Introduction:

The affiliate marketing landscape is shifting rapidly, and according to Taras Kiseliuk, CEO of ClickDealer, we’re on the verge of some major changes. In this candid Performance Marketing Pulse podcast interview, conducted at the end of 2024, Taras shares his bold prediction that telehealth is poised to become the next big opportunity for affiliates, especially as consumers become more comfortable with remote healthcare consultations.

Key insights from this episode include:

  • The Telehealth Opportunity: Why Taras believes telehealth, particularly around GLP-1 products like Ozempic, represents a massive untapped market for affiliate marketers
  • Pay Per Call Evolution: The growing importance of call-based campaigns and how upcoming TCPA compliance changes could actually benefit quality-focused affiliates
  • Video Advertising Edge: Why AI-powered video ad creation is making high-converting creative accessible to affiliates of all sizes
  • Global Expansion Strategy: How ClickDealer built a worldwide operation and their vision to compete with enterprise-level platforms like Impact

From managing remote teams across multiple time zones to navigating regulatory changes, Taras offers practical insights for affiliates looking to scale their operations in an increasingly complex digital marketing environment. Whether you’re focusing on traditional verticals like e-commerce and lead generation or exploring emerging opportunities in telehealth, this conversation provides valuable strategic guidance for the year ahead. This conversation took place in December, 2024, soon after the US Presidential election, and as fears of a recession grew due to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump Administration tarifs.

Transcript:

Taras – ClickDealer (00:00) For me, I think telehealth is gonna kill it. I can feel it. I think it’s gonna get bigger and bigger. Honestly, it’s gonna be just like, it’s on the fringes, but I’ve been around to see it here, here, here, here, and like, oh man, I mean, look at the hems. I just did telehealth. Affiliates can do the same thing differently for different products, for the same products, but I think it’ll do really well, especially for health and beauty.

Chris – mThink (00:23) Hi, welcome to Performance Marketing Pulse, the Blue Book’s new podcast. This episode features Taras Kaceliak of ClickDealer. ClickDealer have been one of our top 20 networks for almost a decade now, they have offices all over the world and are super nice people to deal with. So I’m looking forward to Taras. We’re going to cover Pay Per Call lead generation, new opportunities for affiliates, you name it. So stay tuned. Taras Kaceliak coming up. Taras, what I’d like to do is start with asking you about yourself because my understanding is you’ve been with ClickDealer since the very beginning back in Kyiv, right?

Taras – ClickDealer (01:16) It’s a long story. Actually, it started in Zaporizhzhia. It wasn’t Kyiv yet. It’s more southeast of Kyiv. I think I was employee number seven or eight. I came there to consult and stay for two months. At that moment, ClickDealer was maybe a team of, I think, yeah, a team of seven people. And they were just you know, starting up that maybe they’re in the business maybe for, for about a year, maybe even less. And I came in just to join them for, for a couple of months of consulting and that was it. And that was just a remote employee in the beginning. So that’s, that’s how I started with ClickDealer. And then, what happened after it’s kind of, asked me to stay a little bit longer. I stayed a bit longer. It was really difficult to work. I mean this is, talk about pre-COVID, but nobody was used to working from home. And this was not even working from home. This is working remote with an eight hour time difference. And it was kind of difficult, not gonna lie to you, dealing with a team that they never saw until I visited them a few months later. But one thing led to another. I hired a couple of people in Toronto. We added a team. We expanded into new verticals, into new GEOs.

It worked out and then we kind of continued expanding. We opened office in Amsterdam. We opened office in actually in India, in Spain, in China, a few in North America. And my kind of career went from, you know, being in charge of one office to being a general manager and then slowly to CEO.

Chris – mThink (03:06) Right.

Taras – ClickDealer (03:06) But yeah, it started as like, let’s just, you know, let’s see if this works kind of thing. I had no plans to stay long enough,

Chris – mThink (03:16) Yeah, but ClickDealer’s all over now, right? Where do you have offices?

Taras – ClickDealer (03:22) So we have offices in Toronto, we have an office in the Netherlands, we have an office in Warsaw, Poland, as well we have a few offices in Ukraine, obviously Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and we have an office in Shanghai. And then, I mean, now the times have changed, we have a lot of remote employees. We have people, actually we have an office in Cancun, I forgot about that one, we have employees in Cancun.

We have people in Portugal, we have people in Spain. I mean, we have people all across Europe, to be honest. It’s, I guess it’s a new way how people work. It’s not always easy, especially considering all the time zones. You know, the saying that, I mean, the sun never sets over the ClickDealer empire, because…

Technically speaking, at some point, I remember like six o’clock in Toronto, it would be still three hours of work on the West Coast. So we had like, can technically speaking work till nine, but at nine o’clock in the evening, it’s our Chinese office already opening and people are coming in. So technically speaking, the work like never ended. It’s just, it’s just always there’s something, somebody up and doing work.

Chris – mThink (04:47) Right. So in terms of how you manage things, do you stay in the Canadian office most of the time or are you spending half your time on planes going around all the various offices?

Taras – ClickDealer (04:59) Used to be like that. We got better and changing. I mean, I still go visit the main office. I mean, I think the heart of a company is still, you know, our Ukrainian team that is mostly in Poland now. So visiting them, it’s a big part of obviously of a routine. I mean, I’m grateful there’s a direct line to fly to them. So it’s great.

But we have team leads that we build around on, you know, on around different verticals. And now we have team leads based on geographical location that kind of manage, alleviate the Spain. So we learn like as we progressed, we learn how to, you know, how to deal with with this kind of a, you know, global cluster of things, sometimes it’s it’s it’s tiring, but it is what it is.

Chris – mThink (05:57) Yeah, I mean, of the things that always fascinates me about affiliate marketing is, you know, more than most businesses, affiliate marketers have to live in the real world in what current events are going on. You know, people are either buying or they’re not. Conversions are either up or down. How do you cope with things like, I mean, there’s the war, obviously, with Ukraine.

Taras – ClickDealer (06:20) Yeah, that was, that was a good

Chris – mThink (06:23) That’s got to be a huge challenge. So how do you cope with all this kind of stuff?

Taras – ClickDealer (06:42) I mean, I’m not going lie to you, it’s not easy. I would say that we have reinvented our business a copious amount of times. We changed our verticals, we changed our GEOs. I’d say that in our business, I mean, a lot of… I’ve been around for 14, 15 years in the network business and…

Most of the partners that existed, they don’t exist anymore. There’s few companies which are still going at it and they’re still doing it, it is crazy. I think we’re one of them. And technically speaking, it’s being diverse, have a good diversity of verticals is important. I mean, there are things which happen every year, no matter what you do. I mean, health and beauty. Somehow, you know, the new year is that date where everybody reminisces about the past year and all the pounds they gained. And the nutra verticals always takes off. So products within a nutraceutical, especially diet products and supplements and meal plans, they explode right after. It’s ridiculous, but that’s how human mind works. It’s very cyclical. But outside that, we see big moves in terms of health space. And I think it’s actually an Ozempic GLP-1 product.

Chris – mThink (10:37) Right.

Taras – ClickDealer (10:40) And the only business we see right now, it’s big pharmaceutical working in it, but there’s a huge chunk of business that is growing right now. It’s called telemedicine where people can actually purchase that. And I think there’ll be more integration with affiliate space. I think this is going to be a really, really popular, popular product.

Chris – mThink (11:01) The whole American healthcare system is moving to that, Where rather than going to see your doctor, you just call someone up on video cam and show them whatever your ailment is or whatever. Kind of like you and me, Taras.

Taras – ClickDealer (11:15) Honestly, I mean, we see what happened with a pay per call. A big chunk of the business right now for the networks is Medicare became like the holy grail of opportunity every year for companies to run a paper call because people have to call and close their policies for next year. So that became a huge chunk. Pay per call grew significantly in those kind of verticals and it becomes more normalized. I’m pretty sure there’s a shift in the consumer behavior where they feel more comfortable either talking through messages, through face-to-face on telemedicine. I think that this is going to have a huge impact on the future of what we sell to consumer and telehealth is like, in my mind, this is going to be on top of a list.

That’s what I think. I think, yeah, it’s more heavily regulated, of course, like everything else. So there’ll be higher barriers of entries, but people who can figure it out and do branded proper campaigns. I would say that there’s more future obviously in things like GLP-1, which is, you know, the derivatives of Ozempic and other products than, you know, regular fat diets and so on and on.

Chris – mThink (12:38) Yeah, it’s a whole new world with that drug. I mean, that’s crazy.

Taras – ClickDealer (12:43) Yes, I mean, I know, I’m not sure what’s the long term implications, but it works in the short term for people who take it and for them it’s life changing.

Chris – mThink (12:51) Well, you know what, if there are long-term implications, I’m sure the affiliate marketing industry will be selling it.

Taras – ClickDealer (12:57) Yeah, we’ll be running torts after for long-term implications basically. So there’s always going to be some kind of business.

Chris – mThink (13:04) And what about more traditional verticals? Are they like steady state for you or are they come in and go, what do you see there?

Taras – ClickDealer (13:12) I mean, historically speaking, there’s always some kind of shift in Feds and things, but there’s like general stuff which always works, you know, downloads. That’s never going to go anywhere for us. A big chunk of our business was working with the antivirus companies and also working e-commerce companies. Like Temu, Walmart, they have budgets and they’re looking for customers acquisition. I mean, this is never going away. It’s exciting because

You see companies like Walmart that want a chunk of online business like to be like Amazon

Chris – mThink (13:50) Walmart’s made good strides. To be fair to them, they’ve worked hard and spent a lot of money.

Taras – ClickDealer (13:55) That’s exactly it. I mean, hopefully they’ll spend more money with companies like ours. You know, there’s other companies like Costco. Costco should be doing the same thing. I Amazon would define how, you know, they deliver products to the customer. They understand that it’s easier for people to just click and purchase something versus going to the store. Right. So the moment Costco realizes that opportunity as well, I’m pretty sure they’ll be jumping into the market much, much faster than they’re doing it right now. But Walmart figured it out. I mean, in my neighborhood, I see this. I have to be honest, I want to call them dystopian buildings. It looks like a space for it. It doesn’t even look like a regular warehouse.

It looks like something from like Blade Runner or one of those like, you know, classic dystopian movies where you just have a mega like building with no windows and it’s it’s Walmart. They’re increasing, you know, they’re increasing their presence with the distribution and that means that they’re going to make huge strides in terms of getting customers and move shifting away from Amazon. So good for them.

Chris – mThink (15:05) Yeah, you know, I went to, I was pitching Walmart on a project about, I don’t know, 15 years ago and went to their world headquarters in Bentonville in Arkansas. Have you been there at all?

Taras – ClickDealer (15:18) No, I team visited them because they’re one of our big clients. My team visited them, but they visited them in New York.

Chris – mThink (15:24) I mean, it’s mind blowing because you turn up and their head office looks exactly like one of their warehouses. It’s a huge building with no windows. And then you go in and of course, there’s cubicles, you know, football field after football field of cubicles and everybody is dressed in clothes from Walmart.

Taras – ClickDealer (15:35) Every table has logos of Walmart. I think they like, when you go to a Walmart office, I said every piece of equipment has Walmart logo on it.

Chris – mThink (15:56) It’s true. It’s really true. They’re an amazing company. They’re very focused. So what about LeadGen? We’ve talked about

Taras – ClickDealer (16:07) So people know that it’s not scripted and I’m just going off. How I feel.

Chris – mThink (16:11) You see, you know what, that’s how it is when people talk to me, Taras, they need beer.

Taras – ClickDealer (16:18) So sorry. In terms of lead gen, I mean, we had an interesting, you know, last couple of years in terms of lead gen. We made some fundamental shifts in our business. Specifically, we did something that we had no idea how to do. That was entering a home service space, which was, you know, a lot of testing, a lot of figuring out things.

It was, I mean, it was, it was crazy. You know, it was not, it was not, it was not, it was not easy. It took us years of running our own media and, and, and testing it and then figure out who are the suppliers and then figure out the buyers and, you know, doing a lot, a lot of, you know, know how on the spot, research.

And then obviously working with affiliates and getting burned by affiliates because affiliates would not follow all the rules as usual and which led us into building as usual.

Chris – mThink (17:29) It is like herding cats sometimes.

Taras – ClickDealer (17:31) It is.

And the first part is like, if they were just patient, it’s an amazing vertical. It’s an evergreen vertical. Once you figure it out, you can be too greedy. It’s small margins, but you can run like high caps for years. And we figured it out and we built out a whole business called HomeCode around it. And that was probably, you know, became like only 25, 30% of our business, all about just running our own media for like roofing, windows, all the home service related products, you know.

Chris – mThink (18:08) And do you you set up your own properties for lead gen things like that you set up your own websites and all that kind of stuff?

Taras – ClickDealer (18:14) Yes, we do. So we build our own brand called Home Quote around it. It was from scratch. And what happened is we started working first with aggregators. It’s all API integration. So we collect the lead, and we pass the lead to the buyer. And then it goes into a waterfall of bidding. And then highest bidder basically buys it.

Chris – mThink (18:40) Okay. Do you, I mean, I know that for a lot of small website publishers, et cetera, that rely on search traffic, you know? Yeah. Do you find that Google’s changes in algorithms and things that have affected a lot of publishers over the last year, do you worry about that or do you have all sort paid media feeding into your sites?

Taras – ClickDealer (19:01) So we do social media. I mean, I would love to do Google just for our customers because they’ll get the highest intent possible. But unfortunately, the payouts are not there. It needs to change unless we work with a branded campaign specifically, it would work. Otherwise, it’s a little bit more difficult to make it work, especially if you’re working with aggregators and so on so on. The search is just too expensive. It’s impossible. It’s the same thing if I try to run insurance, unless I’m a State Farm that is trying to buy direct leads, I’ll make it profitable. If I’m an affiliate, it’ll be difficult. It’s definitely going to be a challenge unless your payouts are really, really high.

Chris – mThink (19:55) Yeah, I I mean, I’m, you know, I have a bee in my bonnet about, you know, the monopolies taking all of the money out of this industry. But I, you know, and I think with the US election, the chances of anybody breaking up Google anytime soon are slim to none. So I guess we all just have to live with it for the next few years.

Taras – ClickDealer (20:15) Yeah, yeah, of course. So yeah, we we learn how to figure out how to run it on social media, different type of intent, but still if advertising resonates with the consumer, they’ll go and purchase the product. I think, I mean, there’s a lot of products which just make sense. It’s just like, for example, like one of them is like home insurance. There’s even statistics behind it. Anybody who searches for home insurance once a year, they’ll reduce the cost of paying for home insurance, they kind of sticks forever. And that’s it. So there’s always,

Chris – mThink (20:56) And I mean, lead gen campaigns, are you… Do you generally sort of roll pay per call into almost every lead gen campaign now?

Taras – ClickDealer (21:05) We don’t, our buyers do. I think that would be a nice next step that makes a lot of sense to do because, I mean, at the end of the day, every lead ends up with a call center or advertiser that has to call the customer. By definition, I mean, so great example is actually the Medicare, right? Nobody runs leads, they run straight to the call center. So they bypass that, it’s click to call.

So it makes a lot of sense also not just selling like home service leads or whatever leads home warranty, it makes sense to run into a call center. But the payouts have to be higher because the conversion rate on leads versus calls is a little bit different. So it’s tougher to make a call. So the payouts have to be higher. I think that’s really important.

Chris – mThink (21:57) I’ve talked to a few buyers and they often talk to me about the difference in the quality of pay per call leads that they get from different channels. How do you see that as an issue? Do you just roll them all in together or do you price them differently or how do you work that?

Taras – ClickDealer (22:17) If you’re working with the publishers, tricky question because then it’s a trust. So basically you get a feedback on the quality and then you can price out saying, because you’ll have anchors that you can rely on in terms of what would be a good KPI for the call. It’s the amount of people picking up the call, or amount of people actually stay and purchase something. So you can quickly judge if it’s a good call or not. For example, if it’s a home services, it’s an appointment rate. Like we work with clients that say we want 30% to actually make an appointment. If you’re below 30, we’re going to pay this much. So you can rate based on different KPIs. Same thing is like if it’s a

ACA, for example, is how many people actually get the policy percent-wise. So you can judge pretty quickly, especially with the call centers, because it’ll give you feedback. So if the communication is there, you’ll know. If the communication is not there, then it’s going to be obviously a huge chargeback. As usual.

Chris – mThink (23:36) Do you run your own call center at all?

Taras – ClickDealer (23:39) No, we have a of partners. I visited a couple of our partners call centers too. It’s also an arbitrage business. It’s basically people getting paid by hours and they have to call somebody, a big amount of calls per hour and turn it into a sale that will be obviously the return will be higher than the chair they’re paying for, the technology they’re using, there’s a cost associated with everything. So for example, yeah, if you’re running really crappy traffic to somebody, they’re also burning money because they’re paying for all that stuff and they’re burning for human hours for everything. And obviously you will get a feedback fast if it’s working or not.

Chris – mThink (24:30) Yeah, yeah. Do you think, I mean, pay per call’s seen a huge growth over the last few years. Do you think it’s going to keep growing that way?

Taras – ClickDealer (24:38) Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Chris – mThink (24:40) What’s gonna drive that?

Taras – ClickDealer (24:42) I mean, one of the good reasons would be TCPA compliance, as you know, that is coming in the States in January. We’ll see how this, I mean, we have a good feeling about it, but just because we have a good feeling about it doesn’t mean it’s going to go that way. I know there’s always, you know, feeling of prediction how things are to work out. And I feel like, I mean,

Pay per call is a great way to have some kind of a diversification from that problem. In my mind, from experience, more regulation is not bad. It means that there’ll be actually improvement in quality. But it also means that it will cut off and drive out all the people that are cutting corners.

it will remove all the guys in the middle because I mean, the way it’s built, like you need a one on one consent with the consumer. So what happened is, is the brokers will have to show their cards, like they have to show who they’re selling to. So that could drive the broker people in the middle out and get more consumer to end buyer closer, which will drive up the, you know, the payouts. So I think that’s like one of

I mean, if you think positive, that’s one of the ways this can all go. The other one is, they don’t need to consent. Just run your lead form into a call, call the call center, get it done with. And then, you know, let’s hope that, hey, did this guy did this right or not? Right. But obviously,

It’s going to be only inbound calls. I can guarantee you like we already saw this year. Nobody want to transfer us because transfers mean it’s impossible to determine where the data came from.

Chris – mThink (26:48) Right.

Taras – ClickDealer (26:49) You know, they didn’t know if somebody just bought a list, call them, harass them, and then did a transfer or did they actually, that’s why people want click to call or inbound. They call it inbound, but if you do, you know, if you do it from your website, it’s click to call. So that’s how I see it. But I mean, it’s again, it’s like equilibrium. Remember economics, like the supply and demand line will find each other. You know, there’ll be the price point where

It makes sense for people to pay and then there’ll be a price point for affiliates. It makes sense to, you know, spend on advertising and then they’ll find a sweet spot. That’s why I’m like, it’ll be a show in the beginning and long run will be all right.

Chris – mThink (27:28) What’s your feeling on regulation in the USA? Do you think there’s more regulation coming on pay per call? Of course, it’s going to depend on the Trump administration, but who seemed like there’d be a low regulation kind of organization?

Taras – ClickDealer (27:40) Yeah, honestly, I mean, if we were talking about Europe, I’ll just say it’s only going to get the worse. USA, it’s like, who’s going to lobby? Maybe all the insurance companies are going to see a drastic drop in revenue due to reduction in getting cheap leads from their subsidiary companies that they work with and then they’ll lobby and change the law. You never know. So, I mean,

A best example is GDPR in Europe, especially in places like Germany, which is like you call somebody without permission, like straight to jail almost, you know? They don’t screw around. So I assume it’s something almost like GDPR, but because it’s such a huge market and there’s so much money in it, we’ll see who…

But for now, I mean, the way it is, it’s tough in the beginning. I mean, in the long run, I think it’ll work. Prediction is the prices will go up for payouts because they’ll be high. Because think about this. If the leads are more like they qualify better and they’re not sold out like too many times, it’s a better quality lead. It means that these people call less like the call centers call less people. So they spend less money acquiring the client. And it’s kind of like rolls up the hill and down the hill because then everybody’s wasting less time on the bad leads. And, you know, in the long run, they save money and then they pass that hopefully, hopefully, theoretically, you know, they pass that price down to everyone.

Chris – mThink (29:28) Yeah. I mean, no, I mean, my argument has always been for the 20 years that the Blue Book’s been around, my argument has always been that if we can professionalize the industry and drive out the bad actors, everybody will make more money apart from the bad actors. Exactly. But it takes time. I think sometimes it does take regulation. Sometimes it’s just competition drives the bad actors out in the end.

Taras – ClickDealer (29:55) Yeah, I mean, that’s why I’m being, I’m saying there’s things in theory and then there’s reality. The reality is like, it’s way more messy. It’s, it’s hell. It’s always like all over the place. It’s just like, I’m like, I don’t get any more disappointed or angry about any changes. I’m like, it makes sense. Like it’s a roller coaster. I mean, if you’ve been in affiliate space for long, it’s like, we, like I said, we reinvented businesses so many times it’s not even funny. There used to be networks around CPI back in the day. You’ve been around, you know this. I used to work at Mundo Media, like it used to be a whale in a CPI space. Where’s the CPI space now? The whole business kind of like changed and disappeared. People just dust off their shoulders and continue doing other stuff.

Chris – mThink (30:52) Yeah, exactly. Okay. So look, what I’d like to do is we come towards the end of this, I’d like to sort of go into a kind of a quick round set of questions. So let me see what you come up with here. If someone was going to say to you, okay, for an affiliate, what are the top verticals for affiliates right now or for 2025?

Taras – ClickDealer (31:18) I mean, e-commerce is no brainer. And we’re talking about different… You can talk about like gadgets, which are seasonal and they murder absolutely during like right now. And then I would say other products, like even Temu Walmart, companies which are passing massive budgets and they’ll do the rev share with you. Number one. Number two is lead gen. Nothing specific. I mean that is not going anywhere. Still, people are to need insurances, people need to fix things, people are going to need to buy things. That is forever business. There’s just niches that you go after. And I mean, there’s a really high paying niches, right? So, right, especially if it comes to like health and beauty and so on and so on. Even that is it’s an amazing. I mean, things we talked about with pay per call, I think it’s only going to get bigger, especially once people freak out about this a little bit more.

I think more, there’ll be more call centers just taking calls directly. And for me, like, I think telehealth is going to kill it. I like, I can feel it. I think it’s going to get bigger and bigger. Honestly, it’s going to be just like, it’s just like, it’s on the fringes, but I’ve been around to see it here, here, here, here.

Chris – mThink (32:16) Right.

Taras – ClickDealer (32:39) but I think it’ll do really well, especially for health and beauty.

Chris – mThink (32:43) Well, I mean, speaking of someone who lives in the USA, I mean, nobody I know gets to see a real doctor very often these days. I mean, you either see a physician’s assistant or you get telehealth. You know, telehealth, maybe finally you’ll get a real doctor. But all respect to physician’s assistants, of course. But yeah.

Taras – ClickDealer (33:04) I live in Canada. I have to wait for a doctor about a year or so. Let’s not even… yeah.

Chris – mThink (33:10) Just come to America, Taras,

Taras – ClickDealer (33:16) It’s a different problem basically. Don’t pay but don’t get anything.

Chris – mThink (33:19) All right, so let’s, I mean, maybe this is a similar question. What do you see as the big opportunities for 2025? Maybe that’s the same question.

Taras – ClickDealer (33:29) It’s kind of is in the same sense, same. If anybody who’s, I would say people should explore more. If search doesn’t work out, the biggest, most scalable things are still Facebook and Google. And I would say that they should be getting more into video. I think that’s more specific terms of media buying.

Chris – mThink (33:45) All right.

Taras – ClickDealer (33:59) Video ads is a huge play and it’s becoming easier and easier, specifically considering that the AI is getting better and you can now do great ads at really low budgets. So if you’re a starting affiliate or you’re a medium affiliate and you’re afraid to put your feet into video ads, man, AI makes it so much cheaper. So I’d say that it’s gonna be more and more of that. It captures people’s imagination better. Look at TikTok.

Chris – mThink (34:41) Exactly. All right. So final question. So as far as ClickDealer is concerned, where do you think ClickDealer will be in five years time?

Taras – ClickDealer (34:52) Man, it’s hard to say. I can tell you where I would love it to be. I would love to be in a company like Impact.com, where we work with the branded companies direct. I feel like marketing networks, they’re like coal miners. Everybody’s life depends on them, but they don’t get appreciated enough. Because at the end of the day,

You know, affiliate marketing and I mean, anything that it’s based on performance beats any agency or any of those companies which kind of like, hey, here’s a platform pays tons of money. We represent a big brand, but they do nothing for them. But at the end of the day, the grunt work is done by companies like ours and bunch of other ones in our industry and affiliates, of course. So I would love to see us emerge on the level where we can do performance marketing and actually do more of a bundle for bigger brands, not just like, hey, here’s a platform.

Chris – mThink (36:02) Yeah, I mean, I see several traditional CPA type networks sort of evolving into sort of changing how they price things for clients. So they’re moving more towards sort of outcome based pricing and things like that. Whereas not necessarily just based on CPA. might look at long term ROI or any number of things. Is that something that you could see ClickDealer doing in the future?

Taras – ClickDealer (36:30) Yeah, man. I mean, we always work with KPIs, and at the end of the day you deliver, you have to deliver on a sale or on some kind of specific action. I mean, meanwhile, agencies is like an old school business where I feel like there’s like is built on just all the relationships where like, hey, here’s a huge budget, spend it and keep 20%. But you really not really might not produce any income or outcome, income and outcome. yeah.

Chris – mThink (37:00) You know, whenever I work with agencies, I’m always amazed at the stuff that they build into their pricing model.

Taras – ClickDealer (37:08) can’t believe it’s legal. Honestly, it feels like they just rip off. Like, and it’s just based on some kind of like either tradition or relationships where they do get the budgets. But I’m not sure what they produce.

Chris – mThink (37:19) I was in a meeting last year and I was working with this agency pricing up a deal for a client and they literally included a hundred grand for meetings. And I was like, what?

Taras – ClickDealer (37:31) Yeah, it sounds like exactly the company that they research in New York that they need to get dumpsters with the caps so that the garbage doesn’t fly out for two million dollars. For two million dollars. So that’s what agencies do.

Chris – mThink (37:47) Exactly.

A revolution in garbage collecting. Yeah, trash cans.

Taras – ClickDealer (37:51) Yeah,

it’s a trash can. That’s what they do.

Chris – mThink (37:56) Okay. All right. So, I mean, how do you just sort of close this out? I mean, what do you what do you see as sort of click dealers, you know, mission and outlook? I mean, what is the do you feel that you have a mission for ClickDealer or is it just grow as much as you can?

Taras – ClickDealer (38:13) I mean, our goals were always to have a global performance marketing presence. I mean, it’s cool and interesting to work outside just the US market and, you know, make things happen and figure out how people take in other parts of the world. you know, figure out marketing campaigns, you know, globally, it’s exciting because I have a marketing degree, so maybe that’s exciting for me. I know that culture, preferences and other things play a huge role in the consumer behavior. And I find that fascinating. it would be awesome. I mean, it reflects in our company the way we are diverse and we have so many people. So being this diverse and I would say the model would be kind of

Global performance marketing would be the great place. Be an Impact.com, but not just in the States. Be everywhere.

Chris – mThink (39:14) So that was going to be my next question, my final question, which is to kind of put you on the spot. you’re talking about, ideally we’d like to become like Impact. So let’s say a brand is coming to see you. What’s your elevator pitch? What’s your elevator pitch for why a brand should come and work with ClickDealer in 2025?

Taras – ClickDealer (39:35) I mean, we actually we just covered about this making fun of agencies at the end of the day, we don’t charge until there’s performance and there’s a specific, you know, action by the client that they’re looking for. So you you like you said, you don’t pay until you get something that you need. I think that’s the that should be the you know, the the understanding for brands, right? Until you get the right customer is that’s when you pay.

You don’t pay to agencies just because somebody maybe had one impression five years ago, but somehow it’s reflected in the stats that they brought the customer.

Chris – mThink (40:16) Do you still find that scalability of campaigns is ever an issue or is that something that doesn’t really apply now?

Taras – ClickDealer (40:26) Yeah, I mean, we’re at the mercy of Google and Facebook and all those gods, basically. It’s again, yeah, you can scale. Are you going to be profitable? Because again, we grew our own media in-house and yeah, you can scale, but you’re not going to make money. And the biggest probably issue between the customer, like advertisers not realizing that

Acquiring the right paying customers does cost more money than the cookie cutter, whatever, affiliate traffic. So I probably that’s the biggest challenge. scale, you don’t always make money. We did, and personally, I know we burn money just to make sure that our advertisers are happy.

Chris – mThink (41:17) I mean, I hear that a lot. mean, you know, it’s all right. Well, listen, Taras, it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for thank you for giving me some of your time and your insights about 2025. I might just go and set up a couple of those Ozempic campaigns myself. Anybody that’s watching, know, ClickDealer has been one of our top 20 networks for nearly a decade now.

Go take a look at ClickDealer, partner with them. They’re a good bunch of people. Thanks a lot, Taras. I really appreciate it.

Taras – ClickDealer (41:50) You’re welcome. It’s always a pleasure talking with you.