Interview with Tradedoubler’s CEO Matthias Stadelmeyer

For those who may not yet be familiar with Tradedoubler, could you provide a brief overview of the business, outlining its core operations and the key markets that are currently being addressed?

Tradedoubler is a leading digital marketing player focusing primarily on partner marketing and influencer marketing. The company was founded in year 1999 in Stockholm by Felix Hagner and Martin Laurenson. Since year 2005, the company has been listed on NASDAQ Stockholm.   

The core of our business is based on our established business model, where we operate as a middleman. We connect brands that have online shops and sell something online with publishers — the websites where consumers usually go to seek information or gain inspiration. This ecosystem includes media sites, news portals, price comparison sites, voucher code sites, cashback sites, and various other portals. We currently work with approximately 3,000 brands, with most of them being international, meaning they utilize our services across multiple markets. Our platform has approximately 180,000 websites registered and linked to it.   

Our technical capabilities are essential for this model; we are able to track the user journey of a consumer, monitoring where they click and what kind of ads they have seen, before redirecting them to the online store. Once a sale has been completed, we track it and manage the entire money flow. We pay the agreed-upon commission to the partner website on the brand’s behalf, and we retain a share of that payment, which is usually around 20%. This share is reflected in our margin of approximately 22% between revenue and gross profit.   

Today the company operates in over 90 markets where we have sufficient traffic and partners to run global partner marketing programs. We are approximately 380 employees and 17 offices, with the headquarters still in Stockholm. Our key geographical presence includes:

Europe: We are strong in all the main markets, including the Nordics, the three largest e-commerce markets (the UK, Germany, and France), as well as Eastern Europe, Spain, and Italy.

Expansion Beyond Europe: We established an office in Sydney, Australia, two years ago, which is generating continuous growth. More recently, in May year 2025, we opened an office in Miami, United States, which became necessary after reaching a limit in servicing our 150 North American clients from Europe. In addition, we are expanding our presence in Latin America, establishing a legal entity and a dedicated team in Mexico to unlock exciting opportunities across the region’s fast-growing digital economy.

Could you tell us more about your product offerings, the specific advantages they provide, and how they stack up against the competing solutions available from other market players?

Our primary aim is to leverage our performance-based business model to expand into other channels, thereby making different traffic sources available to brands on a performance basis, ensuring they continuously pay only for performance. Our product portfolio is composed of three core offerings:   

Partner Marketing: This is the company’s original product, dealing with publishers and often focusing on the last click of a user journey, such as cashback sites, price comparison sites, and voucher code sites.   

Influencer Marketing (Metapic): This product has been active since year 2017. The fundamental business model is the same, but the traffic sources are creators and influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. We utilize an arbitrage function here: brands pay us largely on a CPA basis (for sales), but we incentivize the influencers on a CPC basis (for clicks) to mitigate the short-term risk for them, as their contribution is not solely last-click driven.   

App Marketing (Appiness): This product originated from an acquisition in the Netherlands. It focuses on campaigns for app downloads and sales inside apps. The business model is principally CPA-based, but it requires a slightly different technical installation and tracking setup.   

The combination of these three offerings gives us a key advantage in the market. We know of very few, if any, competitors that have our type of product mix, which allows us to address a wider range of performance marketing models. Furthermore, this diversification gives us access to different budgets at larger corporations, as partner marketing, influencer marketing, and app marketing are often managed by separate internal teams.   

Since Metapic began segmental reporting in Q1 2021, how has the Influencer Marketing unit developed strategically and financially? Is this segment designated as the core strategic priority, and what is the projected outlook for future growth?

We acquired Metapic as a startup with two employees in year 2017 and adapted its model to match our core performance business model, which allowed us to scale the offering.   

Financially, Metapic has doubled its revenue every year in the initial phase. Last year, the growth rate was still 50 %, and currently, the growth rate is approximately 30 %. This progress now means that Metapic accounts for about 20 % of the company’s total business.   

Strategically, we initially expanded from the Nordics to Poland and Eastern Europe to test the business case in our markets. Seeing this succeed, we spent the last two years expanding Metapic to all eight European core markets where the company is present. This expansion required an operational investment, as each market requires a core team of three people: one for client management, one salesperson, and one for influencer recruitment and management. In parallel, we have developed the proprietary technology of Metapic, including a self-serve solution, which is important for large brands that manage their influencer relationships directly and use the platform as a management tool.   

Metapic is designated as a strategic priority for the company. Despite the current growth rate of 30%, we believe the potential is far from exhausted. We have recently invested further into strengthening the teams in the various markets since we see opportunities to grow substantially going forward, and we are optimistic regarding the future growth outlook for this segment.   

Given the recently announced US office opening and expansion plans, what is the most critical strategic measure the company will prioritize to ensure rapid market entry and scale in North America?

The establishment of the US office in Miami in May year 2025 was a response to a structural challenge. Previously, we lost larger clients who consolidated globally with competitors that had a US presence, and we were often not allowed to pitch because we lacked that presence. Furthermore, we had 150 clients in North America by the end of the previous year, but major US publishers refused to sign European agreements, leading to a bottleneck due to our lack of a US legal entity.   

We are focusing on three critical measures to ensure success in North America :   

Onboarding Top Publishers: This was the prerequisite for operating effectively. We have managed to sign individual agreements with almost 90 % of the largest 20 publishers since May, and they are now integrated into our platform, allowing us to compete in the market.   

Local Presence and Team Establishment: It is essential to have a dedicated team on the ground to build relationships and deal with local legislation and currency. We now have a team of five people, and I personally spend two weeks every month in the US, working closely with the team and the market.   

Sales and Pipeline Building: We are actively building our sales pipeline. The two sales managers we recruited started on September 1st, and market feedback has been positive. Winning prominent clients creates a valuable pull effect by demonstrating our capabilities and trustworthiness.   

We focus on the e-commerce segment, specifically four key verticals: travel/entertainment, fashion, retail, and consumer electronics. In the US, we are particularly established in the travel/entertainment and fashion segments. Examples include Major League Baseball (with approximately 200 programs), the New York Yankees, the Miami Marlins, and various Broadway shows.   

As of Q3 2025 you decided not to simply add short-term AI features, but to rebuild your platform from the ground up to meet the demands of an AI-driven market. What does this strategic shift entail in terms of implementation and organizational impact?

We spent approximately one year analyzing the impact of AI on our business. We realized that simply adding external tools or chatbot functionalities would not be sufficient, and that we couldn’t effectively build AI functionalities internally due to the historical structured way we stored data in databases.   

The decision for a complete rebuild was made about one year ago. The implementation took eight months and was finalized in the summer of year 2025. The core implementation involved:   

Data Migration: Migrating all our structured databases to create one unified Data Lake, where operational tracking data, Power BI data, and client data are now stored. This structure allows AI to be applied directly on top of the data.   

Technology: We migrated to Oracle Exascale databases and are considered to be on the forefront concerning this implementation, with our chief database developer having been invited to speak at the Oracle AI World 2025 conference about the experience.   

The organizational shift focuses on three main application areas:

Internal Automation: We have built an internal team to automate many manual and recurring tasks inherent to partner marketing with AI. For example, product feed handling, a 20-year-old challenge, is now managed by AI, which reads the feeds and maps them to our internal structure, solving 30 % of our related support tickets.   

Interface Functionalities: We are developing AI-based features within the platform’s user interface. We expect the first functionalities to launch in Q1 next year.   

Network Preparation: We are working closely with our publishers to manage the disruption from Large Language Models (LLMs). We are helping them become AI-compatible and have already integrated the first AI publishers into our system, which we believe will increase the relevance of our channel. 

In twelve months, where do you see Tradedoubler and can you elaborate on the strategy that will take you there?

I anticipate that the execution of our strategy will give the company a very healthy outlook. The strategy for the coming twelve months is centered on making progress within the four key growth opportunities we have identified:   

Existing Markets: Continuing to establish the company and gaining market share in our core European regions.   

New Markets: Achieving progress in the US and Mexico, alongside continuous investment in Eastern Europe where we see good traction.   

Product Portfolio: Increasing the number of clients that utilize more than one of our three products (partner marketing, influencer marketing, app marketing). The overlap between these products is currently small, representing a large organic growth opportunity by increasing client value.   

AI Capabilities: Achieving greater efficiency in our internal processes and successfully launching the first AI functionalities in the platform.   

Could you give three distinct reasons as to why Tradedoubler is an attractive investment today?

Tradedoubler stands out as an investment opportunity thanks to its resilient business model, clearly defined strategic growth levers, and dedicated management team focused on delivering long-term shareholder value.

Future-Proof Business Model: The business model as a middleman between brands and partners is robust; we believe that traffic will always be traded in the digital environment. We operate in a growing market and have strong technological capacity, which we believe will draw business towards performance marketing companies like us.   

Clear Growth Opportunities: The four identified growth pillars provide a clear strategic path forward, focusing on measurable growth through increased market share, geographic expansion, full utilization of the product portfolio, and technological efficiency via AI capabilities.   

Financial Valuation and Management Commitment: We believe the company is undervalued, partly due to historical factors and prior passive communication with the market. Crucially, the management team and all 380 employees are fully committed to driving the company forward. Our incentive structure is linked to the share price, signaling our confidence in the strategic plan to the market.