At SiGMA Euro-Med 2025, NetRefer marks a major milestone: two decades in affiliate marketing. David Buhagiar, Head of Marketing & Acquisitions, highlighted the company’s journey and ongoing leadership. With state-of-the-art technology and partnerships with Microsoft, NetRefer services some of the largest operators in the iGaming sector.
Today, the platform processes around one billion impressions each month while maintaining exceptional service standards. NetRefer continues to lead by adhering to its core values of clarity, fairness, and trust, which Buhagiar credits as essential to its long-term success.
“This is what I believe keeps us at the forefront of the game.”
NetRefer’s booth at iGB Barcelona drew attention with the launch of Co-Pilot AI and the upcoming Report Builder Add-On. Both tools showcase NetRefer’s commitment to innovation in data handling and reporting.
Co-Pilot AI allows users to ask complex questions and receive clear answers instantly. Report Builder enhances flexibility with features resembling an Excel format on steroids, enabling rows, columns, formulas, and automated notifications.
“We are the first to market with our Co-Pilot AI, bringing artificial intelligence to affiliate marketing data.”
“Report Builder not only gives detail but also notifies you when it is time to look at the reports.”
Reflecting on two decades in the business, Buhagiar emphasized trust as the key theme for operator–affiliate relations. Trust, he explained, directly drives growth and collaboration in the industry.
“The more trust there is, the more business there is for both sides.”
Operators and affiliates are also increasingly focusing on paid media and advertising. In response, NetRefer is preparing to launch a bot detection tool and user agent string reports by Q4 2025. These tools will help distinguish real traffic from fake, allowing stakeholders to protect their marketing spend.
Looking ahead, NetRefer plans to expand its data extraction capabilities beyond operators to affiliates. Automation will be a central theme, unlocking new opportunities and making NetRefer the single destination for managing affiliate programs.
“Ultimately, our goal is to close the loop and make NetRefer the only place to manage your affiliate program.”
At iGB Live London 2026, CasinoLove interviewed Amanda Camenzuli from NetRefer about the changing state of affiliate marketing. The conversation focused on traffic quality, attribution, reporting, player value, AI automation, and the need for operators to make decisions from clean and measurable data.
Amanda explained that affiliate marketing has become more complex, but complexity itself is not the biggest issue. In her view, the larger problem is that complexity has hidden inefficiencies for many years. Affiliate marketing has often been measured by volume: clicks, registrations, deposits, and player numbers. That model is now under pressure.
“This industry has been running on volume, who has the biggest number of clicks, players, registrations. I must say that that era is over now.”
One of the strongest points in the interview was the shift from asking how much traffic an affiliate brings to asking what quality of traffic that affiliate brings. Amanda explained that some players register, deposit once, and then disappear. In CPA models, operators may still pay commission for these players even when their long-term value is weak.
This creates a problem for operators. When player value is placed next to commission paid, the affiliate channel does not always outperform other acquisition channels. The issue becomes harder in a multi-jurisdiction environment, where operators must also deal with attribution, manual processes, compliance pressure, and limited time and resources.
“Today the actual shift is going from how much traffic versus to what is the quality of that traffic.”
According to Amanda, many reporting systems still do not show this reality clearly. NetRefer sees its role in helping operators understand the gap between apparent traffic volume and real business value. By studying data patterns across clients, NetRefer can help operators better understand where they stand and how traffic should be evaluated.
Traffic quality and attribution accuracy are now major topics for operators and affiliate programs. Amanda noted that “quality” is one of the most used terms in the industry, but also one of the least measured. Many operators ask for quality data, but fewer can prove it properly.
She explained the difference between players who show intent but do not generate real value, and value players who bring revenue to the operator. Some users may look active inside a dashboard, but they mainly inflate costs, bonuses, and acquisition spending. Real traffic is different because it brings measurable revenue and justifies commission paid to the right channel.
“Quality is a terminology that is very much used today in our industry. At the same time, it is one of the least measured.”
This is where NetRefer’s enhanced tracking comes in. The goal is to give operators visibility across the player journey from the first touch point. This helps them see where genuine traffic comes from and attribute commission to the correct affiliate channel.
Amanda also discussed bot detection and user agent details. These tools help strip out invalid or suspicious traffic and give operators more information about devices and behavior patterns.
Instead of simply producing more reports, charts, and dashboards, the goal is to make affiliate data more honest and measurable. If operators can trust the data, they can make better decisions before paying out commissions.
“The point here isn't to necessarily generate more data or more reports or charts, but it is to make the data honest and measurable.”
This marks a difference between traditional affiliate performance marketing and what NetRefer is building today. Amanda described NetRefer as a performance marketing platform focused on measured and defensible quality, not only more traffic or more data.
Many operators have huge amounts of data, but they still struggle to turn it into clear business decisions. Amanda described this as being insight poor, rather than data poor.
Operators want to understand which affiliates are making them money and which affiliates are costing more than they bring in. This is difficult when reports do not put cost and value on the same page. According to Amanda, this is one of the problems NetRefer’s tools are designed to solve.
“Most operators aren't necessarily data poor. However, they are insight poor.”
NetRefer’s BI analytics and Report Builder tools help different teams select the metrics that matter most to them. This can include affiliate managers, legal teams, compliance teams, and finance teams. Useful metrics may include revenue versus commission, cohort retention over time, and threshold-based triggers.
With automatic triggers, webhooks, and threshold-based reporting, operators can receive insights about player behavior before paying a channel. The main value is not in prettier charts, but in catching financial leakage before it becomes invisible inside the program.
“It's about catching the money that leaks while everybody else is busy.”
Looking ahead, Amanda said the affiliate industry will be tested over the next two years, but in a positive way. Operators are becoming better at measuring before they pay. They are asking whether an affiliate relationship truly earns its commission, or whether the operator is paying for players it might have acquired anyway.
This may split the market into two groups. Affiliates that generate genuine traffic and high-intent players will continue to be valuable. Programs that cannot prove their contribution may struggle.
“The programs that will win over the next two years are the ones who can prove they earn their contribution.”
Amanda pointed to two major technological shifts. The first is the move from reactive to predictive analysis. Operators want to know which players are likely to churn and which high-intent players are likely to keep generating revenue.
The second shift is AI automation. However, Amanda warned that AI only works properly when the data foundation is honest and trustworthy. Without that foundation, automation can scale bad decisions instead of improving them.
“AI on data which is not honest and trustworthy, if you don't have the solid foundation, AI automation will only industrialize bad decisions.”
Amanda connected these trends back to NetRefer’s values: clear, fair, and trusted. For NetRefer, these values are strongly linked to data. Clear data shows what is happening. Fair data helps operators understand what they should pay for. Trusted data gives operators a stronger foundation for future decision-making.
As affiliate marketing becomes more measurable and more automated, the ability to define the value of each partner may become one of the most important advantages for operators and affiliate programs.
“Clarity on what is happening, being fair on what you're actually paying, and having a solid background and a solid foundation like our data management platform is all that the operators will ever need more than ever in the future.”