From Affiliate to Innovator: An Exclusive Interview with John Wright, Owner of StatsDrone

• Brian Jeacoma
• September 15, 2024

We had the chance to speak with and interview John Wright, the owner of StatsDrone.com. John has been in the iGaming industry for decades as a affiliate, affiliate manager, affiliate coach, and now the co-founder of StatsDrone.com. Let’s take a look at the interview to see what John had to say.

It is an honor to speak with the owner of StatsDrone.com.  

Question: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your background. What casino games caused you to want to begin a career in the gambling industry? 

John Wright: I was in the process of graduating from university and one of my highschool friends was trying to encourage me to join his card counting team. I didn’t believe professional gambling was a real thing so I rejected this offer for 2 years.

Until one day he told me he got a BMW M3 roadster. 

It was at this time my friend was playing online casinos doing bonus hunting, playing some professional poker and the odd bet on sports. 

I started learning basic strategy of blackjack using sites like CasinoMeister and WizardOfOdds.com as my go to resources.

Eventually I learned video poker when the terms and conditions would change and then that disappeared and it become bonus hunting with slots. 

To this day, bonus hunting mostly alive and well with the small exception of a company called The Greco which does consulting for casinos for bonus abuse. They help casinos minimize bonus abuse and rewrite their signup bonuses and wagering requirements to be less friendly for bonus hunters and good for real players. 

Question: What made you want to take the leap from being a successful affiliate marketer to an affiliate coach? 

John Wright: I did affiliate coaching at the same time as affiliate marketing building my own sites. I mean you gotta practice what you preach and live and breathe the work. 

I did affiliate coaching for about 10 years but although it was a great experience, I had aspirations of launching StatsDrone for a long time so I made the decision to drop coaching and my affiliate sites to focus on this new project. That is looking at Business Intelligence in affiliate marketing. 

Question:  What about affiliate coaching do you find to be most rewarding? 

John Wright: Most of the people wanting my help would eat some of my hours and not offer anything in return so this was the least rewarding part. 

On the rewarding side, I meet Duncan Garvie who’s now working with Blexr and is the founder of BetBlocker. I’m glad I got to help him on his journey of growing his affiliate site. I’m proud to be his friend and to know someone as smart and talented as he is in the space he covers in iGaming. One of the most knowledgeable people I know in the world of gambling. 

Question:  So now we come to the creation of StatsDrone.  Was your prior experience in igaming an asett for you? 

Everything, no joke!

John Wright: On the operator side; being an affiliate manager, understanding affiliate and player fraud, bonuses and the rest.

On the player side; understanding how players work and how marketers need to build a product for their players.

On the affiliate side; experiencing the pain of running an affiliate business. 

Question:  When you created this program, what need were you hoping to address within the gambling industry?  

John Wright: The number one need I wanted to solve was revenue leak.

As an affiliate manager, I would encounter affiliates that would sometimes place a casino in the #1 position on their site because that brand offered 70% revenue share. I knew that brand was likely never to convert yet I saw casino affiliates pay attention to 2 metrics that I believed are not the most important.

Many affiliates would chase higher commission as being important to them and their total revenue.

I believe all affiliates should care about the conversion rate of their traffic, the player values of their traffic and the EPC values. EPC being earnings per click.

I mean who cares if your number 1 program makes you $5000/month if it requires say 100,000 clicks to generate that. You’d be better off giving that top exposure to a brand that might be making you $2500/month but only required say 5000 clicks to achieve that same result.

I wanted to make the data and understanding of it, easier for affiliates so they could focus on doing what they do best. Creating content and value for their users and letting us help them optimize their traffic and brands. 

Question:  Can you give me a brief overview of StatsDrone?

John Wright: I like to describe is as being like the Quickbooks for affiliate marketers. Our app pulls data from affiliate programs and we get as much of it as we can for you. Clicks, FTDs, deposit amounts, CPA amounts, qualified CPAs and revenue.

StatsDrone gets this data on 4 levels:

• Account
• Brand
• Campaign
• Dynamic variables

Question:  What differentiates StatsDrone from other affiliate management tools in the iGaming industry?

John Wright:  Super tough question. I’ll take a step back by saying I think many casino affiliates know of their pain points of running a business but they are problem aware and not solution aware.

I have some direct competitors in our industry and indirect competitors but I think if more affiliates knew about us, we would all benefit.

Some of those sites that are tools specifically for affiliates are:

• Routy
• Voonix
• Nifty Stats
• CPV Lab
• Trackonomics
• Affluent
• Affilimate
• AffiliationCloud by Raketech
• WeCanTrack
• Affiliate.ai
• Lasso
• Affiliatable

All similar tools do something slightly different than the other so we all have our collective strengths, weaknesses but we approach the problem from a different angle with our solutions. 

If you look at the Top 25 EGR affiliates in iGaming, many of them are using Voonix and some of them are using StatsDrone or Routy. For the rest not using, they have built their own in-house stats app and Business Intelligence. 

This implies that the smaller and mid-sized affiliates don’t all know about these tools or have the budgets to build themselves. 

I believe if affiliates want to get stronger, they’ll need these new BI tools to help grow their business. 

Question:  Does StatsDrone integrate with major affiliate networks and platforms like Amazon? If so, can you walk me through the integration process?

John Wright:  Not yet but we do have some popular affiliate networks supported.

Right now, we support around 1350 iGaming affiliate programs and some of them are affiliate networks. 

Simply put, we add the programs that our customers keep requesting. As an FYI, we are now adding 50 programs per month and not slowing down anytime soon. 

Question:  What type of reporting and analytics features does StatsDrone offer to help affiliates optimize their performances? 

John Wright: The 2 most popular reports we have are the brands reports and campaign analysis reports.

You can see below a list of brands showing the clicks, unique clicks, EPC and there are about 15 more columns of data that you can scroll to see. 

I think the campaign analysis is the most requested feature for people that want to use StatsDrone.

The power in using campaigns is you can assign a campaign for any of the following:

• By GEO
• By site
• By channel

So if you can segment your data by GEO like one link per country, then you can understand where your main source of FTDs are coming from. On top of that, you can know which channels have the best player values. 

If you have multiple sites, then you can use separate campaigns to monitor performance. If you have different channels like home page, newsletter, YouTube, blog posts, etc… you can segment to know where you’re generating these players from. 

Question: What metrics does StatsDrone track, and how customizable is the platform for different types of users?

John Wright: We all it the ABCDs. Accounts, brands, campaigns and dynamic variables which is S2S tracking for unique clicks or click IDs. 

Overall the platform I wouldn’t say is more customizable but rather, we standardize the data for you so you don’t have to and can have an easier time comparing programs, brands and campaigns for performance. 

Question: Trends are constantly changing. How do you stay ahead of trends in the affiliate marketing and iGaming industry, and how does that influence the development of StatsDrone?

John Wright: For that is 3 things:

• The Affiliate BI podcast
• Talking to customers
• Research

The Affiliate BI podcast, I get to chat with affiliates, data experts and a lot of big name SEOs like Eli Schwartz (author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy) . Simply put, I’m asking questions that my affiliates would want to know the answers to.

Talking to customers is something I do daily. They come to me to ask me questions and I think and hope they trust me from my life time of experience. 

Research is something that I don’t think ever ends and can never be enough of. I’m building data tools that help with more research on the affiliate marketing space and I try to share those insights with other affiliates. 

Question: How does StatsDrone handle scaling for larger teams or affiliate networks with multiple users?

John Wright: We have seats and we’ve just launched a version of our app that is fully hosted on the affiliate’s server. We cannot see our affiliate’s data but the larger companies want 100% assurance that we can’t. It is this and our seats functionality that helps.

Also the bigger the customer, the more needs they have. The more they ask us, the more we can make changes to our app to make it better. 

Question: What pricing structure does StatsDrone follow, and what factors should a business consider when deciding on a plan?

John Wright: I’m definitely not a pricing expert. Far from it. I just know that most of our customers have told us that we are not charging enough. We used to think we were after the Nifty Stats model of $25/month but I don’t think our apps are directly comparable. Half of our customers are on the premium plan and want those premium data features. 

In October we’ll have new pricing that will likely look something like this: 

• $99/month for the Starter plan
• $600+/month for the Pro plan
• $900+/month for the Enterprise plan

The main factors we have are simply getting feedback from the users. As long as we are constantly building features and delivering value, our customers are dictating how our business operates. 

Question: How do you approach partnerships or collaborations within the iGaming industry?

John Wright:With an open mind. I believe everyone should always be closing, or rather always be networking. 

If you’re someone that is talking to me asking me about GEOs for players or if I’m in need of payments, I can’t help you but I won’t say no to a LinkedIn connection and I’m happy to refer. 

I hope that by being helpful that people recommend me at some point. 

Question: How do you measure the success of your platform, and what are your goals for growth over the next year?

John Wright: For me success is 2 things:

1. Having customers that love us
2. Having a sustainable business that can grow

I get excited when our customers tell us how happy they are with our service and the product. This is everything to me.

Sure we all want to have a successful business. I’m sure we will get there in time but our only focus is on growing the business so we can continue to invest more into the product. 

As of today, we have 11 people on the team and that is all tech and nobody working in sales. The only marketing we do is the podcast I run and my ramblings on LinkedIn. 

Question: Can you share any success stories or case studies where clients have significantly improved their performance using StatsDrone?

John Wright: Last week in working with a company that just onboarded StatsDrone. They told us that their month end consolidation work used to take 10 to 11 days of work. They said our app cut that down to an afternoon. 

Question: Do you have any advise to new users of your platform? Where should people start and what can they expect to gain from your program?

John Wright: I think people should just at least try us out and talk to us to see if/how we can help. We help people save a lot of time as our first driver of value to affiliates. The 2nd driver of value is helping optimize revenue as well as identify revenue leak.

On my side, I’ll be looking to create more content to help people navigate the nuances of running an affiliate site and sharing best business practices for growing an affiliate site no matter the size of your org whether 1 person or 100+ people. 

Question: How Can People Get In Touch With You? What Are Your Socials?

You can contact John on Linkedin and Instagram.