Brook Schaaf is CEO and co-founder of FMTC, an affiliate marketing data company that helps publishers turn commerce content into revenue through coupon, deal, product, and program data. A longtime industry operator, Brook has spent his career thinking about the machinery behind affiliate marketing: how data moves, how publishers get paid, where incentives break down, and what the channel needs to become more valuable to the wider web. He is the author of The Affiliate Hypothesis: Universal Link Monetization to Save the Open Web, which argues that affiliate marketing could provide a much broader economic foundation for online publishing. Brook is a frequent writer and speaker on affiliate technology, attribution, publisher monetization, industry economics, and the sometimes uncomfortable gap between how the industry works and how it says it works.