James Foster

James joined AdExchanger in 2012 as a junior reporter on the buy-side desk, six months before the first wave of European programmatic consolidation made the trade-press beat genuinely interesting. He spent the next eight years writing about display, then programmatic, then the affiliate-network industry as it was repositioning itself away from "performance marketing's poor cousin" and toward "performance marketing's most quietly profitable corner." By 2018 he was the senior editor for performance and affiliate coverage; by 2020 he was burnt out on the trade-press economics — declining ad revenue, sponsored-content boundary creep, the slow erosion of the firewall between editorial and the company's events business — and he left for a research role at a London consultancy that was building a paid intelligence product on the same beat.

What he learned in the next four years on the consultancy side isn't in any of the firm's published reports. It's in the gap between what advertisers tell vendors they want (transparency, fixed CPMs, deterministic attribution) and what they actually buy on (familiar branding, account-manager relationships, the network their CMO heard about at the last conference). It's in the four years of confidential RFP responses he reviewed for fortune-500-tier clients, which showed that the network that "wins" a major brand's review is usually the network with the best mid-funnel account team, not the network with the best traffic. And it's in the structural reason that comparison-shopping for ad networks is genuinely hard: the data needed to compare them honestly is locked behind NDAs, and the trade press has been gradually pulled toward sponsored coverage by the same economics that have hollowed out every other trade-press vertical.

He left the consultancy in 2024 with a specific thesis: the affiliate-network industry needs a comparison editorial property that operates on the model of a consumer publication — clear methodology, named tradeoffs, no sponsored placement, the willingness to say "this network is better than that one for this specific use case." That's what bestadsnetwork.com is. He runs the editorial. He commissions the testing. He still calls his old AdExchanger sources twice a week to triangulate what he's hearing. He still believes the trade press has a job to do; he just got tired of waiting for someone else to do it.