In this latest episode of Champions of Performance Marketing, we’ve met Florin Simovici, a renowned innovator in the affiliate marketing industry and expert in cash-on-delivery affiliate networks and traffic optimization systems.
Florin is a true pioneer who’s done it all in the affiliate space. From co-founding the influential Affiliate Expo Conference in Italy to developing Traffic Manager, the platform now powering 80% of Europe’s cash-on-delivery affiliate networks, Florin brings 15 years of industry experience that’s simply unmatched.
His technological solutions have transformed countless affiliate operations, and his strategic insights continue to revolutionize how networks approach traffic management across the continent.
We are excited to share this interview with all of you, and hope you will find it as interesting as we did.
Our conversation revealed his professional evolution and his strategic vision for the future of affiliate marketing and cash-on-delivery in Europe.
Check the Episode on Spotify here:
Q: Tell me a little bit, how did you get to affiliate marketing? What made you enter this space?
Florin Simovici: I think it happened 15 years ago when I started my journey as an affiliate. Initially, I worked in the dating industry, mostly doing SEO and search engine optimization. I launched my own network in 2014, after five years of experience, and then we launched TrafficManager as a consequence of the technology behind the network.
Traffic Manager is an affiliate tracking platform for affiliate programs and networks. It’s more for B2B, not for media buyers, but we’re trying to offer all the tools our clients’ affiliates need. Our niche is affiliate networks and affiliate programs.
It was a heck of a journey, I need to say 15 years. I remember pretty much everything like it was yesterday. I’m really proud of myself and everything that I have done in this period, with the errors and the good things as well. In the end, it’s just trial and error. This is the way we’re performing in this industry and, I think, in many other industries. I’m really happy to be in this place right now.
At the moment, I am preparing for going to Dubai for the Affiliate World Conference. I will be a speaker at the affiliate managers academy there with Stefan Paul Muehlbauer.
Q: When you started with SEO, did you also do media buying or use SEO only in your campaigns?
Florin Simovici: I started as an SEO. I was focusing my energy on that at that time. I think media buying was at the beginning. In that period, not many affiliates were buying traffic. Most of us generate traffic through SEO or other methods.
I remember media buying started to catch up. In the beginning, I didn’t give much importance because I was focused on where I was talented and I was generating enough traffic.
However, once it became necessary, I started to study this part and do some campaigns for different projects, including my projects like the Affiliate Expo conference.
I’m doing the media buying, me and my colleague from Italy; we are managing the campaigns ourselves.
Q: Since we are talking about Affiliate Expo, what made you launch this conference? And why Italy?
Florin Simovici: I didn’t launch it myself. This conference has been there since 2018, but it was always a local conference. So everybody who came to the conference was Italian. The primary language spoken was Italian, not English. Most of the companies were Italian, like 90% of them. So it was a narrow market, a narrow niche where most of the participants were Italian.
I wanted to launch in 2023 a conference in Italy that would compete with this one. I bought the domain; I bought everything. I wanted to partner with some people from the industry. I already had the sponsors through my affiliate tracking software.
I went to some of our clients and said, “Guys, we want to organize a conference. Are you interested?” I explained the concept, and they liked it right away since we mostly focus on education and masterminds for media buyers.
The thing is that the guys who were organizing this conference in Italy reached out to me. They asked if we could have a conversation. I scheduled it and saw five people already waiting for me. I was expecting the typical Italian response where they would blame me for building another conference competing with them. But it was the total opposite. They said, “Listen, we understand that you have potential; you have a lot of clients in this industry. Would you like to partner with us instead of building another conference?”
I said okay but explained that I knew they were local, and the primary language was Italian. I wanted it to be an international affiliate conference with international speakers, and I wanted to be in charge of bringing those speakers because I knew what topics interested the audience. They said, “No, listen, we’ll give everything to you. Let’s put the budget together, 50-50, split everything, and do it exactly as you want.”
In the first year, we took one of the most expensive locations in Milan. We lost 65,000 euros. In the second year, we lost another 60,000 euros because we invested in our own brands—for me, Traffic Manager, and Me2C, the local affiliate network that is my partner.
It’s a collaboration. I didn’t launch it myself, so I cannot take credit for that. I’m organizing it right now. Most of the planning is scheduled by me and my colleague Valeria, who is really my right hand and my sister. She’s helping me in a huge way with the conference.
The first two years were spent in the city center of Milan. This year, we’re changing everything. We’re going to Lake Maggiore on the lakeside. It will be a fantastic experience.
We want to focus more on the VIP experiences than just the standard exposition centers where people go in, see some booths, and do some networking. We want to focus on networking because, in the end, that’s the key. People need to connect and network more. So this is what we’re trying to do.
Q: So right now, are you also in this partnership with the company from Italy?
Florin Simovici: Yes, we are 50-50. It’s me with Traffic Manager and the AI20 affiliate network. They are a local affiliate network that offers cash-on-delivery. They’re very cool. I’m very good friends with the owner. They are very professional, so I have no issues sharing the credits for an amazing conference with a team like that.
Even if they are competitors to many of my clients, my clients trust me. They understood the importance of a well-organized conference in Italy, which is attracting a lot of new affiliates and media buyers from around the world.
They have new talent that they can bring on board. The e-commerce and cash-on-delivery industry is growing month to month, especially in Europe. It’s becoming a really huge thing and many affiliates are coming to explore this new vertical.
Q: Returning to cash-on-delivery, why this niche, e-commerce and cash-on-delivery? What’s so special about it? Maybe explain what cash-on-delivery is about for people who don’t understand it well.
Florin Simovici: There is a way to deal with the final customer in Europe. Instead of using a credit card, you can ask the courier to deal with the customer once they deliver the product they bought online. The final customer pays the courier, and the courier pays the affiliate network or the advertiser. This is cash-on-delivery. It was invented in India many years ago.
It became massive in Italy initially and then in the rest of Europe. I was lucky to be the right person at the right time with the affiliate tracking software.
TrafficManager and my team are providing technology for 80% of the affiliate networks in Europe that offer cash-on-delivery.
It was easy for us to combine them all. This is how the conference turned into a niche event for cash-on-delivery, e-commerce, sweepstakes, and lead generation in general. We are not going to tackle the broad industry like the financial conferences are. We are focused on this niche because it needs more attention.
It’s a powerful and very profitable niche for media buyers because most of these products you find in cash-on-delivery can be promoted on Facebook and Instagram, they can legitimately push through media buying. They don’t need to go gray or black, it’s all white; they’re all legitimate products. People buy them, you find an angle, push it, solve a problem, and you make money. It’s very straightforward.
Cash on delivery it’s a sort of drop shipping with the products already in Europe. So the delivery is in a few days instead of a few weeks.
Q: Tell me about the Traffic Manager. How did you start that? You mentioned at the beginning that you had a network and began building the software for it.
Florin Simovici: Yes, exactly. That’s how we started and how I ended up with Traffic Manager.
It wasn’t planned to be an affiliate tracking software, to be honest. We began to give it as a side thing to a few friends in the industry. We saw that they liked it. With their help, we improved the product. In 2015, we started to give it away, and in 2016, we launched it as a side product.
Everything started as a network. I also wrote a book about my journey in this industry. It starts from my days as an affiliate and how I ended up networking with my partners back then and how we switched everything to Traffic Manager.
At that time, we had an affiliate network based in Romania. I exited from it in 2019 with my associate Francesco. We sold our shares to our partners. The network is called Tube Advertising. It’s still around, and they’re still using our technology. But it was related to the dating and adult industry, not cash-on-delivery. We were focusing mostly on the dating industry.
Q: So you exited the network and started focusing only on the software platform Traffic Manager?
Florin Simovici: We reached the point where we needed to make a choice. My partner Francesco and I said we either continue with the network or focus on the product.
At that time, in 2018, before selling, we started to receive some complaints from clients using the platform. We had about 20-25 clients then.
They said, “Guys, we know you also have a network.” Even though I wasn’t managing it anymore, we had employees. But we were adding more and more products to this network—digital products, cash-on-deliveries, e-commerce, not only dating, sweepstakes, and so on. So we started to become competitors to our clients, which made sense.
I said: “Listen, we must choose now because we cannot continue both ways. We need to choose the main business, either shut down Traffic Manager and continue with the network or shut down the network and continue with Traffic Manager.”
Then, we received an offer to sell. I preferred that, of course. That gave us some liquidity to invest in Traffic Manager right away.
I chose the software path because, to be honest, you don’t need to deal with affiliates as much anymore, you don’t need to chase payments from advertisers, and there’s less hassle providing the technology than having and managing a network. It’s way more difficult to manage a network than just providing software.
Q: So now you work and provide the software for affiliate networks so they can track their affiliates and everything you did as an affiliate network?
Florin Simovici: Exactly. What we built for our own network is now in our client’s hands. But what we built back then was maybe 40-50% of the software we have right now.
Because when you have many clients, they come with their expertise and their own needs. You build something new when you see many clients with matching needs. Then you come with your experience and approach to the problem they want to solve, making it even better.
We added new features to the software step by step. Now, it has become huge—a monster that’s getting even bigger every day.
Q: I know what you mean because they always ask for things, and you cannot build custom things for one specific client. When more clients ask for the same thing, you see that there is a need for it, and you start building it. Right?
Florin Simovici: Exactly. We build custom stuff for clients, but not everybody can afford to build custom solutions. When we receive the exact requests from different clients, we know this is a trend, something they need. We need to make it perfectly. We don’t even charge for it.
Q: What challenges have you seen affiliates have when working with affiliate networks, from the affiliate’s point of view?
Florin Simovici: I think the biggest challenge that affiliates have is that they often encounter network owners who are not entrepreneurs, from my point of view.
Many people come to us wanting the software – they pay 300, 400, 500, or 1000 euros for the plan they choose. But this doesn’t make them entrepreneurs if they open a network.
It doesn’t make them businesspeople. They start on this road thinking, “I will just take an offer from an advertiser, put it in the platform, give it to affiliates, and then I make money.” This is not the case anymore. It was like this maybe 15 years ago when it was easy to build a business with value-added services or one-click offers, zero-click offers, or trials. That’s not the case anymore.
You need to be creative, a businessperson, and able to manage your cash flow, keep your promises to the affiliates, guide them, follow up with them (very important) and many other things.
When I see clients of mine who open the network for three months, then close and don’t pay some affiliates, I know there are affiliates coming into the industry.
So the second time they try to open a network, I don’t give them the cloud platform anymore because I know they’re going to scam others. Unfortunately, it’s a problem that happens quite often.
From our side, we’re just providing the software.
We don’t know the real intention behind it unless we know the person did it before, so we don’t give them the platform anymore.
But this is, in my opinion, the biggest problem in the industry—too many networks with no idea how to run a network or work with people. Some people have bad intentions from the beginning.
The best case studies of networks that worked well with inexperienced people were when we had affiliates or super affiliates who opened their networks. They know how to deal with things. They know how it works.
They need a tech person on the team or someone who understands a bit about technical aspects and server-to-server postback integration.
Before we started, you needed to do API integrations. You needed to have a developer in-house. Now you don’t need that anymore. You have tracking platforms. All you need to do is connect one tracking platform to another, all of which support server-to-server postback integration or at least 99% of them.
Those who don’t shouldn’t even be in the industry anymore because not supporting that today is unacceptable. It’s a standard in our industry.
Q: It should be, right? But I know some cases where they don’t have it and don’t intend to implement it.
Florin Simovici: I know. They’re trying to keep their customers there, and they’re afraid of competition. But this is the road to their end.
Conclusion
This is the end of the first part of the interview with Florin Simovici.
Hope you enjoyed it!
Florin Simovici’s journey from SEO specialist to industry leader exemplifies the evolution of affiliate marketing itself.
What began as a personal affiliate venture 15 years ago has transformed into Traffic Manager, a platform that now powers 80% of Europe’s cash-on-delivery affiliate networks.
This is the case with many affiliates who start their own venture once they learn how affiliate marketing really works.
His strategic decision to exit his own network and focus exclusively on providing technology demonstrates a keen understanding of the industry’s direction and needs.
Through the Affiliate Expo conference, Florin continues to shape the European affiliate landscape, creating a space specifically designed for the growing cash-on-delivery and e-commerce sectors.
His emphasis on quality networking experiences rather than traditional exposition formats shows his forward-thinking approach to industry events.
Don’t miss this interview, below you can find the entire video interview (and we encourage you to subscribe as well to keep in touch with the latest interviews!)
Stay tuned for the second part.
Meanwhile, you can get in touch with Florin Simovici here:
- Website Traffic Manager
- Instagram SimoviciFlorian
- For the conference Affiliate Expo
