Goloot on the Wild West, $100 Billion, and the Power 100

Goloot is proof that a good pivot beats a good idea. Founded in Montreal in 2017 as a mobile ad network, the business flopped, regrouped, relaunched, and flourished in 2020 as a content-powered performance marketing company.  

Now headquartered in New York, it's part of Awin's content partnerships movement, where advertisers reach readers through native ad units embedded directly in editorial content, blogs, and newsletters, rather than through traditional display or search. 

On an affiliate platform like Awin, the nuances of partners like Goloot mean you can recruit premium publishers to scale your acquisition channel incredibly fast. 

But Goloot is a little different than some. 

Its founder, Lucas Beland, started the company at 19, straight out of a career spent building mobile games and apps in his bedroom. The pivot into content came from a bet that brands would lose trust in the monopoly held by paid-ad channels like Meta and Google.  

Goloot now works with over 500 brand partners, has grown its team past 40, and distributes dozens of millions of dollars in revenue share to its content publishers each year. It's also a member of Awin's Power 100: a showcase of the 100 most innovative partners on the Awin platform network. 

At ThinkTank Americas, we sat down with Lucas to talk about the company's origin story, why the affiliate channel has been core to its growth, and where he sees ad spend heading over the next decade. 

View Lucas's full interview above, or check the write-up below. 

Lucas, congratulations! Goloot has made the Power 100. Could you describe what Goloot is? 

Goloot is a performance marketing company that specializes in helping brands acquire customers via content.  

We have a large network of content publishers and partners, from tier-one editorial media websites to blogs and newsletters, and we power our own native ad units in these articles and pages that feature recommended products and offers to the readership, who can click through and make their way to a brand's website. 

It's a discovery experience, a consideration experience, but specifically designed for performance, so hoping that click converts into a high-quality customer. We've expanded the business over the years to support newsletter formats, article formats, and all sorts of exciting content activations. 

This index is full of interesting companies and how they started. How did it start for Goloot? 

It's been a crazy journey. The company is a five-year-old business that I started out of Montreal when I was 19. I dropped out of school: the classic glorified entrepreneurship story, except my career really begins before Goloot, in mobile gaming. I was a nerd who loved thinking about mobile games and concepts, and through that I discovered advertising, because most mobile apps and games are monetized by ads. 

I spent my teenage years building all sorts of products that failed miserably, but it got me into the weeds of programmatic advertising. When I got a bit older, I started focusing on building something more solid, and one of the ideas was to change the way consumers interact with ads, first on mobile. Goloot started off in 2017 as a mobile ad network. It failed miserably, but I hung onto the vision, and we saw a huge opportunity in 2019–2020. 

Fortunately, Montreal is full of performance marketers. The affiliate industry booms there for some reason. I was surrounded by voices telling me to try something outside of games. I saw a shift in the market: ad networks were changing their privacy frameworks, brands were losing trust in Meta and Google ads, and I thought, ‘They're going to want to spend money somewhere else’. I believed content was going to be a really big part of the 2020s, and content websites needed better ways to advertise to their readership that weren't just a boring banner.  

So I pivoted the business in 2020 and never looked back. Raised money, built a team, and here we are. 

As a startup, how has the affiliate channel helped you scale? 

We have the privilege of servicing brands directly that don't even have affiliate networks, and we encourage them to adopt one, because it's such a transparent and fair attribution framework.  

A lot of brands struggle to understand the impact and value of their media. Affiliate is direct and simple, entrenched around a last click, so for our brand partners who want to start investing in content-based advertising but have a hard time justifying that to their CFO, doing it through the lens of an affiliate network that measures the value and revenue impact of our media is huge. 

The affiliate channel itself has been a one-to-many leverage for a media company like ours. We were fortunate to be supported by publisher development teams, marketplaces, and events like this one [ThinkTank Americas], where we could build significant relationships and accelerate the business.  

Affiliate networks are so full of partnership opportunities that when you're looking to grow a company like mine from zero to now, over 500 brand partners, they've been a catalyst in helping us scale. 

And just geographically, starting out in Canada, going to the US, what was that journey like for you? 

We started even in Quebec, which is a very unique market: French-speaking, in an ocean of English-speaking consumers, with very different laws and intense privacy frameworks. Every creative a brand sent us, we'd flag: not compliant, wrong language, wrong punctuation. We had to do a lot of work to demonstrate our value in Quebec, so expanding outside of that market felt really easy. We were like, ‘this is the Wild, Wild West - there are no rules!’. 

Interestingly, the majority of our business is now in the US. Goloot's head office is in New York City, and we partner mostly with American brands. But they love to lean on us as a Canadian company to navigate the Canadian market, because Canadian consumers are similar to Americans yet so different. Some brands oversimplify it and think of Canada as just another California, but Canadian consumers trust different kinds of media, speak a different language in some capacity, and consume content differently. Today our business is about 70% US, 30% Canada, and we help a lot of our American partners market themselves in Quebec and Canada. 

Going the other way, Canadian brands entering the US get a lot of scale from us: bigger consumer pool, bigger buying power, and American consumers who are very responsive to direct-response advertising and love discovering products through commerce content.  

Canadian partners tend to struggle in the US because it's so competitive, so we help them gain scale through our distribution. American companies going into Canada are often overly ambitious about it and need to understand there's a very different consumer profile and behavior to navigate. 

What are the big trends you're focusing on? 

We started off as an ad network and we're still an ad network at our core. We're proud to be distributing dozens of millions of dollars in revenue share to content partners, which has been a great asset for clients who are overly dependent on certain ad platforms and want to diversify and reach consumers at a different point in the funnel. 

One product we're bullish about helps brands build partnerships with publishers on Meta, so they can advertise from a more trusted, credible voice, and typically benefit from better CPMs because publisher partners carry a lot of authority and trust on that platform.  

When you think about how saturated Meta ads have become, leveraging commerce content and publishers can help reduce costs and build a better relationship with a reader who's saturated with ads. It bridges the gap between a declining open web and Meta, giving publishers a second wave of momentum. 

What does the future look like for Goloot? 

I adore our approach: R&D focused, trial and error, not overly affirmative about things we don't really know, but open to all sorts of areas and product investments.  

We've scaled quickly. There are now over 40 of us, and we're going to keep building the team. We're helping brands outside the affiliate channel discover its capabilities and why its attribution framework matters. 

In the next 10-15 years, brands' dependence on Meta and Google ads is going to keep diminishing. Some research suggests about $100 billion in ad spend is expected to shift away from those traditional platforms toward more diversified sources. Brands are going to want to work with a variety of partners rather than depend on one or two to drive the majority of their ROI, and we're positioning Goloot to be the investment leader for all things content and performance, the way other companies have taken ownership of checkout pages, newsletters, or mobile games.  

It's great for publishers, who can lean on a technology partner, and great for brands who need access and scale. I’m excited to keep building our little baby into a giant. 

Strike up a partnership with Goloot, or browse the Power 100 for influencers, tech partners, coupon sites, and more.