Blask, the AI-native iGaming analytics platform, is getting ready to launch a new capability: tracking where operator brands appear on affiliate sites, day by day, and logging proof. Ahead of the public launch, The Gamblest sat down with CEO & Co-founder Max Tesla to talk about why affiliate placement has run on trust for years, what changes once someone starts checking, and what operators should expect when it goes live.
TheGamblest: Let’s start with the basic pitch. What will the new Affiliates feature do?
Max: It shows an operator where their brand sits on an affiliate’s page, next to every competitor, on a given day. Second position or eleventh. Moved since yesterday or hasn’t. We find the affiliate sites, find the pages that carry brand rankings, and log a snapshot every day: which brands sit on the page, in what order.
TheGamblest: What’s the problem you’re solving?
Max: Affiliate placement deals are contracts. An operator pays for a logo in a specific spot, on a specific page, for a set window. Nobody checks whether it happened. The only proof anyone has is a screenshot the affiliate manager forwards from the same person whose bonus depends on that screenshot looking good. Operators pay an invoice with no receipt attached, every month, industry-wide.
TheGamblest: How does the data collection work?
Max: Three steps.
1. It’s an ongoing discovery process, not a fixed list someone maintains by hand.
2. On each site we classify all pages that are available and find the pages that carry brand rankings.
3. Every day, we record which brands sit on those pages and where they rank.
Rank is the brand’s real position on the page, logged with a screenshot as the record. Top to bottom, left to right.
TheGamblest: What was the hardest part of building this? Anything that almost didn’t work?
Max: Getting the ranking logic to survive contact with a real page. A redesign, a script that reshuffles logos on every refresh: any of that breaks a naive “read the page” approach within a day. Early on, one version flagged a brand as gone because the affiliate had switched to lazy-loading images below the fold. The brand was still there. Our crawler just hadn’t scrolled far enough. Small bug, expensive lesson: verification tooling has to be more paranoid about false negatives than the thing it’s checking.
TheGamblest: Could an affiliate or operator game this — swap a logo in and out right around when your crawler runs?
Max: Anyone determined enough to time a logo swap around a daily crawl is also determined enough that you should ask why they’re doing it. To answer directly: the screenshot is the evidence, not a number we compute after the fact and could quietly adjust. If someone’s manipulating placement specifically around when we look, that’s a more interesting story than the placement data itself.
TheGamblest: What will an operator be able to do with this that they can’t do today?
Max: Two different jobs. First: confirm a brand sits where the contract says it should, on the days being paid for. Pull up the affiliate, the page, the date. See the rank. See the screenshot. Second, and this is the one that matters over time: watch a competitor’s affiliate footprint expand. See a brand appear on affiliates it wasn’t on last month, see the count move week over week, then check exactly which sites picked it up. The first job is an audit. The second is competitive intelligence operators haven’t had before.
TheGamblest: Is this only useful to operators, or does it cut the other way for affiliates too?
Max: Both sides get something real out of it. An affiliate’s pitch to a new operator is built on trust: strong affiliates carry trusted brands. Once this is live, affiliates can show how many brands rank, which ones, for how long. A strong affiliate wants that number visible. Ad networks went through the same shift once impression counts stopped being self-reported and started being verified. Once a verified number exists, operators stop trusting an unverified one.
TheGamblest: Why hasn’t anyone built this affiliate layer before?
Max: Affiliate placement lives on thousands of individually designed web pages that nobody standardized, and it changes daily.
There’s no API for “what does this page look like today.” Someone has to go look, every day, on every page that matters, and keep looking after the page gets redesigned twice. Most companies decide that maintenance burden isn’t worth it. We decided to reinvent the web archive in our way.
TheGamblest: Where does this sit inside Blask? Is it a bolt-on, or core to what you already do?
Max: Same instinct behind everything we build at Blask: find a signal that predicts what’s happening in a market, and make it visible. Affiliate placement is a demand signal and a competitive signal, same category as search demand or game visibility. It happened to be the one nobody had bothered to structure. We’re adding a lens onto the same 5000+ brands operators already track inside Blask.
TheGamblest: When does this actually go live, and where does coverage start?
Max: We’re launching in the next few weeks, with Brazil first. Affiliate marketing carries more weight in Brazil’s operator playbook than almost anywhere else we track, so it’s the market where “is my logo where I paid for it to be” matters most right now. Coverage expands from there. I’d rather commit to one market I’m confident in than hand you a long list I have to walk back in six months. It is worth mentioning that the preview version is just scratching the surface, so many things are already under development and will ship more by the end of this year.
TheGamblest: What does success look like a year from now?
Max: If in a year the first thing an iGaming head of affiliates checks is Blask Affiliates instead of an email attachment, or a spreadsheet, that’s the shift. Worldwide coverage will happen regardless. The habit change is the real milestone.