What Happens When You Turn Affiliate Marketing Into a Games League

Why Most Affiliate Networks Are Built for the Brand, Not the Partner

Dorin Boerescu has been in this industry since 2009. He started as an affiliate, bought a network that was turning over next to nothing, and has since facilitated more than 828 million euros in GMV. But the number that matters most to him is not the revenue figure. It is the question nobody asked when they built every traditional network before his: who actually has the right to decide how the marketing budget gets spent?

What followed that question is Business League, a full-transparency affiliate ecosystem built around one metric, the number of sales. No branded traffic allowed. No hidden rankings. No six-month approval chains. Just a live leaderboard, gamified performance tiers, and a platform that treats affiliates like the traders they actually are.

Lee-Ann sat down with Dorin to find out how a concept born in Romania is now live in Ireland, why complete transparency makes programs stronger rather than more vulnerable, and what happens when you build an affiliate network from the affiliate's point of view rather than the advertiser's.

Talking Points Include:

• Why affiliates are traders, not content creators and why the best performers in Business League have never read a Kotler textbook
• The leaderboard that embarrassed a client who thought he was number one and why seeing the real ranking changed how he ran his program from that day forward
• Full transparency as a fraud deterrent and why making all data visible to everyone keeps bad actors out and drives up quality across the entire ecosystem
• How gamification goes beyond commission from speed contests to conversion rate competitions, and why affiliates compete even when the prize money is only 25 euros
• The case against budget caps in performance marketing and why capping spend in a cost-per-sale model is one of the most counterproductive things a brand can do

Stop Building Networks for Brands. Start Building Them for the People Taking the Risk.

Every traditional affiliate network was built by a developer who saw a technical opportunity. Track the click, log the conversion, pay the commission. The infrastructure was designed to protect the advertiser and reassure the finance team. Nobody asked the affiliate what they actually needed.

Dorin came at it differently because he had been the affiliate. He knew what it felt like to invest your own budget, take all the risk, and then wait to find out if the commission structure was going to make it worthwhile. When he built Business League, the starting principle was simple: whoever puts the money in gets to decide how it is spent. That single idea reshapes the entire power dynamic of an affiliate program.

The result is a platform where affiliates see everything. Which e-shops are performing. How many sales each partner is generating. What conversion rates look like across different traffic sources. Rather than creating chaos, that transparency creates accountability on both sides. E-commerce shops can't hide a broken checkout or an outdated coupon code. Affiliates can't inflate numbers or game rankings without the whole ecosystem noticing. And because the only metric that counts is sales, the noise falls away completely.

What a Football League Table Has to Do With Your Affiliate Program

Business League is not a metaphor. It is the actual operating model. E-commerce shops compete as teams. Affiliates compete as players. Performance is measured across 28-day rounds, exactly like a football season, and everyone can see the standings in real time.

The tier system runs from freelancers generating fewer than one sale per month all the way up to unicorns producing more than 10,000 sales in 28 days. Those labels matter because they strip out the usual affiliate industry hierarchy of creator versus media buyer versus coupon site and replace it with one question: how many sales are you generating right now? A cashback site that drives 8,000 conversions sits above a glossy content publisher driving 40. The leaderboard does not care about the method, only the result.

The gamification layer goes deeper than rankings. Speed contests reward the first affiliate to reach 100 sales in a category. Conversion rate competitions run on a timer, pushing affiliates to act within hours rather than weeks. Average order value competitions incentivise partners to seek out higher-margin products. Each mechanic targets a specific healthy behaviour, and the psychology of competition does the rest. As Dorin put it, they are not competing for the prize money. They are competing because they want to win.

Listen to Find Out More About:

• How Dorin went from selling his agency shares in 2009 to building a network that outperforms traditional media channels on ROAS
• Why Business League launched in Ireland first, what he found when he got there, and which market is next
• How a branded traffic ban is enforced technically and what happens to affiliates who try to get around it
• The five performance tiers from freelancer to unicorn and what it actually takes to move between them
• Why Dorin would have dinner with Jeff Bezos and what Amazon's affiliate program did for this entire industry
• What an ROAS of 11.9 from non-branded traffic looks like in practice across 900 e-shops and 5,700 affiliates

Key Segments and Where to Tune In

• [10:25] The Business League model explained: Premier League for marketing, 28-day rounds, five tiers, and why the only metric that matters is the number of sales
• [19:10] Full transparency as a competitive moat: why showing everyone the data keeps fraud out, makes brands better, and builds genuine respect between partners at different levels
• [24:30] Gamification in depth: the First 100 speed contest, conversion rate competitions, and why Dorin used the same system on his kids to get them to brush their teeth
• [33:20] Rapid fire round: affiliate marketing in three words, the one thing e-commerce brands get wrong when they launch a program, and who Dorin would have dinner with

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