don't need military level, great security. Right. So, so are you familiar with the scale of business? No.

[00:39:55] John Wright: Okay. Are you familiar with the iron triangle? Nope. I got some homework to do. Okay. So the,

[00:40:01] John Wright: the line triangle is really recent, but right whenever you're buying any kind of product or service, uh, you can, you can only ever have two factors in your, in your, in the favor speed, price and quality, right? Right. If something is cheap, it's going to be, you're going to get it quick and you're going to, and it's going to be, it can be good quality. But if something is, uh, sorry, let's go back to that again. If you're, if you're buying something and the price is, is low,

[00:40:36] John Wright: then then the quality needs can be high, but you, and you won't see it quickly. Right. So, so only over two, two of those in your favor with that same sort of rationale, same, same triangle, scalability, decentralization and security choose to, right. And so all, all blockchains work like Bitcoin is super, super secure, but it's slow and expensive. Right. Um, um, so in, in, in this case, you don't need the kind of security that Bitcoin provides. You need this sort of transaction costs

[00:41:13] John Wright: that Solana provides and the speed that's not a provide, but you also need something in case the seller goes down because let's face it. Yeah. So I was brought down before with a DDoS attack, where's a two Bitcoin, but I'm literally two bit like someone liquidated to Bitcoin, stuck them into Solana, set the requests out, DDoS, D and buy net, right? That, that will, when you will help us, we'll change as things grow, maybe it's a bit, but ultimately you, you, you still need to kind of back up. All right. So, um, I would go, go to the sort of blockchain

[00:41:50] John Wright: agnostic approach whereby you interface with, with the platform and the platform that puppet mastering cross different, different chains, depending on availability, price, and by all of the, and last question, what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence? I think we live in a, and I, I say this from a sort of outside perspective by no means am I in expert in marketing, not even close. So I, this is my

[00:42:27] John Wright: uneducated Neanderthal, right? And, um, I would say that a lot of data at the moment is siloed,

[00:42:40] John Wright: which is what perpetuates current model of affiliation. It's what keeps the power in lines of the, of the merchants. I think once those data pools are correctly emerged in a way where ownership can be directly attributed and reports can be generated from a connected data pool.

[00:43:12] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: I think, uh, I think the, I was going to be a fucking interesting space.

[00:43:18] John Wright: Awesome. Uh, Jean-Michel, how can people get a hold of you?

[00:43:21] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: And LinkedIn the ends, always the best. Or my website,

[00:43:28] John Wright: I will put the, that website and your LinkedIn in the show notes. Jean-Michel, thank you so much for doing this. I learned a lot today. Pleasure. Likewise. It was fun. Thank you.

[00:43:38] Jean-Michel Azzopardi: Thank you for tuning in to the affiliate BI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.