Lu Discover.

I started out in 2009 learning HTML and CSS, and spent the next years as a UX designer, working on apps for pilots, restaurant management software and crypto mining tools. That work taught me to judge design by what it does for real users, not by how it looks in a portfolio.

In 2016 I moved into affiliate marketing, buying traffic on nutra and dating offers and writing about the industry. I spent my first year sure I understood how the money moved, until a webmaster showed me a working funnel and proved otherwise. That’s when I started digging, and I haven’t stopped.

Today I run aliencpa, and I write about the gap between the industry’s public success stories and the everyday reality of the job: moderation, margins, account bans and the terms nobody reads.

I launched aliencpa in 2017 as a calendar of affiliate conferences. It has since grown into an independent magazine about affiliate marketing and paid traffic, where we sign up, set up tracking and go through the payout process before we publish a verdict. Sponsors can’t buy a rating, a review or a verdict.