The Affiliate Marketing Podcast

Why Most Affiliate Networks Are Built for the Brand, Not the Partner
Dorin Boerescu has been in this industry since 2009. He started as an affiliate, bought a network that was turning over next to nothing, and has since facilitated more than 828 million euros in GMV. But the number that matters most to him is not the revenue figure. It is the question nobody asked when they built every traditional network before his: who actually has the right to decide how the marketing budget gets spent?
What followed that question is Business League, a full-transparency affiliate ecosystem built around one metric, the number of sales. No branded traffic allowed. No hidden rankings. No six-month approval chains. Just a live leaderboard, gamified performance tiers, and a platform that treats affiliates like the traders they actually are.
Lee-Ann sat down with Dorin to find out how a concept born in Romania is now live in Ireland, why complete transparency makes programs stronger rather than more vulnerable, and what happens when you build an affiliate network from the affiliate's point of view rather than the advertiser's.

Talking Points Include
Why affiliates are traders, not content creators and why the best performers in Business League have never read a Kotler textbook
The leaderboard that embarrassed a client who thought he was number one and why seeing the real ranking changed how he ran his program from that day forward
Full transparency as a fraud deterrent and why making all data visible to everyone keeps bad actors out and drives up quality across the entire ecosystem
How gamification goes beyond commission from speed contests to conversion rate competitions, and why affiliates compete even when the prize money is only 25 euros
The case against budget caps in performance marketing and why capping spend in a cost-per-sale model is one of the most counterproductive things a brand can do

Listen to Find Out More About
How Dorin went from selling his agency shares in 2009 to building a network that outperforms traditional media channels on ROAS
Why Business League launched in Ireland first, what he found when he got there, and which market is next
How a branded traffic ban is enforced technically and what happens to affiliates who try to get around it
The five performance tiers from freelancer to unicorn and what it actually takes to move between them
Why Dorin would have dinner with Jeff Bezos and what Amazon's affiliate program did for this entire industry
What an ROAS of 11.9 from non-branded traffic looks like in practice across 900 e-shops and 5,700 affiliates

Key Segments and Where to Tune In
[10:25] The Business League model explained: Premier League for marketing, 28-day rounds, five tiers, and why the only metric that matters is the number of sales
[19:10] Full transparency as a competitive moat: why showing everyone the data keeps fraud out, makes brands better, and builds genuine respect between partners at different levels
[24:30] Gamification in depth: the First 100 speed contest, conversion rate competitions, and why Dorin used the same system on his kids to get them to brush their teeth
[33:20] Rapid fire round: affiliate marketing in three words, the one thing e-commerce brands get wrong when they launch a program, and who Dorin would have dinner with

Send me a text with your questions

What happens when a 26-year performance marketing veteran looks at the creator and affiliate divide and says the industry is solving the wrong problem entirely?
If your affiliate program and creator program sit in separate budget lines with separate managers measured against completely different success metrics, this episode will feel uncomfortably familiar. Todd Ulisoe, Chief Revenue Officer of Nomix Group, has spent 26 years watching brands unknowingly build the same problem into their marketing structures over and over again. The solution, he argues, is not better technology. It's better people alignment.
Todd's career reads like a history of digital marketing itself: Amazon in its early days, building one of the world's second-largest ad networks, marketing for Dane Cook before influencer was even a word, building and selling three separate businesses. Now at Nomix Group, overseeing a portfolio that processes three billion monthly queries, he's seeing exactly where the creator and affiliate worlds are colliding and how brands can stop treating that collision like a problem.

Talking Points Include:
Why the creator versus affiliate budget battle has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how people are compensated, and what actually has to shift at C-suite level before any of it changes
How unified measurement frameworks work in practice, and why brands that reconcile creators and affiliates against the same verified transaction outcomes will outperform those that keep them siloed
What three billion monthly queries tells you about where consumer intent is moving right now, and which channels are capturing purchase signals before Google even gets involved
Why Todd believes the label affiliate marketing is holding the channel back, and what calling it performance-based media would actually unlock for brands trying to build market share
The crawl, walk, run approach to integrating creators into your existing affiliate program without breaking the economics that are already working

Listen to Find Out More About:
Why Todd refuses to call it affiliate marketing anymore, and what renaming the channel to performance-based media would do for how brands budget and value it
The distinction between transparency and brand safety that changes how you should be questioning your publisher partners entirely
What the Target creator program restructure signals about where the rest of retail is heading with its partner mix
Clicks without context: the metric Todd says performance marketers are most consistently wrong about right now, and what to focus on instead
The rapid fire round: one channel to back for the next five years, CPA versus revenue share, and the best conference opener after 26 years in the industry

Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:
[06:25] Where the affiliate and creator worlds actually break down: different budget owners, different success metrics, and why forcing both into the same operating logic creates friction before a single campaign launches
[18:31] What three billion monthly queries actually tells you about consumer intent in 2025 and which channels are picking up purchase signals before Google is even in the picture
[24:15] CPC to CPA: why Todd says it is just math, how Shopnomix runs 90 to 95 percent CPA, and the four-step framework for proving out the economics before you scale
[29:41] Rapid fire: creators or traditional affiliates for the next five years, the metric everyone gets wrong, and the line Todd uses at conferences after 26 years in the game

Send me a text with your questions

What happens when the biggest threat to your publishing business is also buried inside the data you're not looking at? 
Jorge Barbosa of wecantrack, joins Lee-Ann to talk about what is actually happening to publishers right now, why most of them are flying blind without realising it, and what the ones who are thriving are doing differently. The conversation covers HCU updates, AI overviews cannibalising traffic, the overlooked relationship between affiliate managers and publishers, and why EPC broken down by traffic source might be the most important number in your business that you're not tracking.

Talking Points Include:
The visibility gap most publishers don't know they have and why logging into your affiliate network reports is not the same as understanding your business
How one publisher shifted from 80 percent organic to 80 percent paid traffic over four years and grew overall revenue in the process
Why AI overviews are changing the user journey in ways that affect affiliate managers just as much as publishers and what you should be doing about it depending on who your audience actually is
The case for affiliate managers paying for their top publishers' tracking tools and the commercial intelligence that comes back in return

Listen to Find Out More About:
Why EPC by traffic source and landing page is the one metric Jorge always leads with in demos, and what it reveals that network reports never will
How big publishers use automated link testing and monetisation scripts to protect revenue at scale without adding headcount
The LLM tracking feature wecantrack is building that measures how often an AI model is crawling your content, not just mentioning it
Why affiliate marketing as a side hustle is the myth that drives Jorge mad, and what the industry actually looks like when you pull back the lens
What the successful publisher looks like in 2027, in one sentence
Why publishers building a brand rather than just a website is the single most important strategic shift happening in the industry right now

Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:
[02:00] The pain points publishers are dealing with right now: HCU losses, AI overview traffic cannibalisation, and why most are still guessing about where their revenue comes from
[06:50] A live demo reality check: the publisher who thought YouTube was irrelevant until the data showed it was their best-converting channel
[22:08] Pivot or die: real examples of publishers who lost eighty percent of organic revenue and rebuilt stronger by acting on what the data told them
[28:00] The rapid fire round: the one metric everyone should track, the best and worst things to happen to publishers in two years, and what 2027 looks like for the publishers who make it

Call to Action
A big thank you to Jorge for being so generous with what he's seen on the ground. If this episode has made you think differently about the data sitting inside your publishing business or program, that is worth acting on sooner rather than later. Have a look at their Affiliate Dashboard or book a demo if this episode has sparked your interest.
KonverJ works with brands and affiliate managers to build publisher relationships and program strategies that are grounded in what the data actually shows. If you want to stop guessing and start making decisions that compound, get in touch with the team here.

Rate, Review and Subscribe on
Send me a text with your questions

What happens when your affiliate publisher is a sleep-deprived new mum with 45,000 verified users, a Dragon's Den deal, and strong opinions about how brands treat people? You listen.
Olivia Davson is the co-founder of Cubbi, the UK's first discount platform built specifically for verified new and expecting parents. She launched it eight weeks after having her first child, built the first version of the app with her sister who had zero coding experience, onboarded over 30 brands before launch, and pitched her business live on BBC's Dragon's Den at nine months pregnant. She walked out with a 50,000 pound investment.
In this episode, Lee-Ann talks with Olivia about what it actually feels like to enter the affiliate industry as a new publisher, why most affiliate managers missed the opportunity she represented early on, and what brands who did show up early gained because of it. The conversation covers the mechanics of Cubbi's verification model, why the parent demographic is unlike any other in consumer marketing, and what the affiliate channel still gets wrong about the publisher relationship.

Talking Points Include:
What Cubbi actually is and why the parent lifecycle is a marketer's playbook in a way that student discount platforms are not
The outreach reality nobody talks about: Olivia contacted a thousand brands before launch. Around thirty said yes. What those thirty did differently that made them irreplaceable partners
How Dragon's Den changed everything overnight, from word-of-mouth pockets across the UK to a nationwide spike in downloads and credibility that no paid campaign could have bought
Why Olivia screens every inbound brand enquiry personally and the red lines that will get a brand turned away regardless of budget

Listen to Find Out More About:
The exact moment Olivia decided Cubbi needed to exist, standing at a coffee shop counter on maternity pay and doing the mental arithmetic
What brands Olivia singles out as genuinely getting the parent audience right, and what they are doing that others are not
How Matthew from Cashblack supported Olivia at the moment she was closest to walking away, and why that kind of peer support matters more than people admit
The expansion plan for Cubbi, what comes after nailing the UK, and which markets are already asking when they are next
Why not everyone needs to understand what you are building, and how that mindset shift changes how you show up as a founder
What the Dragon's Den investment from Susie Ma has meant practically for the business beyond the headline number

Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:
[07:25] The scrappy startup reality: a thousand outreach messages, thirty brand partners, and what the ones who said yes understood that the others missed
[13:00] How Cubbi verifies users, why the verification model matters to brands, and the difference between targeted reach and spray-and-pray traffic
[15:37] Dragon's Den: why Olivia went on the show at nine months pregnant, what happened when the episode aired, and what a nationwide audience spike looks like on a growth map
[19:00] What the industry gets wrong about new publishers and why the affiliate channel is more transactional than it needs to be

Call to Action
A big thank you to Olivia for sharing her story so openly. If this episode has made you think differently about how your program handles early-stage publishers, that instinct is worth acting on.
KonverJ works with brands and affiliate managers to audit partner recruitment and relationship strategies from the ground up. If you want to build a program that attracts the next Cubbi before th
Send me a text with your questions

The rules of discovery are being rewritten in real time. Here is what affiliate managers need to understand before the market moves on without them.
If you have been half-listening to conversations about AI search and hoping it will settle down before you have to do anything about it, this episode is your wake-up call. Reza Moaiandin, co-founder of SALT.agency, has spent 25 years watching the internet evolve from static HTML to generative AI. He joins Lee-Ann to cut through the noise on SEO, AEO and GEO, explain what the data from his clients is actually showing about shifting user behaviour, and give affiliate managers a clear-headed diagnostic for where to focus right now.
Talking Points Include:
Why SEO, AEO and GEO are not three separate disciplines -- and the crucial distinction between winning the click, being in the answer, and being part of the answer that every affiliate manager needs to understand right no
The 20% tipping point that changes everything -- Reza's research tracks the mass adoption rate of generative AI globally, and his data suggests the hockey stick moment is closer than most people think
The collapsing customer funnel -- how discovery, comparison, evaluation and shortlisting are now happening inside a single AI interaction, and what that means for the partner segmentation models affiliate programs still rely on

Listen to Find Out More About:
Why Reza refuses to use keyword difficulty as a meaningful metric, and the specific example of a tiny B2B company that outranked international businesses for a keyword rated 99 out of 100
The hidden technical trick using Cloudflare and server logs that lets you see which of your pages AI platforms are actually pulling, and what that tells you about how your affiliates' content is being used
Why ChatGPT and Claude give different answers when Reza is asked to pick a favourite, and which one he recommends for affiliate managers specifically
How the user journey is being compressed so that discovery, comparison and purchase intent are collapsing into a single AI interaction before a user even reaches your website
The generational behaviour shift Reza is tracking using his father and his teenage nephew as a real-world test of when mass adoption has genuinely arrived
Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:
[05:06] Reza breaks down the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO in plain language, and explains why confusing them leads affiliate managers to make the wrong budget decisions
[11:00] How the traditional customer funnel is collapsing inside a single AI interaction, illustrated with the running shoe example that makes the shift impossible to ignore
[20:40] The diagnostic Reza would run on any affiliate program today: where to start, what to fix first, and why fixing AEO and GEO before your SEO foundations are solid is a waste of time and budget
[24:44] The server log technique that tells you exactly which pages AI platforms are pulling from your site and your affiliates' content, and why most affiliate managers are not looking at this data
Call to Action
A big thank you to Reza for sharing his research and his thinking so generously. If this episode has made you question whether your current partner segmentation still reflects how your customers actually find you, that instinct is worth following up on.
KonverJ works with brands and affiliate managers to audit and rebuild partner strategies that are built for where the market is heading, not where it has been. If that conversation is timely for your program, get in touch with the team here.

Send me a text with your questions