PerformanceIN: Bristol's News and Events Brand for Performance and Affiliate Marketing
PerformanceIN is a Bristol-based news and events brand covering performance and affiliate marketing. From its home city of Bristol, England, it publishes industry news, research and opinion through its website at performancein.com — now presented under the Hello Partner brand — and stages the PI LIVE events, among the best-known conferences in the performance marketing calendar. The brand grew out of one of the UK's earliest affiliate marketing communities, and its history tracks the professionalisation of an industry that began with individuals earning commission from bedroom websites.
Today the publication covers affiliate, performance and creator economy news: partnerships between brands and publishers, influencer marketing, compliance, technology and the deals and appointments that move the sector. Its events and awards — PI LIVE, the Performance Marketing Awards and the partnership awards run with Hello Partner — bring together advertisers, networks, agencies, publishers and technology companies from around the world.
Overview
PerformanceIN describes its world as paid-by-performance advertising: marketing in which advertisers pay for outcomes — sales, leads and other actions — rather than for exposure alone. Its news site publishes daily stories and opinion for that industry, and its current homepage bills itself as covering affiliate, performance and creator economy news. Recent coverage has included creator awards, arguments about the economics of affiliate marketing, partner marketing in the Nordic media industry and the question of who owns compliance in an affiliate programme — a mixture that reflects how far the sector has spread beyond its coupon-and-cashback origins.
The brand's events side is at least as prominent as its publishing. PI LIVE Europe, held in London each October, is described as a leading global meeting place for performance marketers, attended by thousands of people including globally renowned advertisers, networks, agencies, publishers and technology companies, with its speaker line-up as the centrepiece of the show.
History and Founding
PerformanceIN's founder is Matthew Wood, who began in affiliate marketing in 1999, working with one of Awin's first clients to supplement his income while at university, and went on to build cashback sites, large-scale arbitrage campaigns and high-converting affiliate sites across many niches. Finding no UK resource where affiliates could talk to each other, he set up a free forum — the community that became affiliates4u, or a4u, and later PerformanceIN — which grew by word of mouth, with many of its original members remaining part of his circle years later. Wood returned to Bristol and built the business there, in his own account moving from working at home to serviced offices as the team grew.
Along that journey, Wood's team created Europe's first affiliate marketing conference, a4uexpo, bringing affiliates and advertisers together. After ten years, the event was rebranded to PI LIVE. Wood is also a co-founder of vouchercloud and of Optimus Performance Marketing, and an investor in startups in the performance marketing space. The publishing brand followed the same path as the events: the a4u community became PerformanceIN, a name reflecting the industry's shift from affiliate marketing narrowly defined to performance marketing in full, and the site's domain, performancein.com, now resolves to the Hello Partner publication, the brand under which the business presents its news, community and awards today.
Ownership and Leadership
PerformanceIN was built by Matthew Wood's Bristol company, Existem Limited, which ran the community, the publisher and its events, and Wood remains the brand's founder and director. The current Hello Partner operation lists a team combining editorial and events roles: Sofia Aira, a journalist covering the biggest stories in influencer and creator marketing; Madaline Dunn, community and content editor for affiliate and partnerships, covering news, trends and analysis while building the community; and Sol Wilkinson, a conference producer dedicated to the future of performance and affiliate marketing and the innovators shaping it.
That staffing reflects the brand's dual nature: part newsroom, part conference producer, with community management treated as an editorial function in its own right.
Services and Distribution
PerformanceIN's services divide into publishing, events and awards. The publishing operation produces news, interviews, analysis and opinion on performancein.com, distributed through the site and its newsletters — the Hello Partner newsletters are promoted across its pages. Its awards coverage doubles as content: detailed showcases of winning campaigns from its award programmes, setting out what the judges rewarded and why, which serve the industry as case-study literature.
The commercial model of a trade brand of this kind rests on event tickets and sponsorship, awards entries and partnerships, and the media partner roles the brand plays for others: PerformanceIN has served, for example, as official media partner to The Affiliate Code event, with Awin interviewing Wood as the publisher's founder about industry trends and the PI LIVE show.
PI LIVE and the Events Portfolio
PI LIVE is the brand's flagship. The London show, PI LIVE Europe, takes place in October at Old Billingsgate, with thousands of attendees and a programme in which speakers address important industry developments and facilitate open discussion about all areas of paid-by-performance advertising. Since 2018 the show has expanded its floor space, with session rooms holding 300 to 700 delegates, a dedicated networking village, designated vertical networking for sectors including retail, technology and telecoms, finance and travel and leisure, and an official after-party. Organisers have expected record attendance in recent editions.
The brand has exported the format: PI LIVE Advanced took the event to New York, launched with the support of US industry figures who described the London show as an industry-leading, high-calibre affiliate event. In 2026 the portfolio added PI LIVE Level Up, a peer-led learning format launched in the brand's home city of Bristol — the West Edition was held on 26 March 2026 — born, the organisers said, from the community asking for stronger collaboration and practical skills focused on daily operational challenges, bringing affiliate managers, brand teams, agencies and publishers into the same room to work on communication, negotiation and briefs. The Bristol show also supported ANDYSMANCLUB, the UK men's mental health charity, as part of its programme.
Awards Programmes
PerformanceIN's name is attached to the Performance Marketing Awards, the industry's annual award ceremony celebrating the best in performance marketing. The awards were already well established by the early 2010s: entries for the 2013 ceremony, held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 7 May 2013, opened in November 2012 from Bristol with five new categories, including best brand engagement campaign and a grand prix, reflecting how agencies were growing in importance to the sector. By 2023 the ceremony was in its 17th year, still at Grosvenor House, with Optimise Media the biggest winner of the night and Awin named affiliate network of the year.
Through Hello Partner, the business also runs partnership awards recognising outcome-based performance, affiliate, brand and influencer partnerships, including the US Partnership Awards in North America, and winners from its programmes are showcased in the Hello Partner publication — campaigns from networks, agencies and brands such as Genie Ventures, Silverbean and dentsu X featured in its awards coverage. A separate Global Performance Marketing Awards, whose winners are also featured in Hello Partner, holds its ceremony in London.
Coverage Areas
Editorially, the publication covers the full partnership economy. Affiliate marketing remains the core: networks, publishers, cashback and voucher models, technical publishers building business-to-business tools for advertisers, and startups using affiliate models to solve consumer problems — all trends Wood himself identified in interviews as reshaping the industry. Around that core, coverage extends to influencer and creator marketing, including its own creator-of-the-year awards coverage across categories such as food and drink, fashion and beauty and purpose-driven creators; to compliance and programme management; and to the internationalisation of partner marketing, from the Nordics to North America.
The readership is the industry itself: advertisers and brands running performance programmes, affiliate networks and platforms, agencies, publishers and creators, and the technology providers selling into all of them.
Digital Platforms
The brand's digital home, performancein.com, now presents the Hello Partner publication, with news, opinion, author pages for its journalists and editors, awards showcases and newsletter sign-ups. The domain's long archive preserves the site's earlier incarnations — articles dating back to the a4u and early PerformanceIN years remain part of its searchable record. Events are marketed through dedicated sites under the performancein.live domain, with venue guides, speaker announcements, apps and arrival information for delegates.
Notable Work and Influence
PerformanceIN's influence on its industry is structural. It created Europe's first affiliate marketing conference, professionalised the sector's calendar with PI LIVE, and gave the industry a set of awards against which agencies and networks benchmark themselves — categories such as best managed affiliate programme for small businesses and enterprises now structure how the market describes good practice. Its founder's path from affiliate to publisher, event organiser, vouchercloud co-founder and investor made the brand a node through which much of the UK industry passed at some point in its development.
The move into the creator economy — covering influencer partnerships as a performance discipline and celebrating creators in its own awards coverage — shows the brand following its market as affiliate, influencer and partnership marketing converge into a single outcome-based discipline.
Recent Developments
The brand's recent direction is visible in its 2026 programme: PI LIVE Europe preparing its biggest edition yet at Old Billingsgate, the launch of the Level Up format in Bristol to meet community demand for practical, peer-led learning, and a newsroom explicitly organised around affiliate, partnerships and the creator economy under the Hello Partner name. From a free forum set up because there was nothing in the UK for affiliates to read, PerformanceIN has become the community infrastructure of an industry — its news source, its meeting place and its scorekeeper.
