How to completely rethink your approach to affiliate marketing: moving beyond "pay for performance" to a complex ecosystem of affiliates, operators, product, and data. Why performance myths fall short, how a single technical failure can turn data into a trust issue, what sets a "doer" apart from a product leader, and which client requests are worth turning down to stay true to your market vision. All this and more in iGaming Heroes on 3S.INFO with Anastasiya Borovaya, CEO of Affilka!

- You've been in iGaming for 10 years and led Affilka from startup to 480+ brands. What belief about affiliate marketing have you completely revised during that time?

I no longer think of affiliate marketing as pure performance marketing, where you only pay for a guaranteed result and one side can dictate the terms. In reality, it's always a complex system of checks and balances where ultimatums don't work for either side.

On one hand, there's the supposed "dictatorship of affiliates": operators often complain about inflated CPAs, even though some smaller brands grow organically almost entirely on RevShare, bringing in a few quality partners each month. On the other hand, there's the supposed omnipotence of operators: when a major brand starts dictating terms, changing conditions on the fly, or retroactively cutting payouts, affiliates simply redirect their resources to competitors within a day.

The very idea of paying only for results is also often an oversimplification. An affiliate brings in a targeted audience, but whether that audience converts is the product's responsibility.

When operators say "the traffic doesn't pay off, so we won't pay," that's usually passing the buck. If the product funnel is broken and retention is zero, the issue lies not with the affiliate but with the product's appeal.

Moreover, popular models like No‑baseline CPA aren't true performance marketing for the operator; they're essentially risk coverage for the affiliate. Genuine performance marketing only starts with RevShare and Hybrid models, where both parties share the risks and the rewards.

  • What is Affilka? It is specialized software for affiliate marketing automation, tailored specifically to the gambling sector. This tool enables gaming operators to manage interactions with webmasters, monitor the performance of advertising channels, analyze audience behavior, allocate budgets efficiently, and ensure timely payouts to partners.

- You came into the industry when affiliate management was all about traffic. Now you say it's about trust and data. Was there a specific moment when that clicked for you?

It was a very specific trigger. A glitch on Affilka's side that initially seemed minor. Many affiliates know our reports and postbacks. We're genuinely proud of that system because we can quickly fire off key events and enrich them with useful data. But every product has its SLAs, uptime promises, and internal priorities about what gets fixed first. For us, the first line was always the performance of referral links and the interface itself. Postbacks and stats? They'll get there when they get there. A glitch in the moment? What's a two‑hour delay, really? No big deal, right?

Turns out, it was critical. A major affiliate had just launched traffic for an operator, and our postback queue got stuck. The data was coming in, but the stats weren't updating in the interface, and postbacks weren't firing back to the partner. We knew the queue would clear in two hours. But for the affiliate, those two hours were flying blind. They know their value, calculate ROI in real time, and were ready to pull the plug on the entire campaign immediately.

The operator saved the day by stepping in and covering the partner's losses on the spot with a straightforward offer: "You usually earn X amount in two hours. We're crediting that to you upfront, + a percentage on top. The traffic is there, FTDs are converting. This is purely technical. Here's our guarantee while the data catches up."

That's when everything fell into place. A partner won't risk their budget without real‑time transparency. And an operator won't compensate a partner they don't trust.

That moment made everything clear. Updating reports once a day or sending postbacks with hourly delays is unacceptable. I can't imagine working that way. Running traffic without real‑time data? Watching clicks come in without seeing them turn into real players? Spending your budget on trust alone? That's not how it should work. You need data, and you need it instantly.

Since then, we've wrapped ourselves in monitoring systems for every service, so we can react the moment something goes wrong on our side. Because a delay, or worse, a lack of data, is a direct hit to trust.

- You grew into a platform leader, and now you also teach. What turned out to be harder: managing the product or explaining how it works to others?

Explaining things isn't hard at all. It's actually my favorite part. I love showing how the product is built. I especially enjoy those WOW moments when a client asks for a feature we don't have, and we come up with a clever workaround on the spot and solve their problem.

Being a universal Swiss Army knife just comes naturally to me. I've been through every stage of building Affilka: product manager, project manager, tester, sales manager, account manager, and marketer. My former boss at SOFTSWISS used to joke that everyone needed a "Borovaya unit" like me.

What turned out to be much harder was the shift from being a doer to being a leader. There are no quick wins here and now. It's always a long‑term game where results come from compound effort. The hardest part is giving people space, even when you think you know better. You constantly have to balance between letting someone make a mistake and learn from it, and stepping in to take over.

It's a tough transformation, learning to delegate and step back while still staying passionate about the product and inspiring others with your values. But when you finally build a team that shares those values, it's the most fulfilling feeling there is.

- What client request made you say: "No, this is not what the market needs"?

There have been quite a few, actually. If we added everything to the backlog, the product simply wouldn't exist in its current form. It would be chaos, a mess of custom features with an unsupportable and unscalable architecture.

Very early on, we were in close talks with a key client and prioritized their wishes almost above everything else. At some point, they demanded that the partner's stats should only show clicks, registrations, first deposits, and basic filters by period and brand. Even back then, our reports had a far wider range of fields, filters, and groupings.

We decided not to cut the product. Instead, we made the fields and filters flexible and configurable for each client, because you can't please everyone anyway.

In the end, that client left, even though the relationship was important for our reputation. It was frustrating, but it once again highlighted a simple truth: tailoring your platform to the narrow demands of a single client means losing sight of the market and building a product that only works for one player.

- Traffic suppliers regularly encounter dishonest brands that intentionally scam and then relaunch under a new name. Some of these brands operate on platforms like yours. Do you feel any responsibility as a provider, and do you have tools to filter such players out at the entry stage?

Every client undergoes a detailed KYC check before signing a contract. Without that, cooperation is simply not possible. We also operate on a prepayment basis: if a client stops paying us, service provision stops. Besides, we track the reasons why affiliate programs are closed. If an operator owes money to us or to affiliates, that's a red flag.

At the same time, it's important to understand the role of a B2B platform. We provide technological infrastructure and software support. We ensure data is processed correctly and displayed transparently, conduct initial compliance checks, and can mediate in disputes if necessary. However, software does not manage the financial liquidity of someone else's business.

What may look like intentional fraud from the outside is often just a cessation of funding. Hired managers pitch ideas to investors, build teams, and launch projects. Then the funding runs out, there are no results, the investor loses patience, and the project shuts down. The investor leaves iGaming, and the team moves on to the next operator.

As a B2B provider, we do everything we can to filter out questionable brands during compliance. But no technology can guarantee the financial stability of someone else's business model.

- Was there a moment when platform data showed you something you yourself refused to believe?

Yes, data regularly highlights such things.

  • Ready‑made banners are almost useless. From the very beginning, we gave operators the ability to upload any banners and creatives. But when we looked at the analytics, we saw that over 90% of all referral links in the system were just direct links. Because of those numbers, we kept treating HTML5 banners as a nice bonus and kept postponing their development, even though almost every operator asked about them during the sales stage.
  • Affilka and mobility. Back then, less than 5% of users accessed the interface from mobile devices. The logic seemed solid: this is a work tool for analytics, full of tables. Who would use it from a phone? But the world went fully remote, people started working on the go, and affiliate managers began generating links for partners right at expos. The share of mobile usage in interfaces jumped to nearly 30%. That forced us to rethink our approach to UX design. It's not just about a responsive interface. It's about the fact that the future of B2B software lies in the concept of interface‑free design. For most operational tasks, a heavy web interface isn't needed at all. All data and alerts could just come through a convenient channel like a messenger.
  • Operators demanding 24/7 account manager support. Yet throughout all 8 years of the platform's operation, we've observed user behavior and seen a deep drop in logins on weekends. Everyone loudly demands 24/7 support just in case, but in reality, on Saturdays and Sundays, affiliate managers barely log in.

- In just six months, Affilka has added 95 brands and is now tracking over 150 million players. With this kind of growth, what scares you more: falling behind the market, or outgrowing what made the platform special in the first place?

What scares me most is becoming legacy software.

When we first entered the market, we called ourselves the "new kid on the block." Not all operators were ready to work with us back then because "affiliates only want to work with software A and B." It took time to establish ourselves.

Now we're 8+ years in. We no longer hear rejections based on software A and B. In fact, many job postings for affiliate managers now explicitly list Affilka experience as a requirement.

At the same time, we have plenty of competitors, and many of them are genuinely good. So resting on our laurels is definitely not an option. We constantly monitor the market, our competitors, client feedback, and try to stay current.

I want us to remain a flexible, tech‑driven partner, while keeping our startup mentality alive. That means avoiding bureaucracy and staying agile in our processes and feature development.

- What's one thing in the affiliate industry you'd like to change, but don't yet know how?

What I'd like to see is real data transparency.

Affiliates often come to us and ask: "Why don't you show X and Y in the reports? We need that for our analytics." The frustrating part is that Affilka reports already offer quite a lot of metrics and grouping options. But the final decision on whether to show them or not always remains with the operator.

As a result, CPA affiliates often only get NGR, registration, and first deposit data. They're denied access to player‑level details, GEO breakdowns, and other parameters. Yet affiliates understand perfectly well that if Operator A on our platform shares everything, then Operator B definitely has that data too.

We try to gently push the market forward. We keep expanding our API endpoints for affiliates so they can pull more data directly into their own systems. Moreover, we add fields to default reports and use onboarding to encourage new operators to give partners as much context as possible. Over time, many operators start to treat this level of detail as the norm. But making it a mandatory industry standard is still a tough sell.

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Quick Answers

AI: assistant or future competitor?

Definitely an assistant. Right now, AI handles the routine brilliantly: initial research, test generation, developing standard features, code reviews, and documentation. This frees up a huge amount of team resources for genuinely complex tasks like architecture, strategy, and product innovation. At the same time, key decisions, priority setting, and final control still rest with people. The main thing here is not to fall for FOMO and not to try replacing everything at once, but to apply what actually works.

What matters more: a strong product or a strong team?

The team, no question. Without people, there is no product at all. When a product has been around for years and has accumulated a lot of legacy, maintaining it and constantly dealing with pushback starts to demoralize everyone around. Trying to build new features on top of it is like adding floors to a rotting foundation while the building inspector has already frozen everything for violations. Only a great team can rebuild that foundation in time and move the product forward.