F EATURE
GE T T I N G
T H E H O US E
IN O RDE R
Affiliates need to take some responsibility for the
success of their own industry, reckons Rightlander’s
Ian Sims. And the best way to go about this is not
by forming a union, but by getting more clued-up on
compliance, calling out the bad actors in the trade
and advocating for best practice
iGB Affiliate: Where did the idea for Rightlander come from?
Ian Sims: I was an affiliate until 2016 and had developed myself
a little tool that monitored my landing pages. It would go out
overnight and follow my links to casinos and sportsbooks and
screenshot the pages I was sending the traffic to so I could look at
them and see if there were any issues with them. It was very useful
so when I sold the network in 2016, I decided to turn it into a
landing page monitor for affiliates.
I launched it at Amsterdam Affiliate Conference last year,
where there was a real focus on compliance. At least two or three
people approached me talking about it. The then CEO of the
Gambling Commission Sarah Harrison had come in and decided
to shake them up a bit and it occurred to me that the technology
I’d written was basically scanning affiliate sites looking for links
and then following those links to see where they went, so it would
be a relatively small step to expand that to work on any site and
look for anything. I came back from Amsterdam and decided that
I’d launched too early, so I stopped all the marketing and decided to
concentrate on something focused toward compliance for operators.
I relaunched in December.
“The bottom line is the relationship between
the operators and the affiliates needs to be
much, much stronger than it is now”
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iGB Affiliate Issue 69 JUN/JUL 2018