Operators increasingly look beyond FTDs towards retention, redeposits, LTV, and profitability. Affiliates understand that expectation, but often have to optimise for those outcomes while seeing only part of the player journey.
This creates a gap. Operators and affiliates ultimately want the same thing: valuable players, but they work with different data, different time horizons, and different mechanics of scale.
Nikita Koshelyuk, CEO of Trident, spoke about what operators may be missing about performance traffic, where responsibility for player value actually sits, and what needs to change if both sides want to scale together.
Scaling traffic without losing quality
Operators have become much more focused on traffic quality. From the affiliate side, what do you think they still misunderstand about how performance traffic is actually generated and scaled?
I think operators still sometimes underestimate that performance traffic is about constant testing, not a static, predictable process. To scale volume, affiliates have to continuously test new creatives, funnels, GEOs, and hypotheses, so quality and volume cannot always be increased simultaneously and linearly. When an operator looks at traffic only through the lens of its own CRM, it can easily miss the nuances of how ad platforms and modern algorithms actually work.
Meta, Google, and TikTok algorithms need spend and time to learn. Operators often expect 50–100 FTDs with a high average deposit on the very first test. However, modern platforms rely on machine learning: to find a paying audience and train a campaign, a buyer needs to generate enough volume, test different hypotheses, and burn testing budgets. You simply cannot scale high-quality traffic through micro-caps of 20–30 deposits.
Scaling is not linear. Every additional step in scaling increases the cost of acquisition (CPA). Expecting a multiple increase in volume without flexibility on rates or hybrid compensation models is unrealistic.
Second, traffic quality depends heavily on the operator’s own product funnel.
Operators tend to pin poor retention and redeposit rates exclusively on “low-quality affiliate traffic.” In doing so, they often neglect to audit their own product:
How stable is the PSP infrastructure?
Are local payment methods actually working?
Is the retention strategy effective?
An affiliate can bring a very similar audience to two operators and get completely different results because one product converts and retains users better. So when an operator focuses only on the traffic source rather than the entire funnel, it can mistakenly treat a product or retention problem as a traffic-quality problem.
“Traffic quality” has become one of the most used terms in iGaming. But do operators and affiliates actually mean the same thing when they use it?
I think operators and affiliates define “traffic quality” roughly the same way. For both sides, it comes down to how valuable an acquired user is to the business. It means an active, engaged player who generates LTV and profit. These are real, paying, retained users who meet the relevant requirements. Ultimately, both sides want the exact same thing: to acquire real players who make deposits.
The difference is less about how the term is understood and more about access to data. The affiliate sees the top of the funnel, while the operator has full visibility into what happens with the user afterwards. So the key question is how fully both sides can assess the user’s actual value.
An affiliate often simply doesn’t have the full picture. They might see registrations, FTDs, and, at best, total DepSum. But they don’t see redeposit counts, NGR, chargebacks, fraud triggers, or player behavior after 30 or 90 days. So asking an affiliate to optimize for LTV without providing the relevant data means asking them to manage a metric they cannot actually measure.
That’s why both sides might hold the exact same standard for quality, while basing their assessment on completely different data and time horizons.
Bonus hunters are a good example. From the operator’s perspective, a user who claims a welcome bonus, wagers it, and cashes out is “low-quality traffic.” From the affiliate’s perspective, that same user is completely legitimate; they came through the same creative and the same advertising campaign as a future high roller.
The data and value gap
CPA is becoming less effective as a growth model because it doesn’t reflect the long-term value of a player. If the industry agrees on that, why is it still so difficult to align operators and affiliates around value?
I think the problem is that very few operators can clearly define what exact outcome they expect from a depositor after 14 or 30 days, and how much they are willing to pay for that outcome. The vast majority of brands still can’t properly quantify their target performance. They only see an abstract goal of “break even in six months” without understanding the intermediate benchmarks: What should the Day 7 redeposit rate be? What total turnover volume is expected by Day 14?
Even when an operator does understand this math, they aren’t always willing to share it with the affiliate. Many brands are either technically unequipped or simply reluctant to pass post-acquisition player activity data back into the buyer’s tracker. Why? Perhaps because they want to keep some room to maneuver: if the brand’s overall P&L declines at the end of the month, they can always label the traffic “low value,” reduce payouts, deny rate increases, or delay traffic checks. In that paradigm, “value” is used as a tool for manipulation rather than partnership. The affiliate is expected to make media buying decisions without having the full picture of its actual value to the operator. And that lack of transparency is one of the main things slowing the transition from a simple CPA model to KPI/value-based models.
Moving from CPA to a value-based model isn’t just about swapping one payment model for another. Both sides need to trust each other’s data and have the same understanding of what “value” actually means. You can’t build a value-driven partnership when the rules of the game are either undefined or deliberately kept hidden. It demands stable postbacks or API integrations, along with continuous, structured feedback. Without that, any talk of “traffic quality” remains entirely superficial.
When an operator sees weak retention or low player value from an affiliate source, how much of that should be treated as an acquisition problem, and how much can come from the product, CRM, onboarding or retention side?
I wouldn’t say there is any universal ratio here. The quality of the acquired players certainly impacts retention and the user’s long-term value, but once the user has made a deposit, their behavior is shaped primarily by the product itself: onboarding, UX, CRM, messaging, and the overall player journey.
Based on my subjective assessment: 40% is the affiliate’s area of responsibility, and 60% is the operator’s.
At the acquisition stage (within the affiliate’s scope of responsibility), several issues can arise:
Misleading and manipulative narratives: promising guaranteed winning schemes, hacked algorithms, or instant access to non-existent bonuses.
A mismatch between the creative and the offer.
Targeting non-paying audiences.
However, if an affiliate delivers clean, targeted traffic without misleading claims, their job is done.
A player registered and deposited real money. They showed trust and genuine interest in the product. If they don’t return after that, the reason is almost always somewhere within the product itself:
Repeat payment success rate: one of the most common hidden issues. The player is ready to make a second deposit, clicks “Deposit,” but the payment gateway returns an error or declines the transaction. The operator, meanwhile, sees it as “poor affiliate retention.”
Difficult onboarding and verification (KYC): aggressive document demands triggered right at the user’s first withdrawal attempt.
Blind, delayed CRM: sending generic emails to an inbox nobody checks, instead of context-triggered push notifications, SMS, or personalized calls.
How do you identify the real problem? By running a cohort analysis. If the operator’s retention drops exclusively on traffic from one specific affiliate while remaining healthy across all others, the issue is on the media buying side. But if that same downtrend shows up across all partners and even their own in-house buying, it’s time for the operator to fix their end of the funnel.
Where do you see the biggest information gap today? What does the operator know about the player that the affiliate needs to know in order to make better acquisition decisions?
The biggest information gap is in understanding what kind of traffic the operator actually considers valuable. The operator sees the full picture after acquisition and understands which users ultimately deliver the best results, but those expectations and criteria are rarely communicated to the affiliate.
As a result, affiliates optimize for what they can measure on their side: volume, conversion rates, and acquisition costs. Meanwhile, the operator evaluates performance much more deeply, but often keeps those criteria internal. This creates a rather paradoxical situation: the affiliate is expected to deliver higher-quality traffic, but nobody defines what “high quality” actually means in practice.
There is also a more basic level: operational incidents. For example, payment gateway issues, product unavailability, technical problems, or a blocked domain are often not communicated to media buyers for hours, and sometimes even days. This directly affects how buyers operate and how they interpret their traffic data. For example, a buyer may stop seeing new FTDs and start changing elements of their funnel, even though the problem has actually been on the product side the entire time.
Can operators damage the scalability of a strong traffic source by focusing too aggressively on short-term KPIs? Where is the balance between protecting unit economics and giving an affiliate enough room to test and optimise?
The short answer is yes.
Performance traffic is not a static product: the source, creative angle, and ad algorithm need time to go through a testing and learning phase. For a campaign to optimize, it requires a steady volume of conversions (at least 50 FTDs per week).
If traffic is repeatedly limited or paused by 20–30 FTD caps before there is enough data to evaluate it properly, this can disrupt the learning process, reduce efficiency, and make subsequent relaunches more expensive.
At the same time, I don’t think an operator should simply give an affiliate unlimited time to test. The operator has its own economics and clear boundaries that it cannot exceed.
In my view, the key is to agree upfront on which metrics will be evaluated, over what period, and when decisions about changing the volume or terms will be made. This gives the affiliate a clear testing window while allowing the operator to understand when enough data has been collected to make an informed decision.
What a Scalable Partnership Actually Looks Like
What separates an affiliate that can deliver traffic from an affiliate an operator can confidently scale with?
The key difference is predictability.
A mature partner understands how their traffic performs on Day 7, Day 14, and Day 30. They are ready to recalibrate funnels, switch app themes, or test new targeting cohorts to make sure the operator’s cohort economics makes sense.
A mature partner has their own resilient infrastructure (internal dev team, smart push notifications, automation). Operational disruptions and supply-side issues don’t bring the team to a halt.
A mature partner avoids clickbait creatives, schemes, and promises of easy wins. They bring in a solid, average player interested in the product for genuine reasons.
A mature partner sets up deep postback tracking, integrates complex analytical events, monitors payment gateway pass rates, and proactively alerts the operator to anomalies (such as a drop in conversion caused by a specific acquirer failure).
As operators build more acquisition expertise in-house and the market moves towards hybrid models, what should they expect from external affiliates that they cannot easily replicate internally?
An external affiliate gives an operator something an in-house team simply isn’t able to replicate: diversity, speed, and risk.
An internal team inevitably builds its own toolkit and standardized playbook. While great for efficiency and control, over time this can lead to operational inertia. A network of external affiliates continuously tests different creative angles, funnels, traffic sources, formats, and messaging models. A single operator simply cannot run that volume of independent, parallel experiments.
In-house teams typically focus on proven, predictable channels. External teams tap into entirely different audience segments: complex mobile store flows, aggressive funnels, local ad networks, and alternative formats.
An operator’s internal buying is a constant OPEX: salaries, bonuses, infrastructure, software, and an ad budget allocated to endless testing. When working with an external affiliate, the operator pays for results. The media buying team takes on the risks of auction volatility, testing new approaches, and creative fatigue using its own capital.
When an operator is evaluating a new performance partner, what should they be looking at beyond CPA, current volume, and historical results?
Honestly, I wouldn’t try to come up with a universal checklist for operators; every business has its own criteria. But I think there’s one important thing to keep in mind: historical performance doesn’t always reflect a partner’s potential.
I wouldn’t try to evaluate a partner based solely on their presentation or promises. Probably the best approach is to start with a small volume, see how the team works in practice, how closely expectations match the actual results, and only then decide whether to scale the partnership further.
Should the relationship eventually go beyond traffic delivery? What kind of market intelligence can a strong performance partner give an operator about creatives, audiences, funnels, GEOs, and changes in acquisition behaviour?
I would put it this way: they can go beyond that scope, but they don’t have to. It is entirely up to each individual operator–affiliate pair.
“Deep partnership” has become a popular term in the industry, but let’s be realistic: the operator has its own business, and the affiliate has their own. The best thing an affiliate can do is deliver traffic that meets the operator’s expectations. The operator, in turn, should process that traffic, convert it, and pay for it.
If the two sides have a multi-year track record, mutual exclusivity, or joint investments, for example, developing a custom product or brand specifically for the partnership, then a deeper exchange of data makes sense.
At the same time, we are always ready to provide operators with practically any information that can help them make more effective product decisions.
If you could change one thing about the way operators and affiliates work together today, what would have the biggest impact on the quality and scalability of acquisition?
If I had to choose just one fundamental change, it would be moving from hidden expectations to clear, measurable SLAs agreed upon at the start of the partnership.
The biggest boost to both quality and volume would come from one simple rule: the operator clearly defines the cohort value criteria upfront and supports them with a dynamic payout model.
That single change would eliminate much of the ground for mutual disputes.
Conclusion
The operator–affiliate gap is not simply about traffic quality. Both sides largely want the same outcome, but often work with different data, different timelines, and expectations that have never been clearly defined.
As acquisition moves towards deeper value metrics, the relationship has to become more measurable too: clearer cohort criteria, better data exchange, realistic testing windows, and agreed rules for scaling.
More traffic alone does not create more value. Both sides need to agree on what value actually means first.
