Affiliate data brought inside the programme
Gamblers Connect, the independent B2B iGaming media platform, today confirmed John Wright, CEO and co founder of StatsDrone and NousViz, as the ninth voice to join the 2026 Contributors Program. The programme reveals one senior industry voice per month across the calendar year, and each contributor publishes under the Gamblers Connect Contributor Editorial Code.
Wright founded StatsDrone in Montreal in December 2017 with Darrell Helyar, and has run it bootstrapped since. The platform aggregates affiliate traffic and revenue data across programmes that would otherwise sit in separate dashboards on separate systems, and it now covers 2,669 affiliate programmes across 57 software platforms according to its own Affiliate Software Report published in July 2026. He came into the industry through Gaffg, the affiliate programme review site he ran from 2010, and through Gambling Domains, and he has hosted the Affiliate BI podcast since 2023.
Recognition includes Best Tech for Affiliates at the iGB Affiliate Awards in 2024, Innovator of the Year at the same awards in 2025, and Affiliate Intelligence of the Year at the AffPapa Awards in 2024. NousViz, the data intelligence platform he co founded in 2026, took the same AffPapa category in its debut year. He also was sitting on the board of trustees at BetBlocker, the responsible gambling charity, where he has contributed design work across the charity’s public facing assets until late 2025.
Focus area: Data as an affiliate discipline
Under the Contributors Program, John will publish on the operational reality of affiliate data. That covers what actually gets lost between an affiliate programme and the affiliate reading its dashboard, how tracking breaks when a programme migrates to a different software platform, what commission shaving looks like in a longitudinal data record, and why an affiliate holding hundreds of programme accounts is carrying counterparty risk that nobody prices.
The wider premise of the brief is that most affiliate businesses still run on spreadsheets and instinct, including large ones. The quarterly Affiliate Software Report is, as far as we can establish, the only public census of which software the affiliate market actually runs on, and its most recent edition shows share moving away from the legacy incumbents toward newer platforms. Contributions on Gamblers Connect are intended to move the conversation from a reporting conversation to a risk and infrastructure conversation, drawing on the StatsDrone and NousViz datasets as the working reference.
Partnerships and Operations Lead, Luka Dimitrijevic, on the appointment:
“Affiliate data is one of those subjects everybody agrees matters and almost nobody writes about properly, because doing it well requires actually holding the data. John has spent eight years building the record of what affiliate programmes report and when they change it, and he is unusually direct about what that record shows. Very few contributors can speak to tracking, market share and responsible gambling inside the same brief. Through the Contributors Program he will share practical insight on affiliate data, revenue leak and market intelligence, with content grounded in real results rather than recycled best practices.”
About the Contributors Program
The Gamblers Connect Contributors Program runs across twelve months, revealing one senior, C level, founder, or stakeholder voice per month. Every contributor publishes under the Gamblers Connect Contributor Editorial Code and is bound by the Contributor Conflict of Interest Policy. Where a contribution references a contributor’s employer or another material affiliation, that relationship is disclosed inline within the article itself, per the Commercial Disclosure Policy.
The programme is built around depth over volume: fewer voices, higher standing, published under a shared editorial standard. John joins Filippo Anzalone, Ihor Zarechnyi, Tamara Novitovic, Aleksandar Dasic, Valentina Diaco, Vladimir Mihailovski, Gali Hartuv and Barb Tasci in the 2026 cohort.
The final three contributors will be revealed monthly through to December.
