AGS MAGAZINE: Playing by the rules

Quick and easy money has always been associated with affiliate marketing. But when you practise white media buying, it can be a decent way to build a stable business. Denys “Max Search” Dankanych, CEO of Quick Leads Marketing, discusses what white media buying means in practice, how he manages the line between creativity and compliance, and how AI is changing the way his company operates.

Maximum search

Max says he was the first to create a channel on search arbitrage, a model in which traffic is bought from sources such as Meta or TikTok and monetised through search partners such as Google or Yahoo. He started the channel “Maximum Search” about five years ago, sharing his learnings and experience in search arbitrage. It gained a lot of followers, but no one knew who the admin was. Eventually, people started calling the anonymous admin “Max”. He decided to keep the name because it was more interesting and had strong recall in the space.

Today, Max isn’t only known in search arbitrage because of his name. A big part of his work is what he calls white media buying. For him, it starts with where the money comes from, who pays it, and how that payment is received. In search arbitrage, his company gets paid through monetisation partners such as Google or Yahoo. The important part for him is that the payment flow is easy to track and explain to banks and other parties.

Another indication is how the ads look and the relationship with traffic sources. Quick Leads works with traffic sources such as Meta and TikTok, and Max says most of their ads are around 99% compliant. The aim is to build good relationships with those traffic sources:

“Everybody is happy. That’s basically why we don’t need to be really aggressive or do misleading ads to earn money,” he says.

Kids in kindergarten

Compliance is paramount to how Max runs the business. Policies on platforms such as Meta and TikTok keep changing. So his compliance team sits between the media buyers and the traffic sources, monitors those changes, and adjusts their internal rules. There are roadblocks along the way, including some beyond their control, but they still have to find solutions and keep working.

To explain how they provide value to the advertiser, traffic source, and the person clicking the ad, Max uses home improvement as an example. Someone may see an ad on Meta, click through to an article about home improvement services. And then choose a keyword that matches what they are looking for. Google can then use that keyword to find a relevant advertiser. For Max, the person should understand what they clicked, why they clicked, and what they are looking for. The ad, article, and keyword should all be aligned.

Of course, there are still times when it’s tempting to deviate, especially when more money is on the line. Max understands that media buyers naturally want to stay competitive and find ways to make a campaign more profitable. As a search arbitrage business owner himself, he knows that pressure firsthand. But he also believes there is still room to experiment without crossing the line.

“We have the rules, we need to follow them, but there is still space where you can be creative,” he says.

So while experimentation still has its place, these days, Max is less willing to take risks that could compromise the business’s stability. Instead, his focus is on building something that can last. Campaigns that cross the line get blocked, and internal rules get stricter if needed. With close to 200 people in the team, one exception can quickly influence how others behave. He compares media buyers to kids in kindergarten: if one person sees somebody else doing something, they will probably want to copy it too. That can mean giving up some short-term profit, but for him, it protects the business from bigger problems later.

They also have an in-house traffic-quality and anti-fraud system. It checks logs, monitors traffic quality, and can reject traffic that does not meet the quality score. Max says they mainly focus on tier-one markets and also look at Google’s monthly adjustments. If those adjustments start increasing, it can be a sign that something is wrong with the traffic or advertisers are not happy with it.

The AI CEO

AI has also become one of the ways they control compliance. Their ads go through checks before they run, helping them catch issues earlier. But AI has changed much more than compliance inside Quick Leads. Since last year, Max has started calling himself an “AI CEO”. His day-to-day work has taken a 180-degree turn. In the creative department, they still have around 20 people. But he says the number and quality of creatives they can produce have increased by about 10 times.

“So we didn’t choose the strategy to fire people because now we can make the same number of creatives with fewer people. Our strategy is to make much more than we used to do,” he says.

The tech department has changed too. They have eight people working on their tracking system and other internal tools. Before, Max might have had an idea and left it waiting for months until the tech team had time to work on it. Now, he can use AI himself to build things such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and make changes much faster. He says they can now adapt in days instead of months.

He also has an AI personal assistant that he talks to every day, whether for technical questions or to debate ideas. AI now takes up what he estimates to be around 80% of his time. Before, his days involved more calls, Google Sheets, strategy work, and conversations with the team. Now, much more of that time is spent communicating with AI, developing ideas, building internal systems, and then sharing those strategies with his team.

Still, Max would not leave the important decisions to AI.

“I cannot see one AI assistant managing 10 departments with 180 people,” he says. Especially when some decisions could lead to serious damage and financial losses.

This article was originally published in AGS Magazine. Explore the latest issue for more in-depth interviews, straightforward analysis and informed perspectives from across the affiliate and performance marketing industry.