– Your experience in the industry is already six years. How has the industry changed since then?
Emre: When I look back, I see an increasing shift to mobile so any network that used to focus on desktop cannot now ignore mobile. Another trend is performance marketing. We all passed through a time when we bought and sold on CPM. That has changed quite a lot. Currently advertisers want to pay for the actual performance they see from networks and agencies. Not only for the installs but often for in-app events. Direct publishers, websites and apps, have had a hard time adjusting to the reality but we see this trend changing there as well.
– What is the future of affiliate marketing? What do you think will evolve in the industry this year?
Ozgur: There is still a lot of fraud, which is sometimes quite sophisticated and difficult to spot. However we hope to see it changing. MMPs are getting better at fraud detection and advertisers are getting smarter about what kind of affiliates they work with. We expect and will be happy to see networks involved in rebrokering and click spamming to vanish into thin air.
I also expect influencer marketing to join forces with affiliate marketing and we already see some activity proving that. That’s why we are currently developing a performance-driven social media influencer marketplace which we named Fenomio.com. This upcoming trend will significantly reinvigorate affiliate marketing. Influencer marketing is where I spend most of my time lately, building a world class product, with our talented CTO Ozgur Kaya and our product team who are based in Izmir, Turkey.