Today I want to talk about a sensitive topic in the affiliate industry that is not discussed openly very often: transparency.
The general rule of thumb in the affiliate industry and in business overall, is to protect your own business. As a traditional blind performance marketing company, this topic has always been a difficult
one for Gamebassadors to navigate
From the early days of our company, clients came to us looking for help promoting their games. Like with any partnership, the goal has always been to build a long-lasting and trustworthy relationship. However, as a blind performance marketing company, transparency can be tricky.
Publishers naturally want to know where their games are being promoted: which websites, which display channels, and which traffic sources are being used.
There are good reasons for this. The first is learning and optimization. When publishers understand which placements perform well, they can tailor creatives to those environments. For example, if a specific website is converting strongly, they can create custom-made creatives for that source and run A/B tests to further improve results.
The second reason, unfortunately, is where things become more complicated for companies like ours. As an intermediary in the supply chain, advertisers pay a margin for our services. In the past, we have shared specific source information with clients as a sign of goodwill and trust. In one case, a client approached those sources directly and offered them a better deal to work without us in between.
This resulted in lost revenue for us and ultimately damaged the relationship. This experience reinforced an important lesson: everyone wants to protect their own business. That is true in every industry.
Trust should be earned and respected, and transparency without clear boundaries can be harmful to both sides.
In our case, the mistake was trusting blindly without putting safeguards in place to prevent misuse of that trust. At the same time, we fully understand the publisher perspective. When you invest in user acquisition, you want to know where your budget is going and how your brand is being represented.
Wanting that level of visibility is reasonable and, in many cases, necessary to scale campaigns successfully. At Gamebassadors, transparency and trust are still core pillars of how we work. For us, transparency does not mean sharing every single data point or traffic source. It means being honest about performance, clear about expectations, and open when something is not working as planned. We would rather have a difficult conversation early than protect numbers that do not reflect reality.
We believe open communication is essential for long-term partnerships, and we always strive to give our clients the insights they need to achieve better results. At the same time, we have learned that transparency does not mean oversharing.