iGaming BI, Affiliate Analytics & the Cost of Bad Data with Lazar Petrov, iGsuite

Live with Restream — November 21, 2025

---

[00:00:00] John Wright: I remember when we were talking with you back in Sophia, Bulgaria, so thanks again for dinner. We were talking about obviously like affiliate program platforms and the BI component, and I believe that a lot of software companies out there, they don't have the BI built in.

[00:00:15] John Wright: So you have your affiliate managers and they're given their mandate. We need as many affiliates as possible. We need as many FTDs as possible, but they're not really looking at the data. And I know you have a different take and philosophy on this where you can help the affiliate manager understand the data and make smarter decisions.

[00:00:31] John Wright: So talk me through about what's your take on what the market has today or what the market needs? Yeah.

[00:00:38] Lazar Petrov: The market is in a very difficult situation right now. Not difficult, but very strange situation where money were printing in iGA, everybody starting business, six month break, even one year profitable becoming millionaire over a couple of years.

[00:00:53] Lazar Petrov: There, there are so many cases like that, and back in the days just. People didn't care about data. You didn't need data to know that you're making money. It was easy, revenue share deal, CPA deal of 200 euro for premium, high quality traffic, entire one market. And nowadays things change.

[00:01:11] Lazar Petrov: It's the cost is extremely high. The high quality traffic is very hard to, and unlimited. Hard to find, it's it's not like before I could launch 3000 FTDs PPC, IR one market easily, but now you don't have PPC, you don't have PPC on Google we call even, it is very stupid.

[00:01:30] Lazar Petrov: Now, our industry, it's to Google ads we call PPC, even though it's for Facebook. We don't call PPC, but again, it's also PPC there, in a way. How to say it's, the situation now is so many competitors, so many brands the demand for affiliate managers, it's high. So you try to find as many affiliate managers as you possibly can, as you said.

[00:01:51] Lazar Petrov: But of course, when you put too many things, it's getting too too hard, it's the quality is dropping. You cannot find the best affiliate managers. Now you find a guy who knows people. That's it. It's normal. This is pretty, pretty normal and we don't have the tools to fight that.

[00:02:11] Lazar Petrov: People with legacy balances who made a lot of money in the past, they're okay to spend six, 700 Euro CPA on high quality traffic, even 800 even. EPCs guaranteed deals, and they're used to not check their performance, they don't care. They're still positive. But for the new companies that are launching now, it's a big pain.

[00:02:31] Lazar Petrov: And if these guys don't catch up with the data and don't understand how it works when they're gonna be profitable, what we see is they work 6, 7, 8 months. They don't reach breakeven, although they were promised to reach breakeven, but their platform or the sales guys, and eventually they close.

[00:02:48] Lazar Petrov: Data nowadays will, it's still not mandatory because people don't realize it and it's still not available broadly. 'Cause if you go to my affiliates, income access net refers, all these platforms refer on whatever they have just reporting. And this is not a BI. And if you go to the platform. Because I'm, I've seen everything.

[00:03:10] Lazar Petrov: If you go to brands like IGP whatever you like, they even don't have BI. It's a simple dashboard, simple reporting tools, no insights, no, no predictions, nothing that you can step and say, okay, I'm doing something good, or I need X money to invest so I can get my money that time. I think I talk too much.

[00:03:31] John Wright: No it's good. I've got like multiple notes to go down. Let's start with white labels. Do you think there's gonna be a more white labels that are just gonna go outta business for all these things you said where the cost of getting a click is now higher and you need to actually look at data?

[00:03:46] John Wright: Like these white labels are basically running in thinking that they're just gonna print money and then they're realizing that they're. Talking with these big affiliates that are saying we need upfront money on top of really good deals. And I think a lot of them aren't able to calculate if their deals are profitable.

[00:04:03] John Wright: Do you think white labels is gonna be a bit of a weird space in the next one or two years?

[00:04:08] Lazar Petrov: But it's, everything is gonna be weird in the next one or two years. We'll never see such dynamic in our industry. We've experienced changes, but nothing like what is currently happening in the industry.

[00:04:20] Lazar Petrov: And yes, I think many people will fail. Many startups will manage to rise and take advantage in this chaos that it's happening at the moment. Yeah, of course many people will fail. This is a must.

[00:04:34] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:04:34] Lazar Petrov: It's inevitable. Not a must, but it's inevitable to happen.

[00:04:38] John Wright: Yeah. Which is unfortunate for affiliates because when they invest into those brands when they lose their rev share accounts, that's their rev share gone.

[00:04:46] John Wright: They might have been better off actually sending traffic to a brand that would've possibly delivered a better ROI on top of not going outta business.

[00:04:54] Lazar Petrov: That thing. Also, this lack of data reflects to the affiliates. Those affiliates also printed money. Yeah. SEO was super cheap to do. You buy 100 backlinks and you are on top 10 in in the rankings of Google.

[00:05:07] Lazar Petrov: Back in the days. Now you buy thousands and you are still not even ranking, so back in the days, it was easy for everybody. Everybody was making money. Nobody cared about data analytics and stuff. And to be honest, if I, because I also have the visibility over the affiliate site as well. For them, they don't have the data to understand which partner.

[00:05:30] Lazar Petrov: In the long term, we'll make more profit to them. They see the current results, brand A is working with them for two years and have disadvantage of bigger database or VIPs. Of course, their profit with them will be higher than a brand that they started six months ago. So they cannot understand their short term value of the players.

[00:05:50] Lazar Petrov: They don't have this data. They cannot build cohorts based on the reports that the affiliate systems are giving to them, and they cannot compare in eco periods, the brands, and it makes very hard for them to understand which one gonna pay me better in two years, three years, even if both projects are successful.

[00:06:10] Lazar Petrov: They will not never know which one is actually more profitable to them.

[00:06:13] John Wright: So I've heard something where I've been asking a lot of different companies what percentage of operators are using the API from their affiliate platform to put into BI? And I'm hearing the number is something like plus or minus 10%.

[00:06:28] John Wright: What do you think that answer is?

[00:06:30] Lazar Petrov: Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. This is 10%. Is hundred percent. Yeah. Hundred percent is 10%. Yeah.

[00:06:37] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:06:37] Lazar Petrov: I most of the, I know many people and very few of them actually use anything like BI and outta those people that use some sort of BI, they never connected with an affiliate software,

[00:06:51] John Wright: Right?

[00:06:52] Lazar Petrov: Yeah. We did. We tried with I've tried in the past to connect my affiliates to BI. It was hectic, man. It was data was with today's delay. Then we had the issues that we cannot have the data on a player level. We couldn't display the course there, we couldn't do many things as a limitations.

[00:07:08] Lazar Petrov: Also, affiliate systems are not built in order to provide a decent set of data to the BIs,

[00:07:15] Lazar Petrov: This is this also an obstacle and an issue?

[00:07:18] John Wright: Okay, so if you are in an operator position or you're gonna talk to another operator, they could build a BI platform that connects to their affiliate platform, but would you say that they need more than that?

[00:07:28] John Wright: They need to basically connect to the actual platform itself and understand all the details of the player, like they need everything.

[00:07:35] Lazar Petrov: Too much information. It's always a problem. So they don't need everything. They need to cover their basics, and they need very stable analysis on which to build strategy.

[00:07:45] Lazar Petrov: 'Cause when you go to loophole from 1000 hundred players to focus on 30 players, why they don't play today, it is normal, my friend. People come, people leave, take breaks. If you have too much debt, it's too much of an it's making you slow. This what I think, if you are too smart, you're getting too slow.

[00:08:03] Lazar Petrov: The more you think, the more, yeah. So you need good data, which is pointing the right direction for you and for this purpose. Even the affiliate software, if it's built properly, in order you to extract the data in a proper way, it's enough to connect only with affiliate software because. People who don't understand, the affiliate software is one of the most crucial components of your business.

[00:08:30] Lazar Petrov: You spend the money there. Our industry is 90 plus percent dependent on affiliates. All the businesses I know, they work only with affiliates. They don't do anything else but affiliates, and they super underestimate this point. And if you don't connect in a proper way with the affiliate software, you never understand your cost.

[00:08:50] Lazar Petrov: You never understand your investment. Per player, per traffic source, per country, per brand. You need to make sure that the affiliate software provides these values on these layers. This is when you can start optimizing your brand in terms of conversions, in terms of player value, to adapt it to the traffic source, to adapt it to the market.

[00:09:11] Lazar Petrov: But if you don't have the cost, you are blind. You don't know anything.

[00:09:15] John Wright: Okay. Would you say that, one of the biggest problems that exist. In any industry, and maybe we have it in ours, that for the ones that actually do have dashboards, they're just making dashboards for the sake of it. Like they hire a BI person, they make some dashboards, it's in Tableau, Power BI, but it doesn't really give you real insights.

[00:09:32] John Wright: 'Cause I remember talking with someone from Bus Acuity and they basically said something similar where sometimes you can build dashboards, but in a perfect world you'd have analytics on your dashboard. To actually watch are people even using this? And they also said that one of the biggest problems they've seen in BI is that there's not a lot of training.

[00:09:49] John Wright: So there's a demand to build the dashboards, but then it's just here's your dashboard and then it goes quiet. Do you think this is a real problem?

[00:09:57] Lazar Petrov: If I tell you how many different reports I have requested that I looked only once in my life, trust me, I've requested all type of analysis, all types of reports to be done every day, every week, and I've checked them only once.

[00:10:13] Lazar Petrov: Only once in my life. This is a great example. Personal, how useless can be too much information. Sometimes it's great to have information, but. Sometimes it's pointless. And this is what it happens with all these dashboards. They make a dashboard because somebody requests them that this dashboard sorry, I'm in the office.

[00:10:32] Lazar Petrov: Yeah. But these dashboards are often. Often, just for presentation or for one time to see them and so on.

[00:10:39] John Wright: Okay, so I want to go a little deep here because this reflects on the work that we're trying

[00:10:44] Lazar Petrov: to do. Lemme just tell you 1, 1, 1 quote. I cannot pronounce this word in English, but I really love it and like it, it states that 90% of the statistics are wrong, and this is the only statistic I believe, this is the thinking when you run, especially marketing teams, they always come and present the data in a way they like to present it. If you give me one Excel, I can show you how good you are, how bad you are, how exceptional you are, how much you improve, how much you don't improve. If you give me an Excel, I can present you the data in all the ways to feel you the way I want you to feel, so data is a powerful tool to do anything but not to do job and work at some point.

[00:11:27] John Wright: That might be the key takeaway. I cut up for the clip here

[00:11:31] Lazar Petrov: Okay.

[00:11:31] John Wright: Yeah. Just going back to what we're trying to do as a company, and this is what I think my philosophy is, and I kind of wanna bounce the idea off of you.

[00:11:38] John Wright: We believe that there's a lot of people that they're building AI tools where the AI tools are the ability for you to ask your data questions. But I believe that a lot of people, they're not really sure what they want to ask and they I think there's a big demand that people are like. I want you to make me look like an analyst.

[00:11:54] John Wright: So I want you to show me the right reports I should be looking at. So what we're planning to do for our strategy, and we chatted about this before the call, is I've got AI. I'm gonna use AI as a gateway, where people are like, yes, I do wanna ask questions of my data, and you can do that. But I'm actually gonna funnel them over to the other set of reports, which is two, two sets of reports.

[00:12:13] John Wright: One is the reports of things that I think they need to look at, and then I'm also gonna include data insights that explain and highlight the value behind those reports to say. If this report shows this, and you're looking at this in particular, if you can't spot the patterns what do you think about this?

[00:12:29] Lazar Petrov: Okay. It's not nice, but I'll tell you a true story. Maybe people will also connect the brands, but as an affiliate software, there is one particular very big brand that I think it was the first to introduce AI. Okay. Where they were showcasing if you ask question, it give you the things that you said.

[00:12:49] Lazar Petrov: So I did a demo with them because. Of course curiosity and it was the first time I see such thing and I was, okay, I'll give you one Excel that I do every day. Not every day, but I do the most often. I want to show me how you're gonna produce. They couldn't produce this Excel. Understand. So there are few things that, because I started playing and discovering things, first of all, there is a very specific terminology that.

[00:13:16] Lazar Petrov: That nobody knows. You need to be someone like analytical guy, Excel guy to know the terminology, how the chart exact names is of the chart that you want to show, how you want to group split. There are a lot of terminology that the normal person don't understand. From there, the visualization of report through AI is getting a bit more rusty, let's say.

[00:13:37] Lazar Petrov: Then if you want to make a really decent analytical source with insight and things, your prompt is three, 3000 words document. Imagine how much time I'm losing to build a prompt for one analysis. It's faster for me and for you, which I think you come to the same conclusion. Ready reports for the basics.

[00:13:58] Lazar Petrov: Your most important thing should be ready. Accessible with one click in real time. You don't need to write a prompt. Yes, AI looks cool, sounds cool. It's selling. It's amazing. But is it working? Yes, it's worked, but is it working better? Not yet. Not there.

[00:14:16] John Wright: I feel very happy to hear this because it's not just what we're planning to do, but we believe to be true.

[00:14:22] John Wright: I spend a bit of time studying data visualization. I took a really awesome course on this a couple years ago, and the key takeaway of the course was like, charts alone are everything. Everything you just said is summarized in this course. Data can be presented in a way where it's you're good, you're bad.

[00:14:38] John Wright: You can control the story, but the story is controllable by how you present the data and what you're going to explain as the mini story. The little insight lines. So I actually believe the same thing. It's we're planning to build these auto custom reports that are done. Programmatically. So it's like, why use AI when AI can hallucinate and you can also ask the wrong prompt.

[00:15:00] John Wright: So it's rather than build that super long prompt, we're gonna be, we know what you at least need to see every day. And if we're wrong about it or if there's more we can learn, no problem, you just tell us, or we'll learn from the prompts of what you're trying to do by asking the questions. And hopefully we've got a feedback loop that says.

[00:15:17] John Wright: We'll use the AI tool to learn. But we're basically gonna pull them in for here. And then as you ask for prompts, we're gonna be, oh, we have this ready to go and we're not gonna use AI tokens for basically more costs for getting the data of what you need without risk of it being wrong.

[00:15:34] Lazar Petrov: Yeah, I need to test this, to put the radio analysis and just ask. AI to give me the insights, not for me to read it and to think over it. Maybe there is his power. I don't know. Didn't test that, but I just think it's good.

[00:15:48] John Wright: Yeah, I, I'm planning to do that in a different way where it's I'll use AI for the modeling of it, but I'm planning to use basically like my skill prompts and queries just to say I know this is the chart we're doing and I need to summarize the data behind it

[00:16:04] John Wright: Do you think with the changes in SEO that operators have a better opportunity to capture a bit more of the traffic that affiliates were taking almost all of.

[00:16:13] Lazar Petrov: It's to be honest, it's it's a difficult question because what I've personally saw it's very different behavior in different markets.

[00:16:22] Lazar Petrov: Like I've seen markets, very nice markets where Google is giving advantage to the brand, not to the affiliate. And we see brands that. Student rank, therefore search words started ranking there, where in some markets you could not take those position from the affiliates and you don't see any brands in the top two, three pages.

[00:16:43] Lazar Petrov: So I don't know what Google is doing. I'm not an SEO expert. It just one I've seen, but it's very market specific. I have no idea how it happens, but for the same work in online print, for example. Brands on first places, or top five to three brands on the other market, on the page, two or three stars, the first brand, which doesn't make sense to me.

[00:17:06] John Wright: Yeah I think I understand what's happened and I just believe it to be true. I think people should be building brands more as part of their SEO strategy. It's like if you want SEO, it's build the brand because that's now getting part of that's ChatGPT, that's code, all these different AI search engines.

[00:17:24] John Wright: This is what it's doing. It's basically analyzing what is a brand and how people are talking about it, respecting it, et cetera.

[00:17:30] Lazar Petrov: I'm not the expert in this field, but yeah,

[00:17:33] John Wright: I think you know more than most people though. So let's pivot to another topic that I'm becoming more passionate about.

[00:17:40] John Wright: Okay. I think that there's a lot of operators that, like you said earlier, you can just get a white label. It's so easy, anyone can do it. So the sales guy sells you the stream that you're gonna make so much money, but in order to run a good operation requires. Experience. It's more than just BI. It's knowing what tools you're gonna have that are going to enhance the product for the player experience.

[00:18:02] John Wright: How are you gonna have a good CRM tool? How are you going to understand if you've got a lot of bonus abuse, which is eating your bottom line and could take you out? So I believe that there's companies in the industry like Glaude Amplitude companies like Golden Whale that do AI optimization on the CRM side Greco for bonus hunting abuse.

[00:18:21] John Wright: Do you think that more companies should pay attention to these tools and always be focusing on going, you start with the value and then that eventually translates into data.

[00:18:30] Lazar Petrov: I'm always for this, even if those, I'm not familiar with those specific tools, but even if those tools don't work or they're not exceptional, we should support them because this is the future for what I'm joking is that this industry, again, like industry for one of the most competitive and adverse industry in the world, now it's.

[00:18:50] Lazar Petrov: I dunno, outdated industry, they constantly use outdated softwares and they don't care. They even don't want to invest in other softwares. It's it's crazy. And the biggest issue is actually this white level providers. Because I've my biggest obstacle to integrate a software was the platform that provides the brand.

[00:19:09] Lazar Petrov: They say, I don't have roadmap to integrate them. I don't want to work with them, or I have this alternative. Use them. Why do you need this to direct? Explain you why I need this. This my business. I pay you, you integrate it. No, they don't want to do it, so it's a big shift at the moment. I don't believe white labels will sustain this huge growth.

[00:19:33] Lazar Petrov: People are pushing towards turnkey solution more and more. This is what I see, and to obtain a license, it's getting easier and easier, and it's giving you more and more benefits, as I told you. Cost increase exceptionally so if you want to fight the cost, you need to optimize your cost somewhere else. And okay.

[00:19:54] Lazar Petrov: AI will help you optimize your opex, reduce your staff cost, but at the same time, a turnkey solution. Reduce your game provider rates, reduces your license fees to the game provider, the platform fee to the game provider. It reduces your lot of other aspects in your business where you can save money in order to compensate the massive increase in.

[00:20:16] Lazar Petrov: Acquisition cost. So I don't see big future for white labeling, especially in Europe and North America, and also in South America, where the competition is growing and growing hectically at the moment. So I. Future is turnkey for me.

[00:20:31] John Wright: Yeah. I want to take a bit of inspiration from a company called Scribe, where when I've studied them a bit more and talked to them, it's like they like to talk to more people in the industry and they also like to look outside of the industry for ideas and bring new ideas to the table.

[00:20:47] John Wright: Do you think this industry needs more of it? It's like you said earlier, we have a lot of money. In theory it's competitive, but people are still doing the same things and we're like. I just feel every time I look outside of iGA I'm like, wow, we are so behind.

[00:21:00] Lazar Petrov: What I'm telling here to, to people is that we are entering, you know how it is, web one, web two, Web3. I believe we are entering in something like software V two, because this legacy software, they're super old.

[00:21:14] Lazar Petrov: And yeah, they're almost impossible to change right now. All these companies which build their massive brands 15 years ago, it, it's a lot of clients.

[00:21:37] Lazar Petrov: So from one side, I understand this legacy softwares, they were very innovative 15 years ago. But back in the days the way we were developing stuff, the code, all these things, were are very outdated compared to nowadays, and for them to migrate from old code base to the new one, having 300 clients and making sure that all these 300 clients are not gonna suffer and not gonna terribly do something wrong.

[00:22:05] Lazar Petrov: It's hectic, these guys cannot afford to make the change. Then comes the second challenge okay, I'm gonna introduce a brand new version and who wants, I'm gonna plug out and plug in. But how you prioritize 300 clients? How you gonna explain to the last guy why he's last? And then why these guys from the new version news, and you are on the old. Also the pricing and why I paid for this sheet, 5K. And now you asked me to pay 5K for brand new super cool thing. It's not fair. So I think our people are in a very bad position because of timing. We've been very advanced when the technology was not that advanced.

[00:22:44] Lazar Petrov: Now technology is very advanced and people catch up, come with you things. But we need to replace the old one, which gonna hurt us, so what I think. It's a great opportunity now for these new softwares and tools because I'm what I've told you, white labeling changing to turnkeys. A lot of big companies moving out from Europe, for example.

[00:23:06] Lazar Petrov: A lot of new platform centering the market, and you saw it on the event so many new suppliers for building your own brand in this industry. Every conference I see at least 10, 15 new companies that I never saw before. And these people are the people.

[00:23:27] Lazar Petrov: Keep going. Yeah. Okay. So it's in my head. It's, you cannot hear it. But anyway what I'm seeing is that this new platforms going to bring the opportunity for the new technology to enter the market, which gonna make them more competitive. And actually, I think this is the people who gonna succeed next.

[00:23:50] Lazar Petrov: I don't believe this. Master don't, outdated companies are the one who gonna succeed. Even. Check the strategy. How changes for some companies, like SoftSwiss for example, they don't care who they onboard. Back in the days you needed a business case, you needed to validate that you're gonna make tons of money to them.

[00:24:09] Lazar Petrov: Their minimum fees were funny, 2000 euro minimum fee because they know you're gonna make money. Nowadays they know that you have 60% chance to not make any money. So they increased a lot. Their minimum fees, they don't care. If you're gonna make business or not, if you have money, experience or not, they're gonna onboard.

[00:24:29] Lazar Petrov: And there are many platforms who change to this strategy, just make sure they make their fixed fees accumulate. A lot of databases of brands making fixed fee every month when they close, it's fine. I lose 50K fixed fee when I'm down, but if I have 10 brands doing five millions and I lose one client, it hurts.

[00:24:49] Lazar Petrov: I think it's a good opportunity, new technology to join forces with the new platform suppliers entering the same markets, which mastodons were tear apart for the past years. And it's a good good opportunity for the upgrade, which is highly necessary in the current cost that we see on the market.

[00:25:10] John Wright: Agreed. So Lazar, thank you so much for doing this. I've I feel like I know exactly who I'm gonna share this episode with, let alone with our team. I wanna pass it back to you. How can people get ahold of you?

[00:25:22] Lazar Petrov: Better not

[00:25:24] John Wright: LinkedIn.

[00:25:25] John Wright: LinkedIn.

[00:25:25] Lazar Petrov: Okay. No, I mean they want LinkedIn. I don't read it.

[00:25:28] Lazar Petrov: I don't check it. It's fine. No need to get back to me. I hope I help somebody. I hope someone learn something or at least get calm that he's not doing something terribly wrong or missing something or whatever. So yeah,

[00:25:43] John Wright: I'm looking forward to publishing it. Thank you so much for this.

[00:25:46] Lazar Petrov: Thank you my friend.

[00:25:47] Lazar Petrov: Thank you. Cheers.