Zoobu's founder
Kevin Brown founded Affiliate Window, now Awin, in 1999 and set up Zoobu in 2012. Along the way he came up with the name Affiliate Window while his double glazing was being fitted, and took a Pink Floyd tribute show to The O2. Here is the story so far, with links to the original coverage.
Kevin Brown has been self-employed since he was 18, which is a polite way of saying he has never had a proper job. Before Affiliate Window, he and his business partner Andy Totten ran LatestEvents, a concert travel company and tour operator.
In 1998 and 1999 Kevin spent four months at home writing the original Affiliate Window platform himself in PHP and MySQL. The name came about by chance. Finding a domain with “affiliate” in it was hard, even in 1999. He had double glazing being fitted that week, and while he was searching for domain names the word “window” came to mind. That is how Affiliate Window became AffiliateWindow.com, and it may be the only affiliate network whose name came from a home improvement project. He built the website, launched the platform in 1999 and handled the early sales to small and mid-sized merchants. Kevin and Andy funded the business themselves with no outside investment, and it was profitable from 2002.
Kevin grew Affiliate Window, now Awin, into one of the largest affiliate networks in Europe. By 2009 the business, then owned by their company Digital Window Ltd, worked with more than 850 advertisers and 80,000 publishers, including Dixons Store Group, Nike and Vodafone, with annual sales above €40 million.
In August 2009 Axel Springer and PubliGroupe bought a 50.1% majority stake. Kevin and Andy kept the remaining 49.9%, and Kevin continued as chief executive. The deal was covered by Campaign, Horizont and the German business press, and announced in Axel Springer’s own press release, which named Kevin and Andy as the two founders.
In March 2010 Kevin led the acquisition of the buy.at affiliate network from AOL, which he described at the time as a milestone for the business. The deal, also reported by Crain’s New York Business, gave the company a combined presence in the UK, the US and Scandinavia. Kevin led the integration, which ended with the buy.at brand folding into Affiliate Window as the US platform launched in 2012.
By the time Kevin left in 2012 the team had grown to more than 200 people. Mark Walters took over as CEO with Adam Ross as COO, and Adam Ross is now CEO of Awin, one of the world’s largest affiliate networks.
In 2010 Kevin founded Zoo Management to manage The Australian Pink Floyd Show. Working with promoters Neil Warnock and Steve Homer, he took the show from small venues to arenas and more than 100 shows a year around the world, including The O2 in London. Zoo Management produced the concert film The Australian Pink Floyd Show: Live from the Hammersmith Apollo, filmed in July 2011 and broadcast on PBS in the US. Not bad for a band whose entire setlist was written by someone else. Kevin also managed The South.
In 2015 Kevin founded GigRev, now FanCircles, to give artists their own branded fan club apps where they own their fan data. In 2018 its Seedrs campaign beat its £250,000 target by nearly £50,000, and Kevin spoke about the business with Music Week, BusinessCloud and the Music Biz Weekly podcast.
In 2019 the company worked with IE:Music on Robbie Williams’ Roundhouse show. By 2021, as FanCircles, the platform had more than 500,000 users and over 40 acts, including Paloma Faith, The Levellers and Ed Harcourt, and The Alarm made more than £20,000 in subscriptions from their FanCircles app.
In 2024 FanCircles raised $2 million from angel investors, covered by Digital Music News and Music Ally. Clients have included UB40, Culture Club, Wolf Alice and Wet Wet Wet. FanCircles also built the Most Haunted app, and in 2025 Kevin talked to Net Influencer about why followers are not the same as fans. In 2026 the company launched PushPass, which puts brands on customers’ lock screens through Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
Since 2012 Kevin has invested in companies across digital advertising, technology and beyond. He was an early investor in SuperAwesome, the kid-safe digital media company acquired by Epic Games in 2020, and has backed a number of other early-stage businesses in advertising, media and health technology. He has raised funding for his own businesses and held advisory and board roles.
Kevin set up Zoobu Limited in 2012 to bring this experience together. Zoobu runs its own network of affiliate content sites and manages affiliate programs for brands, so it works on both sides of the channel. Zoobu also owns a portfolio of hundreds of high-value .com domain names, which is either a smart investment strategy or a very specific hobby. Possibly both.