{"id":1296,"date":"2026-08-06T03:43:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T03:43:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/?p=1296"},"modified":"2026-08-07T03:50:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T03:50:52","slug":"martin-christiansen-grailbet-partners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/martin-christiansen-grailbet-partners\/","title":{"rendered":"Recruitment is the Last Step: Martin Christiansen on what has to work first"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Every new affiliate program opens with a request it has not yet earned the right to make: send us your traffic. Martin Christiansen<\/a><\/strong>, Head of Affiliates<\/strong> at Grailbet Partners<\/strong>, is currently on the difficult side of that request. He is building a program from the ground up, running it on Wynta<\/strong><\/a>, and approaching partners who have heard a version of the same pitch many times before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has been in iGaming since 2006, with more than sixteen of those years spent in affiliate marketing across casino, sportsbook and poker. The work has covered acquisition, program launches, commercial strategy, market expansion and team management, in regulated and unregulated markets across Europe, the Nordics, LATAM and Canada. That history is now being pointed at a single question: what does a program have to offer when it cannot yet offer proof?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His answer, consistently, is that it has nothing to offer except the reliability of its own behaviour, and that reliability has to exist before anybody is invited to test it. Which places recruitment considerably later in the sequence than most new programs are willing to put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The product has to be ready before the traffic is<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask him how he would set up an operator preparing to go live tomorrow and the answer arrives as a ninety-day sequence with recruitment sitting at the end of it. He would not approach a single affiliate until the offering they are sending players to is genuinely ready to receive them. He is blunt about why generosity cannot paper over the gaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A competitive commission plan cannot compensate for a weak product, unreliable payments, poor retention or unresolved tracking problems.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thirty days go on definition rather than outreach: target markets, ideal player profile, and the unglamorous work of confirming that the product, payment methods, bonuses, support and messaging actually suit those markets. Alongside it sits the rulebook: accepted traffic sources, restricted countries, brand bidding, compliance and the precise conditions under which a CPA qualifies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the plumbing. Links, attribution and postbacks tested rather than assumed. Terms and conditions written before they are needed. Payment procedures established. Reporting that can be trusted. And, critically, a named owner for each function: who approves deals, who validates traffic, who fixes technical faults, who reconciles commission. Ambiguity here surfaces later as a slow answer to an affiliate, which is a more expensive problem than it looks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only then does he open the doors, and only slightly. A controlled group of relevant affiliates across a spread of traffic sources, with the full player journey monitored from click through registration, deposit, gameplay, repeat deposits and retention. This is broadly what Grailbet Partners has been doing during its own launch. The logic is unsentimental: problems are cheaper to find inside a controlled group than across hundreds of partners, and an affiliate who loses confidence in a new program is very hard to win back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new brand is asking for a favour, and should act like it<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recruitment problem follows directly. A new brand has no conversion history, no established player values, no payment track record. Christiansen starts by acknowledging that the affiliate is the one taking the commercial risk, which reframes the entire conversation. Enthusiasm about how well the brand will convert is not an argument. What works is a credible reason to test: a genuinely strong product, a specific market opening, a compelling player offer, or terms that honestly price the risk being taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He will not send the same proposal twice. Before offering anything he wants to understand the partner’s audience, GEOs, traffic sources, expected volumes and promotional positions, on the grounds that an SEO portal, a streamer, a media buyer and a network are running fundamentally different businesses with different exposure. Treating them identically is not efficiency; it is a failure to have done the reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What he proposes instead is deliberately small: a defined traffic source, market, position, commission model, volume and review period, assessed together once the numbers exist, and scaled only if they justify it. It is an offer designed to be easy to say yes to and easy to walk away from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the part that actually does the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Most importantly, do what you say you will do. Paying correctly and on time, responding promptly and resolving the first problems professionally will build more trust than any sales presentation.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affiliates rarely leave because of performance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask why partners stop sending traffic and the expected answer is money. Christiansen’s is closer to friction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Programs hold affiliates when they are commercially worthwhile, operationally reliable and easy to deal with. The second two do a great deal of quiet work. Performance obviously matters; the brand has to convert and retain. But partners will sit through a bad month if they trust the people running the program and are told honestly what is happening. What they will not sit through is chasing. Reports that require a reminder, payments that require a follow-up, approvals that disappear, basic questions that go unanswered. Add sudden changes to terms or deductions that arrive without explanation and confidence goes quickly. Once a partner begins to wonder whether a program is reliable, the traffic tends not to come back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programs that hold their partners keep developing the relationship after signature: reviewing performance, sharing product updates that are actually relevant, proposing new angles, refreshing creative. It requires a manager who knows, at any given moment, which partners are live, which are preparing to launch and which have gone quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is why he treats recruitment volume as close to meaningless. A database of thousands of registered accounts with a handful of active partners inside it is not a program; it is a mailing list. He would take a portfolio small enough to have a real plan for each name in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FTD counts flatter campaigns that do not deserve it<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same scepticism applies to how success gets measured. Before agreeing to any commercial terms, Christiansen expects an operator to understand its own economics: acquisition costs, bonus spend, payment costs, fraud exposure, retention and the player lifetime value it can realistically expect. Terms set without that are guesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judged on FTD volume alone, a campaign can look excellent and cost money. The honest view takes in deposit values, wagering activity, repeat deposits, retention, bonus usage, chargebacks, fraud indicators and net gaming revenue over time, at which point a campaign delivering a large number of low-value players can turn out to be worse than one delivering considerably fewer who stay. Hence controlled tests and CPA caps, especially with unfamiliar partners or unfamiliar sources: agree a volume, look at what actually arrived, then scale, adjust or stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is even-handed about models. Revenue share aligns both parties over the long term, provided the calculation is transparent enough to be trusted. Hybrid deals split the early acquisition risk while keeping both sides invested in what the player does next. What does not work is a single universal rate applied across every GEO and channel, since SEO, PPC, social, paid media, streaming and database traffic do not produce comparable players. That particular shortcut, he notes, gets expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An affiliate manager who cannot answer is not managing anything<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond rates, what affiliates want from a manager is accessibility, honesty and reliability: someone who understands their business, replies, and takes ownership when something breaks. Christiansen keeps one rule that costs nothing and prevents a great deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Even if I cannot provide the complete answer immediately, I can confirm that I have seen the message and explain when they should expect an update. Silence creates uncertainty, and uncertainty damages trust.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The frustrations he hears are predictable and almost entirely self-inflicted: late payments, inaccurate reporting, CPA qualification rules nobody can explain, commission adjustments that appear without justification, terms revised after the traffic has already been delivered. Then the smaller irritation of generic promotional blasts sent to partners for whom they are obviously irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of this is structural rather than personal. A manager forced to route every payment query, technical fault and compliance question through several departments with no deadline attached is not solving problems; he is relaying them. Fixing that means clear internal ownership, agreed response expectations and giving affiliate managers genuine access to the information their job depends on. Christiansen sees the role as representing both directions at once, protecting the operator commercially while arguing the affiliate’s case internally, including against decisions that would damage a partnership for no good reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traffic is only half of lifetime value<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of which matters if the player journey collapses after registration. Affiliate teams, in his view, need to work closely with retention and engagement, because the value of acquired traffic is determined largely by what happens next. Managers should know how referred players are welcomed, segmented, supported and retained, and whether the bonuses, payment methods and communications suit the market and source the player arrived from. Strong traffic landing in a weak onboarding journey wastes everybody’s money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exchange runs both ways. Retention teams can identify which player groups hold long-term value; affiliate teams can explain where those players came from, what message brought them, and what expectations were set before they ever registered. That combination is what makes CPA evaluation honest. A higher acquisition cost is defensible when the players stay, and a campaign that looked strong on day one deserves reconsideration when the same players deposit once and vanish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where the next few years get won<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christiansen expects the advantage to come from precision rather than scale: better targeting, stronger localisation, more flexible partnership structures. Operators who genuinely understand a market’s payment preferences, player behaviour and local promotional channels will beat programs exporting one product and one commercial model everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditional SEO partners are not going anywhere, but programs will increasingly need to work with streamers, communities, social publishers, paid-media specialists and networks, each of which needs tracking, compliance handling and commercial terms suited to how it actually operates. That is a lot of variation to hold in one program, which is where the operational layer starts to matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Grailbet Partners, Christiansen uses Wynta to manage campaigns, commercial agreements, tracking and reporting in one place, an overview that becomes valuable precisely when partners differ by GEO, traffic source, commission model, CPA cap and campaign period. His argument for technology is narrow and practical. Accurate, accessible data removes the spreadsheet assembly, the statistic-checking and the routine reporting questions that consume an affiliate manager’s day, and returns that time to analysis, opportunity-spotting, faster responses and actual conversations with partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is careful about the limit. Automation should clear the administrative load so managers can do the relationship work, not stand in for the relationship itself. The programs that win, he thinks, will pair reliable technology and good data with people experienced enough to build trust, because affiliate marketing remains a relationship business and he sees no sign of that changing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which returns to where he started. A new program cannot prove anything yet. It can only build the machinery that will eventually do the proving, and resist the temptation to go recruiting before that machinery works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Give your affiliate managers their time back.<\/strong> Wynta brings campaigns, commercial agreements, tracking and reporting into a single platform, so your team spends less of the week assembling spreadsheets and more of it building the partnerships that grow the program. Book a demo<\/a> or speak to our sales team at wynta.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every new affiliate program opens with a request it has not yet earned the right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1297,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[10,11,13],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1298,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions\/1298"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wynta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}