Solving compliance in affiliate marketing with Ian Sims of Rightlander

one of the things I touched on was was content writers I think there's a lot of content writers in the industry that don't necessarily understand the psychology behind players or they don't think as consumers would so they're writing from a marketing and a sales perspective um when actually if you switch your mindset and get them educated on thinking like a consumer and how that information is being presented to them then you're going to get rid of a lot of the sort of the simpler compliance compliance

issues I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by statr so welcome to the affiliate bi podcast I got a special guest uh someone I've known in affiliate marketing and igaming for very long time uh we're both uh I gaming dinosaurs and affiliate marketing uh Ian I'm going to pass it to you to do an introduction and tell us what you're doing now and tell us a bit bit about your your history in IG gaming

and affiliate marketing sure hi John thanks for having me on um yeah a lot of you may already know me I've been an affiliate or was an affiliate I should say for a good well 12 years from 2004 to 2016 when I sold my affiliate Network I I mainly in iame in I gaming sort of doing casino and Slots um I'm a programmer by trade before that I was uh working for banks and financial institutions is not quite so exciting um but yeah ultimately sold my

network and then started up right Lander which we'll obviously talk a little bit more about later um in terms of how that fits into the story but yeah compliance unfortunately is done my thing or fortunately depending on how you how you look at it John yeah it's uh we're gonna try to make compliance uh exciting and I know you're were just on the Awin podcast recently So I listened to that just to get some notes but I mean I think we both kind of touch on

compliance in different ways and we like as an as an affiliate back five six seven years ago started experiencing it going wow this is is really painful and I think uh I think you might have stumbled in the right thing at the right time it might not look sexy but everyone kind of needs this work well I I think compliance actually is not necessarily a problem it can be a solution as as we'll discuss a little bit as we go on I think it's very easy

to think of compliance as as a bad thing that you have to kind of get round but actually if you think outside the box a bit it can work in your favor and we'll we'll cover that a little bit so it's not quite as bad as it seems well that explains like what said earlier about having a programming background because I remember some of your sites and looking at them I mean I looked at every affiliate site I could get my hands on so when I

looked through yours they're very data focused like you put data points about slot games that I'm like are players interested in this and what I believe was that they probably were because I think you know um that type of uh player better than anyone where you broke down the data and I think when you look at all the other regular slot sites they're all just kind of like the same so I just kind of want to get your take on adding that extra layer of data

and really knowing your customer and being able to do something different that I I think most Affiliates are just get lazy and they don't want to do that extra work yeah I mean bear in mind that I came into this industry as a player so I'm enthusiastic as well about um casino games video poker slots where my thing still are when I go to Vegas so I think that obviously helps a little bit when you've got an enthusiasm for something and being a programmer I kind

of wanted to marry the two to together so when I first started it was kind of more about the opinion side of things so you know as a player and going and playing the games whether it be online or offline I felt I was well positioned to do that much like influencers are today in their different fields you know they they kind of they live a life and they they're enthusiastic about it they know what they're talking about and that's why they're so successful you know

when you're after information on a product or or if you want someone to come and do some work in your house you go to The Experts rather than just you know someone who says they know something about it so really when I first started it was opinion-based but I think as as kind of time went on and the affiliate Landscapes changed and changed even more since I left it and and obviously you're at the behest of Google and various other sort of traffic tools and it

really um data became more of a focus to try and retain Authority which is kind of what I was trying to build I think if you can be an authority which is a key word here then I think you you you can get a bit further so that that's kind of the data thing came from and Slots compara which was the U my main sort of data site had a lot of data that we fed in um on every slot game trying to understand the psychology

of a player and if you know if you liked Cleopatra what other games you going to like yes you might like Egyption theme slots But ultimately it's more about the game playay and so it kind of fed in all this data that then you could go and do a search on and get other games that kind of will give you a similar Vibe so I've always been a fan of data and using data in that way and it takes opinion out of the equation um which

still has a lot of relevance but makes life for me a little bit easier as a programmer that's an interesting take you just highlighted about combining this idea of authority which is important and it's becoming more important as time goes on with Google but you know bringing it full circle back to data yeah I mean Google's always been talking about Authority um I guess I guess back in the day it was more about um Quality content that was the thing wasn't it that was the phrase

that everyone used and I think there was a very different sort of take on what quality content was to some people it was well-written content which is kind of what AI can do for you now and a lot of it was not necessar well-written content but actually knowing what you're talking about and I think when you go to an opinion site you know if you go to Trip Advisor for example when you're going on holiday you want people that have been there seen it done it

and if someone just says oh I think Roman is a really nice place to go you know it's got great Coliseum blah blah blah you think it well yeah that's great I can find that out from hundred different places but when someone says I've been to Rome I've been in the Coliseum by the way you get ripped off and that's the St of information you want so I've always thought as Authority as being the sort of stickiness that will make people come back to you rather

than just quality content yeah I think that's a a topic for another time of uh yeah probably I mean Authority sounds so simple but it's you're right it's uh there's a lot of people that won't just take that extra time to do that work to become Authority and you got to live you can get people doing it for you you know you don't have to be the authority yourself if you've got a team of people that know what they're talking about I mean this goes into

the whole content writing thing which actually is also one of the biggest problems when it comes to compliance I should point out which we can talk about but you know it doesn't have to be you as the authority providing that they think you've got authoritative authoritative information okay I want to go into your story of how did right Lander come about okay so it was an accident be honest with you I love these stories so when I saw my network um to bxa in in malter

in 2016 I kind of wanted a reason to stay involved in the industry because I loved all the conferences a lot of friends in the industry thoroughly enjoyed it it was great and I thought there's probably more opportunities in there for me but I didn't necessarily want to LEAP into something else so so so quickly so I had I'd built this tool for myself which is basically just uh it used to go out every night and screenshot all the landing pages that I was sending all

my traffic to across all the sort of operators and every morning I could just I'm a cup of tea and look at the pictures and think okay that one's broken that one's changed that's not relevant and fix them up so I thought I'll take that to Market when I sold my site it's a great way of keeping you know in the industry and Affiliates would probably appreciate that and as I was building it um basically the ukgc said actually compliance um we're quite interested in this

now and it all sort of happened over that sort of year period that I was building it so I just kind of tweaked the tool to see if it could pull out data from websites as it was a bit of a scraper anyway and that's how rightand it came about it's essentially we had a knock on the door 2018 very beginning of from Leo Vegas and then another knock on the door from um beo at the time who'd both been hit with fines saying you can

you help us and that's kind of where it snowballed from I like The Accidental stories but um it's also a really interesting timing for you it's uh I remember I remember getting all these compliance emails 2017 coming in all the same time and for me it was H painful being an affiliate having to fix uh a compliance issue that would save me $500 that would cost me$ 10,000 to do programming yeah look look I think I think you know compliance hit everyone quite hard and no

one really knew what they were talking about at that stage you know there were no rules um and so it took a little while for people to kind of understand what it meant um but I think at that point yeah it was seen as a real pain in the proverbial but I think as time's gone on I think you can think about this differently if an affiliate shifts their mindset a little bit and thinks actually in every problem there's an opportunity and and if you think

about compliance as an opportunity rather than a problem you can actually see some real benefits from it because you can manage the expectations of consumers and if you can do that then basically all the way up the chain from the moment the consumer arrives at your website right through them becoming you know a a signed up customer an operator everyone up that chain is going to be much more appreciative of the fact they've got someone that understands what they're getting into so I think it benefits

every you just got to think differently about compliance and not see it as a as a pain point and see it how it can help you and there are other ways the data that compliance can give you and the way it makes you position the data on your website the focus perhaps you put on promotions and terms and conditions and stuff it shifts all that you just got to think a little bit differently it's an interesting take you're highlighting which is compliance could well it's not

that it could it probably does and it should improve the conversion rate for Affiliates for players for operators operators yeah ultimately everyone's trying to you know the whole idea of compliance at the moment what Regulators are doing is trying to protect the consumer there's also an element of Brands wanting to protect their brand integrity and their risk and obviously if they get fined it threatens the Integrity of affiliate programs as well so don't get me wrong there are lots of things to think about um and

and issues at hand but ultimately if you've got happy consumers you're going to have a happy industry you won't have you have a lot less of the problem players on on on your books you'll have people that understand what they're getting into a bit more they won't just be focused on all free money which is always has been and always will be a problem because it it appeals to human greed and that's never a good thing when you're selling something yeah and yeah I'm a I'm

a big fan of actually managing expectations and I always used to do that on my slot slot sites I didn't used to promote bonuses at all or very rarely I might mention them but they certainly weren't Focus because I always saw that as an extra that someone would get when they got to the website so if they were keen on going through to play you know XYZ casino and then they get there and financially you also get $50 for playing that's like lifting their expectations even

further and I guess that's the difference between us two selling affiliate sites and you sold a bler and probably got a lot more for it yeah yeah I'm not gonna lie it's a good deal yeah uh so what would you say are some of the different uh like common compliance uh issues that you see for maybe on the operator side and obviously spilling into the affiliate side of business I think one of the things I touched on was was content writers I think there's a lot

of content writers in the industry that don't necessarily understand the psychology behind players or they don't think as consumers would so they're writing from a marketing and a sales perspective um when actually if you switch your mindset and get them educated on thinking like a consumer and how that information has been presented to them then you're going to get rid of a lot of the sort of the simpler compliance issu so for example we come across a lot of text um a lot of phraseology and

a lot of um information that's very much designed to make people think they can make money from gambling however you look at it that's essentially what the text is saying and that's not the right approach if if you if you go to someone with that and put that in their heads they're coming in really for the wrong reasons you know there is this argument gambling is can make you money there's this argument that gambling is entertainment but you have to manage the expectations of the individual

and I think a lot of content writers just think oh I've got some text I'll put something out there that sounds nice and pretty and we'll try and get them to knock on the door and come in and I think that's just too simplistic yeah right so yeah the mindset is really really important to put yourself in the mind of a consumer be honest with you it's just common sense John yeah a lot of compliance is just common sense if you read something that's been put

in front of you more often than not most of us will know when we're being misled or if we're being exaggerated or we'll understand that sales is sales but a lot of people don't a lot of people get taken in or they're in you don't know their financial position or their situation at home you don't know if they're looking for escapism whether they need money you don't know if they're in debth you don't know what pressures are on them basically so everyone's going to read that

bit of text differently and and but I think you touched on it in a really interesting way that content writing is actually one of the core parts of the problem where like I've been in the situation before with my previous affiliate sites of hiring content writers I train them but every time I look over the stuff I'm like no don't write that and it's like you said they they talk about it from a sales point of view and they have a pressure to produce content at

the best quality and as fast as possible for a set rate I mean they're all getting paid quite often uh by the word so um yeah I think it's it's not easy to train good writers and I think that's what maybe separates the the the best Affiliates of like they put a lot of effort into it and there maybe indirectly being just more compliant by focusing on this quality aspect and of course that leads just nicely into a conversation about AI so absolutely you know we

know how that's being viewed at the moment I mean it's a fast changing environment but a lot of people are thinking about AI as as a Content writer really which you know is well and good um my my personal opinion is you know if you're trying to do it to rank in Google then so are a thousand other people you know all you've done is taken a thousand people competing for the top 10 spots and made all their content better so so I don't believe that's

a solution but what's really interesting you know we've done some research into Ai and how it potentially help or impact what we're doing from a compliance perspective and the one thing that's really interesting apart from the fact obviously a lot of it's working on older data um unless you kind of got your own data or you you buy more up toate packages it doesn't really fully understand the nuances of compliance so we had an example recently I can't remember the country it might have been Italy

but I can't remember where we we asked AI to write an article for us on on um the regulatory landscape for gambling in Italy and it came back with what looked on the surface a pretty good article about bonuses and what you can and can't do but there were actually little nuances in the in I think it's it I might have my my facts wrong here but there were little nuances in terms of you you couldn't um you had to compare different operators you couldn't have

pages about a single operator and stuff and it didn't recognize that it just was Blanket you shouldn't be talking about this so so if you start to rely on AI for the facts in your article to build your Authority I think that's really quite precarious ground especially in regulatory environments and I think what's dangerous about that is not everyone's writing about that type of content so if they're one of the few that actually publish it they actually might get rankings and real traffic going to those

pages believing it to be true and then of course people are writing their own articles from seeing that one article and just it's a good point yeah absolutely good point AI is only as good as the data it can access I I think this is this is where the Affiliates in the future that will win out will be really smart that they'll be building we're going back to data question they'll be building their own data sets and their own databases and and their own um ways

of mining data that no one else can get access to and they'll be able to control who has that and it'll be authoritative data but until you know AI it's just one of these things that we're going to see a lot of changes over the next few years and they'll be good and they'll be bad um but I think it's you people have to approach you with caution okay I've got a couple curveball questions and it's going to tie into Ai and it's going to also

tie into what Affiliates have to do to be successful um do you think AI is going to make it such that the big Affiliates like let's just use bleer as an example that can afford to invest big money into AI in every aspect it's like getting the right tools hiring the right people do you think this is going to help some of these affiliate companies just get stronger at the expense of making it more difficult for the small to midsize Affiliates to just like get their

foot in the door um yeah to a degree um everything's cyclical so so I I believe that there are always niches and we go back to the whole Authority thing again where you can build Authority in specific niches and if you use data correctly anyone there's a lot of data out there you don't have to be a big company to go and get your hands on API feeds and good interesting data or to collect data yes some to some of it cost I get that and

and bigger companies will be able to afford more but I don't know I I can't answer the question outright but my feeling is there there'll be there could equally be as much of a leveling of the playing field as there could be an advantage to the bigger operators I think it depends on how smart you are how you use it what data you collect and what you do with it I don't think money is necessarily the be all and end all of making AI work effectively

for you and I think your answer is very similar to some seos that I've interviewed that have kind of said more or less the same thing where they believe Authority is your gateway towards not only just getting your foot in the door but actually you know making carving your own space Authority comes from data a lot of the time as well so you know you what you really want is data that's yours and no one else has that's what you really want and it's not impossible

to get you just need to spend some time doing it you know when I built slots comparer you know I had a couple of guys helping me and we went out and we analyzed all the games and we spent months and months and months collecting data that no one else had but it's not difficult to get it's just time you know it's just understanding it getting a couple of people involved that knew what slot games meant how they how they worked and how the psychology worked

we pulled that data together is very successful it cost me very very little to employ them to do that uh next question it's kind of it almost ties into the previous one of like you know will the Affiliates get bigger and what's the competitive Advantage because it's like Affiliates need to be good at two things like getting the traffic and usually we're going to just say it's SEO even though it's now video and a whole bunch of other things and then they got to be sometimes

good at the tech now you can launch your site on WordPress and not like just be oblivious to the world but then as you get deeper it's like all these data points like you yourself built a a custom CMS I think and you used like a lot of data points so that data point uh became published and you know you're able to Pivot like the categories so do you think like the the the data driven part of it uh is what helps Affiliates become more compliant

which also has a secondary bonus of just making them convert better and having a USP yeah quite possibly I can see that when you start dealing with opinions versus data so you can have websites that have opinion and we've talked about Authority and how that opinion can build Authority and we've talked about websites that can use data and the two can come together of course you can have both so it's it's probably easier to fall over on the compliance side when you're talking about opinion especially

if you've got the sales mindset going um than it is on the data side where ultimately you know you're regurgitating data but I think what Affiliates can do if they go more with the data route is they can become data providers so it needn't necessarily be be be about selling to the consumer directly it might be about creating data feeds or creating services and Provisions that operators or other Affiliates can use you know very much like you've done John actually um you know create something that

that can potentially be used by other people so so I think the smart Affiliates will recognize that you can probably do both but but ultimately you need to diversify and that's always been the case to be fair you know you don't want to you don't want all your eggs in one one one basket yeah uh going further into social media um are you seeing uh more Affiliates get into the space where is becoming like more of a prominent marketing channel that does Drive players to operators

uh and yeah just a like I think we've seen in the past 10 years where that was maybe the first wave of compliance where companies said no we don't want you posting these bonuses on social media because when the bonus expires it's a the amount of work you have to go back in time to delete that like you're not able to maintain a proper database in social media social media environment I think social media and gambling are a bad mix if I'm honest I think it's

um the regulatory environment that surrounds gambling and also from an ethical point of view you know when you're when you're ranking in Google you're ranking your content for people that are actively looking for for gambling content they're looking for opportunities to go play or whatever social media is not like that a lot of the time you're putting your it can be a little bit like that but you're putting a lot of your content in front of people that don't really understand gambling they haven't really gone

actively looking for it they don't necessarily understand the risks attached to it they might think it's a bit of fun for whatever reason so I've never been a great fan of voting on social media for one thing so maybe I got a bit of bias there secondly from a compliance perspective what you just said is very true so so these these platforms are very much W Gardens they don't really care whether you're a compliance company whether you're a marketing company they just don't really like showing

you what they've got and how they do it and obviously they've been talks between governments and these Platforms in terms of how they put controls in place but you know we all know the response to that's been relatively muted so so I don't hold out too much hope that they're going to suddenly get all ethical and worried about the compliance side so so when I'm talking to operators or when we're talking to operators generally speaking it's a difficult conversation within the gambling sphere it becomes easier

when you when get outside of gambling um into the influencer sphere and slightly less regulated areas where you're kind of operating more under advertising standards rather than strict you know regulatory um rules that we have in gambling um but my my if I was starting up an operator now if going to that side of things or an affiliate again I wouldn't be going anywhere near social media video yeah I think video's got some some mileage in it but again if you're using the main platforms from

a compliance perspective they're dangerous areas you know it doesn't take much for someone to say something in a video without really thinking about it that can bring a brand into disrepute or can actually threaten the viability of an affiliate program you know you've seen all these um the streamers for example they can get a little bit OV excited some of them are very great fun they do a fantastic job but every now and again it wouldn't surprise me if you know a comment came out that

you think oh hang on a set you shouldn't really be saying that and it's very difficult to police even for a company like us it's very difficult to police Le um th those communities I think that's uh probably the the core reason why bar stool was basically bought out you know it's like Baro pen gaming they like you can't say these these these things no that's it you know it's um as an affiliate you join an affiliate program and you know obviously once you're in it

you want to make it needs to work for you you don't want a threat of being cutle and I think I think if you've got other Affiliates out there doing the social and the streaming thing then you're in more risk of having a problem come from that program when when those risks rebound onto them so that's how I always looked at it I don't want to be in a port of Affiliates that are doing dodgy or difficult awkward stuff in the I know for like things

like YouTube and I'm assuming twitch has it although I haven't dug further into it where you're able to create a profile and as you publish content you're able to say is this suitable for adults so you're able to do uh a couple of these filters and obviously with with us being Affiliates in the past where we've been able to say well there's targeting like block certain countries do you think social media will at some point have these tools where my profile can actually say you know

what I don't want users able to view my content from these countries and I can actually even take it a step further and say some of these posts are like in order for them to be compliant because I'm talking about let's say personal finance advice I have to add this little addendum that says this is not personal uh this is not Financial advice you think these tools actually might start appearing as much as I think their basic is basic as hell to integr to integr I

think they will but I think it'll come from outside pressure rather than inside decision making you know if you get a regat that turns around to the operators in the gambling space and says right okay we don't want any of your Affiliates advertising on social media channels until that's in place a lot of the big brands are going to pull out of their advertising from Facebook and and Co and that might make them think twice about it it might take you know quite a c change

to do that I don't hold out a lot of hope that it'll be anytime soon um but it'd be quite a nice thing to have to be fair I think uh I think it just needs to be kind of pushed on them but I think you're right I think it's going to happen more from a a government perspective rather than an industry kind of like hey guys uh here's a free easy thing to implement and once you do you're going to have uh the ability to

you know just get more traffic monetize everything yeah yeah uh what are some changes you'd like to see in affiliate marketing uh for both Affiliates and or Publishers as well as operators and affiliate affiliate programs I mean the one thing I've seen over the past three or four years while while sort of working in compliance is quite surprised at the number of big operators that that Cho down their affiliate programs and cut off Affiliates because of the the compliance risks or perhaps other reasons they're not

being necessarily that transparent about I think that's bad news for everyone because I think Affiliates generally speaking don't just say oh I've been cut off I'm going to go away they think right okay I'm going to go to someone that wants me and when you're in a regulated environment there are plenty of of black market and gray Market operators that want Affiliates and a lot of those operators are actually very good you know I in the past before components was a thing I've worked and played

at a number of different um operators that now would be regulated and some would be unregulated and I could yeah I could easily list a bunch of what you call Gray Market operators that are fantastic experiences for players so it's not a bad thing for the player perspective necessarily other than the fact obviously they don't have the the the um the uh regulatory sort of uh net to sort of support them when when there's a problem but I think if big brands are cutting off Affiliates

you're going to send more of those the dark dark side not term I use but it's dark side I've seen the darker side and um the more Affiliates that do that the more there's going to be of that stuff in in Google and you know the the bigger the problem the regulated Brands make for themselves so I'd much rather see them work with Affiliates and think of them as partners rather than just a means to an end and actually nurture the ones that aren't doing it

right and help them to thrive and help them to understand what compliance is what it means and why they should be doing it right there'll always be the old one you can't control I get that but ultimately you need the majority to be working with you otherwise the majority are going to be working with people you don't want them working with that's uh fascinating I didn't even look at it from that point of view like I did have a mindset of obviously seeing that you know

when things are not favorable where you got specific markets I don't want to name which markets but when they impose like really strict um uh you know gaming laws that kind of hurt maybe not hurt players but encourage them to basically jump the fence it's encouraging Affiliates to jump the fence and I think what you've highlighted is uh is definitely a reality it's if you're using all this compliance to kind of you know chip away at your Affiliates and you end up with like less operators

to work with especially in very specific markets um you get Affiliates that think why do I want to do this and why not have two sites and one's the dark market and the other one other one other one you know the legal markets and even with new Affiliates that I talk to that want to get started um it's really difficult for me even saying you want to go this route because I mean if you look at the US market all right you kind of need like

a lot of money to pay for licensing and you know what does it look like you know I think the the licensing model looks interesting but I think I think we're all just kind of encouraging people to to pick a path that the whole industry saying we don't even want to Happ yeah no I totally agree yeah that and like I said there are good operator ators out there that wouldn't necessarily be regulated as well so as long as the Affiliates are doing their due diligence

and they're understanding that they're working with with operators that are good for consumers it won't necessarily have a massive massive impact on the consumer but it will have a massive impact on the regulated um economy within economy within economy within gambling I I think also be quite Hest to have a some sort of body um that the operators kind of could report into and and help Affiliates understand compliance a bit better because there's still there's still confusion out there as so you know from an affiliate

perspective as to what they should be doing you know every month we're finding stuff and Reporting it to programs and we try to encourage those programs to work with the affiliate to get it fixed and to help them educate and understand it we don't want just cutting off the affiliate the ones that do it repeatedly fair enough make a decision on that but ultimately there needs to be someone out there that can teach Affiliates how to do compliance effectively and and have a common set of

rules rather than just everyone having their different ideas about what it means uh for fully agree in the sense that I mean like we've got 2,000 accounts for testing and the compliance like we still going to be compliant even though we're not sending traffic but uh I just find that the the message is coming from operators is not consistent it's uh they're asking for certain things and it's like okay are like what's the reason behind it like you know notorized passport and things like that um

and then sometimes the compliance requests they they they try to reference uh the gaming laws but I'm like where in where in the law does it state that this is the compliant part it's almost like operators sometimes pick and choose what they want to be compliant or maybe sometimes to leverage the compliance to get something else out of before they don't necessarily fully understand it and and to be fair you know a lot of the regulatory bodies issue guidelines rather than hard and fast rules so

there is an element of interpretation that has to go into compliance But ultimately if you had a central source that could unpick that and and form a common view that people could subscribe to so if you know you get the bet 365 and the tins and the and the you know the flutters of this world into that sort of working group and come up with a sort of common idea about what they want it's going to help the industry in those territories to understand more about

what's required of them and then once you get to that sort of more of a stable flux you can probably start to build up your affiliate programs again in a much more compliant way and and without isolating all these Affiliates who are going to run off and promote the gray Market ones because they just don't know what's going on and can't get any traffic and it probably should be done this way because if we don't do it this way uh more of our chat gbt is

gonna basically make those rules for us and someone's going to write that article and well yeah I mean you know if there are rules everyone follows I don't really mind what they are but it just has to be a common set of of guidelines that everyone could understand and that you it's one of the biggest headaches for everyone so going down this uh compliance rapid hole I know you mentioned a few times that there's just a lot of interesting data behind the work you do and

what you you all cover for both operators and Affiliates and I just wanted to ask if there are any data stories that came to light or what was surprising that when you started to build right Lander that like you obviously get to see data in both a different way and see data that not everyone um gets a chance to even look at even though they could probably try to build this themselves so I'm just wondering what kind of stories have come to to to light I

mean there was a very there was quite um an amusing story from from three years ago now uh where we it's a commonly known um scam really um using one of the tabula ad networks where what we assumed was an affiliate was putting out some content saying that there was a a c CEO of a company you could fill in the company because they used a lot of different ones was in trouble because there was a loophole in the software that allowed people to win lots

of money and we identified that one of our clients was um implicated in this article there were links affiliate links actually to this client within the article so we notified them um they got us straight on a call uh with with a marketing their marketing department and what became quite quickly quite quite clear quite quickly was the fact that um they were trying to find out how we'd found it what we'd actually where we managed to discover this content and it became clear quite quickly that

actually maybe it wasn't an affiliate doing this after all okay it was coming from internally so that was quite a funny interesting conversation but I think I think the the one thing that um has struck me most about compliance since becoming an affiliate and going into this and and realizing I was doing it wrong as well was was not applying common sense to what I was writing I wasn't looking at it from a consumer point of view I was thinking of it as I need to

get them in to be a player point of view a lot of my content I look back at now and I shudder well it's gone now thankfully obviously because it's gone but but I wrote some stuff that I'm you not particularly proud of because I I now think about it differently so so a lot of what we see every day it's just because people haven't thought it through you know yeah easy to win money at XY Z or you know i' I've I paid off my

car with the money I won on this slot you know all these sorts of things it's just you know the moment you say it sounds wrong but you'd be amazed how much of it there is out there it's quite a bit I mean I think we've all seen like the car payment uh bonus hunting articles where if you follow it and uh you know there's certain ways of actually making money off of bonuses you could do that but uh I think it's uh even the phrase

make money is is bad you know you can make money just the moment you say that you're trouble so you have to think a little bit about that phraseology and how you present it but they're so natural to say aren't they you know a lot of the the phrases that we think of just you just write without thinking actually when you think about it are a little bit misleading exaggerated or create a false idea of what someone can achieve I'll put my hand up and say

yeah I I don't want to even read the stuff I wrote 10 years ago targeting players it's uh let's just not go there uh last question what do you see as the future of affiliate marketing as an intersection with business intelligence I think probably you know I'll just reiterate um a couple of points that I've made before which is owning data I think if you you know if you can own your own data uh collect your own data then that's G to be very valuable so

I think that um smart Affiliates will be doing that I think the the data provider thing is something that's worth looking at if you're then collecting that data how can you use it doesn't necessarily have to be just to Consumers you know there are the people that could use that data but the ultimate thing is you retain control of it um and then The Authority thing you know not not everyone can necessarily get the traffic in so how can you use authority to get yourself a

much more perhaps a smaller a smaller share of the pie but customers that are genuinely interested in the fact that you're playing video poker and you know the strategy for example so I think Authority is is something that's really important if you bring those three together then you you've got a recipe for Success going back to the the big networks getting in the way of that success the bigger they get the more risk there is you know if you've got 2,000 websites out there there's a

reasonable chance that one or two of those are going to have some stuff on there that might be picked up and and the bioregulatory um body of some sort un lead to trouble and you know we know there are four or five big networks in the industry it is a bit of an accident waiting to happen you know there could come a time for the smaller affiliate when actually a lot of your competition suddenly disappears because the industry's industry's industry's changed that makes sense uh Ian

Sims thank you so much for doing this how can people get a hold of you um well they can always email me at ian. SIMS wand.com if they feel inclined to do so or if they want to learn more about compliance stuff and how that affects them more than happy to answer the questions on that through that email address cool I'm on LinkedIn LinkedIn as well hand off Sims on LinkedIn and then we'll put all those that info in the show notes including right lander.com so

obviously where you're going to get that compliance uh Ian thank you so much for doing this no worries thanks John 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 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