John Wright is an iGaming veteran with 25 years experience as a player, affiliate manager, casino manager, affiliate and now providing tools for the affiliate marketing industry. He graduated in engineering from the University of Toronto specializing in robotics and AI. Today he’s working on AI, machine learning and local LLMs with StatsDrone and NousViz.
In this interview for LUCKLANDIA, John Wright, Co-Founder of StatsDrone and NousViz, will share an overview and innovations that HaveYouBeenShaved bring to the iGaming affiliate world.
Q: The website for HaveYouBeenShaved.com is very compelling and maybe even controversial. Why did you create the website and what have people said about it?
John: I’ve had the site live for almost a year and it got a small amount of traffic but I had real signups from affiliates. They clearly were interested in this. I’ve got a survey inside the application itself and I’m surprised at the results I get. I guess if people aren’t interested then they wouldn’t fill out the application.
I thought it was time to launch it as an official campaign for StatsDrone. We do it because I love data analytics and I feel like we can cut up affiliate data in so many ways. I'm confident we can do more than just help affiliates get their stats and commissions.
Q: You’ve done surveys about affiliate shaving where most believe it happens. Tell me more about the results and what people share with you.
John: The irony of the surveys and polls that I do on LinkedIn or WhatsApp groups is that when I ask if people think affiliate shaving is real, the people that consistently say no are affiliate managers.
In one of my polls, I had an affiliate manager vote on whom I had a previous problem with the program he worked for where I did catch them shaving. I found that totally ironic. That program in question had retroactively added winning players to my commissions over the last 8 months to reduce my affiliate commission from $540 to $145. This was a very small amount but it proved to me the lengths some affiliate programs will go to steal.
Q: You claim that you’ve helped recover over $100k in affiliate commissions, is this true and which affiliate programs were this if you can share?
John: I don’t know any affiliate that doesn’t think shaving doesn’t happen.
Since writing about shaving the last few years, I’ve had a lot of conversations about it and stories from affiliates.
I am proud of the awards we have won over the years including iGB Affiliate 2025 for Innovator of the Year for our Changelog product of shaving analysis.
Q: You’ve worked as an affiliate manager and casino manager so is shaving easy?
John: Technically yes but the way in which I see shaving happening today is done in a lazy way. Unfortunately this happens to affiliates however the lazy way I mentioned previously means if you analyze your data in the right way, you can find the evidence of it potentially happening to your account.
When I did affiliate management a long time ago, I worked on a platform that had a simple button to detag players from any affiliate. One operator was caught using it where the affiliate had screenshots of one of their players disappearing from the reports along with a large commission. They went public with it and magically, that feature in that platform disappeared. It magically reappeared a year later.
I had a chat with a friend that does affiliate management consulting and they’ve had interviews where they explicitly asked how they could shave.
Q: So how can you help affiliates with shaving analysis?
John: We do a few different reports so I’ll summarize them and what we’ve got good at with our analytics tools especially with NousViz.
- Analyzing the last 7 days of the month looking for winning players wiping out commissions
- Players disappearing in the last 10 days of reporting the FTD using StatsDrone pulling the data from the affiliate program backends via scraping or API
- Finding players moved from higher commission to lower commission campaigns
- Finding players moved to 0% rev share campaigns
One thing we are doing at the time of writing is I’m working with affiliates to do the analysis and building a cohort database of anonymized data and sharing the feedback with those affiliates. If I detect shaving at one program, the rest of the affiliates are made aware of it.
On top of this, the data insights I’ll learn is which brands are trending up and trending down on a day by day basis. This data I think is useful for affiliates to know if their commissions are safe and so they can optimize their brands. This does have a correlation with trust and is a sign of quality as well which could impact recommendations of brands.
Q: Do you consult with affiliate programs?
John: We do and the discussion is an interesting one. I’ve talked with numerous affiliate managers that have told me that they get pitched to so many affiliate sites for flat fees and most of the deals are not good ones for the affiliate manager. It is unfortunate this is normal but it requires better trained affiliate managers which they don’t grow on trees.
The work we have done in analytics for affiliates is fairly similar for the affiliate program and I find the work fascinating and fun.
Q: What do you have planned for 2027?
John: We’ve only helped affiliates recover €150,000+ but I’d like this to surpass €2.5M and think we’ll make it happen.
Also I’ll be giving a keynote presentation at ICE Barcelona 2027 and I’ll be sharing some big data insights that I don’t think affiliates or operators have ever seen before.
LL: John, thank you for your time. We wish you success in the future with HaveYouBeenShaved!
