Digestmedia-buying
Affiliate and CPA networks for games
By Jordan Wells, Senior Analyst — Archive date: 3 min read
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Affiliate and CPA networks still move real mobile game install volume on a pay-on-result basis, but the fraud exposure demands specific contract terms.
Under the platforms that take most of a mobile UA budget sits a layer of affiliate and cost-per-action networks. They still move real volume for studios willing to manage them directly, and the pricing runs on results: an install or a specific in-app action, paid for only when it lands, rather than an auction clearing on impressions.
How the pricing actually works
A CPA network prices on an agreed action rather than an impression or a click: an install, a completed tutorial, a first purchase. The studio pays when the network can show the action happened. That pushes risk onto the network and the publishers behind it, who earn nothing on traffic that fails to deliver, which is one reason the model has outlived years of increasingly sophisticated auction buying on the major platforms. The trade is transparency. A studio buying through a CPA network usually sees far less about where its traffic originates than it would buying directly on Meta or Google, because the network aggregates a long tail of publishers and app arbitrage operators whose individual quality varies enormously.
Where the fraud exposure sits
That lack of visibility is exactly where affiliate traffic earns its reputation. Install fraud, incentivised traffic dressed up as organic, click flooding that claims credit for installs which would have happened anyway: all of it runs hotter in affiliate and CPA inventory than in media a studio buys directly from a platform, because the publisher layer between the studio and the end user resists auditing and a pay-on-result model pays a bonus for inflating delivered volume. Standard MMP fraud detection catches a meaningful share. Studios running serious affiliate volume add network-level scrutiny on top of it, working through individual publisher performance rather than trusting the network's aggregate numbers.
The contract terms worth insisting on
Push for the protections before the spend, not after the first bad month. The one that matters most is a chargeback window, written into the contract with a hard deadline, letting the studio claw back payment for traffic it later proves fraudulent. Alongside that, insist on publisher-level performance data rather than blended network reporting, plus a written right to pause or exclude any individual publisher the moment a quality problem shows up, with no penalty attached.
A network that resists any of them is telling you how much of its volume depends on traffic that would not survive the look, which is worth knowing before a studio commits budget.
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