My journey to coming up with the idea of the StatsDrone app have been fermenting for a long time. I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing and in online gambling for over 20 years. I’ve been a player, affiliate manager and eventually an affiliate and it took me a while to realize there are a lot of unsolved problems in affiliate marketing. Problems that people are talking about but not in a detailed way in order to solve those problems.

The story behind wanting to build an affiliate stats aggregator comes from having launched Gaming Affiliates Guide, gaffg.com, back in 2010. That site reviewed gambling affiliate programs and I did affiliate coaching through it as well.

In running my own gambling affiliate sites, I used an app called Stats Remote which sadly closed in 2017. Even though at the time the app was in business with no knowledge the app was about to implode and disappear, I was planning to build a competitor to Stats Remote because I felt there were things missing in this app that would have made it an essential service.

What are the features that would make the app an essential service for me?

How about knowing when an affiliate program was actually closed? I mean up to 50% of emails from affiliate programs end up in spam. I’m also too busy to be checking forums daily for this info and there is no guarantee that info will show up in a forum.

What about when links change and you have to update ALL of your tracking links because the previous links were made to be invalid.

What about programs that stopped paying affiliates? I’d like to know about this. Even if this info was posted in a forum, how many people are checking the forums daily? Some affiliates are so big they don’t have time to do this, they just have to rely on their staff to catch this. If they do catch this, you can bet they are not going to share this info openly because what incentive do they have.

As you can see, other affiliate app stats were missing something that to me would make the app essential beyond just checking daily stats.

I could go on and on about other situations similar to this but I won’t mostly because all of that will be showcased on future feature announcements from us.

How do I view affiliate marketing today?

I kinda see it as broken on both sides of the fence for affiliates and affiliate programs.

I’m still shocked when I see how some big earning affiliates operate their business with low or no tech solutions. So for affiliates there are problems for new affiliates entering in the space and for the big fish, I’m surprised at how much room some of them have to grow to get bigger.

What about affiliate programs?

I just don’t see any innovation happening in the world of affiliate marketing. If there is anything innovative happening right now, I’d say it is probably happening on the Ethereum network. Otherwise your affiliate programs today operate like this: give you links, maybe give you some campaigns and give you a ton of banners that you really shouldn’t be using. Banners have been dead for a long time and affiliates need better assets and service.

Why leave the affiliate space?

I feel it is tough to be innovative in the affiliate space when it seems like everyone is doing the same thing as each other, just with a different flavour. For me personally, making tools for affiliates gives me a buzz because I’ve experienced many problems that affiliates are having today. This was the driving force behind starting StatsDrone.

The future of affiliate marketing

On just numbers alone, affiliate marketing is massive and it will employ an insane number of people around the world directly and indirectly. If online gambling is worth over $60 billion a year today, what will it be in 5 years? That is just one industry out of the segments within affiliate marketing.

The future of StatsDrone

Our company’s first project is the StatsDrone app for igaming affiliates to collect and store their clicks, deposits, revenue and other data you should definitely store yourself. Within this app we will be building more tools that I personally feel will turn into essential services.

After that we have a few more projects that we intend to launch that we hope will change the world of affiliate marketing. It would be cliche to call it Affiliate Marketing 2.0 but that is what I feel it is. I want our company to solve real problems that exist today that people have a hard time explaining how it is a problem and have an even more difficult time solving it.

I hope you follow our journey and follow us on social media to keep in the loop on our future feature releases. Likewise we want you as users to give us feedback and suggestions on how we can be better.