iGaming Affiliate Marketing: How Casino and Sportsbook Operators Acquire Players

Ask an operator where the next thousand depositing players will come from and the answer used to be a budget line. Buy search, buy social, top up with affiliates for whatever the paid channels missed, and treat a high cost per player as the price of moving quickly.

That order has reversed, and the reason has less to do with efficiency than with access. iGaming affiliate marketing is the channel least exposed to advertising gatekeeping, because the operator is not the one applying for the ad account. A brand can hold a licence in a market and still find that the channels its acquisition plan assumed are closed to it there.

The last eighteen months make the point:

• Brazil's regulated market opened in January 2025 with a ban on influencer, celebrity and athlete promotion of gambling brands, and prohibited welcome bonuses outright later the same year. 

• Meta stopped accepting social casino and gambling-style advertising across nineteen markets in February 2026. 

• X reclassified gambling as a restricted category and closed paid partnerships to operators. 

• The Netherlands blocks gambling advertising between 5:30am and 9pm. 

• India banned online real-money gaming entirely in August 2025.

None of it was coordinated, and that is the practical problem. An operator running a paid-first model rebuilds that model every time a jurisdiction moves, and jurisdictions are moving at different speeds in different directions.

What holds through it is structural. Partners own the audience, carry the cost of reaching it, and are paid after a player has already proven to be worth paying for. The operator buys an outcome rather than an impression.

This is a guide to how that works from the operator side. What the channel delivers, who the partners are, how the commission models behave against your P&L, the plays available beyond first-deposit volume, and what tends to break in the first quarter.

The Model, from the Brand Side

An iGaming affiliate program is a performance agreement between an operator and a third-party publisher. The operator issues the partner a tracking link. The partner drives traffic to the operator's brand through their own audience. When a referred visitor completes a qualifying action, the operator pays a commission.

The qualifying action is where operator programs diverge from every other vertical. In eCommerce a conversion is a purchase, and the transaction closes. In iGaming the qualifying action is usually a first deposit that clears a threshold, and the commercial relationship then runs for months or years afterward as that player generates revenue.

That single difference drives everything else in this article: why commission models are more complicated here, why net revenue definitions matter more than headline percentages, and why player-level attribution is a requirement rather than a reporting nicety.

What the Channel Delivers at Scale

The clearest way to size this is to look at the partners who are publicly listed, because their revenue is operator money and their filings are audited.

For example, Better Collective delivered 305,000 new depositing customers in the fourth quarter of 2025. Gambling.com Group delivered 98,000 in the same period. Two companies, roughly 400,000 new depositing players placed with operators in three months.

The deposit figure is the one worth sitting with. Better Collective introduced a Value of Deposits metric in 2025 to measure what referred users actually put into partner platforms over time. It reached a record €820 million in the fourth quarter, up 13% quarter on quarter, against €726 million in the third. That is money arriving in operator accounts from one partner group's referrals in a single quarter.

Set that against what the partner earned. Better Collective's total revenue in the same quarter was €94 million across every business line it runs. The ratio between what the channel costs and what it moves is not subtle. Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a program-level cost figure, since group revenue spans segments beyond referral, but the direction is unambiguous.

The audience behind those numbers is not small. Better Collective reported a total digital audience above 400 million monthly visits. Gambling.com Group grew revenue 30% across 2025 to approximately $165 million, with marketing services delivering the bulk of it.

Entering a Market Under Restriction

Brazil is the cleanest recent test, because the market opened under exactly the conditions that break paid acquisition. Advertising restrictions from day one. Influencer promotion banned. Welcome bonuses prohibited partway through the year.

The market still produced around $6.27 billion in gross gaming revenue across 2025. In the first half alone, the regulated market generated roughly R$17.4 billion, with 17.7 million unique bettors, across 78 licensed operators running 182 active brands.

Better Collective alone delivered 407,000 new depositing customers from Brazil across 2024, 82% of them on revenue share contracts, generating around €70 million annualised and 19% of group revenue.

Industry analysis of the post-regulation market makes the cost comparison explicit: with pre-registration promotions banned and bonuses limited, media became the main growth lever, and CPMs and cost-per-click rose as operators competed for the channels that remained compliant. The alternative to affiliate acquisition did not disappear. It got more expensive.

The Same Channel on a Longer Timeline

North America shows the same channel working on a different timeline. Better Collective's transition away from upfront payments toward revenue share in the region built an accumulated customer lifetime value base above €155 million, with North American revenue share income up 46% year on year in the first quarter of 2026.

That number is the case for patience. Revenue share income defers earnings and compounds them. Partners have been willing to accept that deferral, which tells you something useful about how they rate the long-run value of the players they place.

Where the Paid Inventory Closed, Market by Market

The channels every other industry treats as default are conditional for gambling brands, and the conditions keep tightening.

• Search requires per-jurisdiction gambling certification. Approval in one market gives you nothing in the next.

• Social platforms have moved from restriction toward exclusion. Meta's ban on social casino and gambling-style ads across nineteen markets took effect in February 2026. X now treats gambling as restricted for paid partnerships, with exemptions handled case by case and no confirmation that operators qualify.

• Influencer and creator channels, which absorbed a lot of displaced budget after the first wave of platform restrictions, are closing behind it. Brazil banned influencer, celebrity and athlete promotion at the start of its regulated regime. France's regulator has signalled a review of social media marketing rules with a specific focus on influencer conduct.

• Broadcast and outdoor carry time-of-day and content restrictions in most regulated European markets. The UK operates a whistle-to-whistle ban on gambling advertising during live sport before 9pm, alongside restrictions on free bet offers in broadcast media and commitments to reduce direct marketing volume.

• Bonus-led acquisition, the mechanic that made a lot of paid media work in the first place, is being regulated separately. From December 2025 the UK banned bonuses with wagering requirements above 10x and restricted promotions combining betting and casino.

The practical consequence for an acquisition team is that channel strategy has to be rebuilt per jurisdiction, on a timeline set by regulators rather than by your roadmap.

Why Partner Traffic Holds When Media Buying Can't

Three mechanisms, and one liability worth stating plainly.

1. Partners absorb the per-market work.
   A comparison site operating in a regulated jurisdiction already holds the local content, the local language, the responsible gambling messaging and the compliance posture required to publish there. When you recruit that partner, you are buying access to work already done rather than commissioning it. In a market like Brazil, where content creators and tipster communities command large engaged audiences and paid inventory is restricted, that shortcut is most of the acquisition strategy.
   

2. Their assets are persistent.
   A ranked review page keeps sending traffic after a paid campaign would have been switched off. When a jurisdiction changes its advertising rules, an organic content asset generally survives the change in a way a media buy does not.
   

3. Cost lands after value is established.
   A revenue share deal pays out of money the player has already generated. That inverts the working capital position of paid acquisition, where you spend to find out whether the player was worth finding. For an operator entering a market, it converts a fixed acquisition budget into a variable cost that scales with results.

The liability: your licence is what is at risk when a partner promotes your brand badly. Licensing conditions in jurisdictions like the UK and Malta hold the operator accountable for promotions carried out on its behalf, including promotion into markets where you are not licensed. Affiliate marketing moves the media cost off your balance sheet. It does not move the regulatory exposure. Partner recruitment is a vetting exercise, and treating it as a volume exercise buys a compliance problem with a delayed fuse.

Who You Would Actually be Recruiting

The partner landscape is more varied than the term "affiliate" suggests, and the mix determines the quality of what arrives.

• Comparison and review sites are the backbone. They rank for high-intent queries, convert at the top of the range, and represent most of the volume in mature markets. They are also the most expensive partners to win, because they have leverage.

• Sports and statistics media send sportsbook traffic at scale around fixtures, at the audience volumes described above.

• Streamers and creators on platforms like Kick deliver younger audiences and high engagement, with the highest compliance risk of any partner type and the most variable player quality.

• Tipsters and community channels, including Telegram and Discord groups, convert well and are difficult to audit. They need tighter terms than the rest of your program.

• Media houses and sub-affiliate networks give you reach through one contract at the cost of visibility into where the traffic originated.

One argument for keeping the mix broad: partner traffic is not risk-free either. Gambling.com Group cut its 2025 full-year guidance and cited poor organic search dynamics through the third quarter, delivering 101,000 new depositing customers against 116,000 in the same quarter a year earlier. Organic assets are durable, and they still sit on someone else's algorithm. A program concentrated in one partner type inherits that partner type's exposure.

Agree What the Percentage Applies to

Most operator disputes with partners are not about the rate. They are about the base the rate applies to.

• Gross gaming revenue (GGR) is stakes minus winnings. 

• Net gaming revenue (NGR) is what remains after the costs of servicing that player come out. What comes out varies by contract, and typically includes bonus cost, payment processing fees, chargebacks, gaming duty and platform or content fees.

Take a player who generates €10,000 in gross gaming revenue over a quarter, with €1,500 in bonus cost, €300 in processing, €2,000 in duty and €500 in platform fees. Gross gaming revenue is €10,000. Net gaming revenue is €5,700.

A 30% share on gross pays the partner €3,000. A 30% share on net pays €1,710. Identical headline terms, 43% difference in what leaves your business.

Deductions and duty rates vary by market and contract, so treat those numbers as illustrative. The principle holds everywhere: define the base, define every deduction, and put both in the partner agreement before you negotiate the rate.

Revenue Share, CPA, and Hybrid Deals

Revenue share

The partner takes a percentage of the net revenue their referred players generate, usually for the lifetime of the account. It aligns the partner with player quality, because a player who deposits once and leaves pays them nothing.

The market has been moving this way. Better Collective reported 73% of its new depositing customers on revenue share contracts in Q4 2025, rising to 77% in Q1 2026. In Brazil the figure reached 82% across 2024.

Read that from the operator side and it says something useful: the strongest partners in the market are increasingly willing to be paid in arrears, out of player value, which is the cheapest capital available to you.

CPA

A fixed fee per qualifying player. Predictable, easy to budget, and the right instrument when you are entering a market and need volume against a known acquisition cost.

The exposure is that you buy the player before you know what they are worth. A partner optimising for CPA is optimising for the qualifying event, not for what happens after it. CPA programs need a qualification threshold with teeth, usually a minimum deposit plus a wagering or activity requirement, and a hold period before commission releases.

The hold period is a platform setting rather than a policy you enforce by hand. In Trackdesk it is configured per conversion type, so a first deposit and a qualified deposit can carry different release windows.

Hybrid

A reduced CPA at qualification plus a reduced ongoing share. It gets deals done with partners who need working capital while keeping some of your payout tied to player value. Most large partner agreements in mature markets end up here.

Negative carryover

The mechanic that decides whether a revenue share program survives contact with a bad month.

If a partner's player cohort produces negative net revenue in a period, because of a large win or heavy bonus cost, negative carryover means that deficit is carried into the following period before commission is paid again. Without it, the partner earns on the good months and you absorb the bad ones in full.

Partners resist it, and strong partners often negotiate it away or cap it at a reset period. That is a legitimate commercial trade. What is not legitimate is discovering after signature that your platform cannot enforce the carryover terms you agreed to. Confirm the logic is configurable before the contract, not after.

Terms the Large Groups Actually Run

The mechanics above are easier to see in the terms the large operator groups actually run. The differences between them are more instructive than the rates.

Deductions are not standardized. For example, Betsson Group Affiliates calculates net revenue as gross gaming profit less bonuses and jackpot contributions, administrative fees, fraud and chargeback costs, returned stakes, and duties and taxes. LeoVegas Affiliates calculates it as gross gaming revenue less bonuses, fraud costs, progressive contributions and network fees. Comparable programs, different lists. A partner moving between the two is being paid on two different definitions of the same word, which is why the rate alone tells you very little.

Tiering by monthly performance is close to universal. Betsson, LeoVegas, 888 and bet365 all run banded revenue share where the percentage rises with what a partner produces in the period. The band does the segmentation work automatically, which is worth copying.

Carryover is where they diverge, and it is not settled. Betsson Group Affiliates operates no negative carryover and resets balances at the end of each month. LeoVegas takes a split position, zeroing deficits caused by player winnings while carrying fraud-related balances forward. Other programs in the market carry deficits in full. There is no convention here to inherit, which makes it a negotiating position you should decide deliberately rather than adopt by default.

Rates themselves are mostly not published. Figures circulating for these programs come from third-party review sites and disagree with each other, which is a useful signal in itself: the number is negotiated per partner, not set on a rate card.

Six Plays that Go Beyond Volume

Most operators run a program to buy first deposits. The programs that outperform use the same partner base for four or five other jobs.

1. Market entry without local infrastructure.
Partners in a target market already hold the audience, the language, the local payment context and the compliance posture. Recruiting ten established local partners puts a brand in front of an engaged audience in weeks. Building the equivalent through owned media takes quarters and carries the cost regardless of outcome. This is why newly regulated markets go affiliate-first, and why the operators who arrive late pay retail prices for the same positions.

2. Buying position on finite inventory.
The top three slots on a ranked comparison page in a given market are a fixed quantity. Enhanced terms, category exclusivity and placement deals are how that inventory gets allocated. Operators who treat every partner as interchangeable and price them identically are declining to compete for the positions that produce most of the volume.

3. Capturing seasonality.
Sportsbook acquisition clusters around fixtures and tournaments, and the recruitment window closes well before the event does. Better Collective pointed to World Cup tailwinds in its 2026 guidance. Partner terms should be re-tiered ahead of a major tournament, not during it.

4. Paying for reactivation, not only for first deposits.
Most programs pay on FTD and nothing else, which gives a partner no reason to help you with the rest of the lifecycle. 

Commission structures that reward reactivated players, or cross-sell from sportsbook into casino, turn the partner base into a retention channel as well as an acquisition one. Few operators configure this, which makes it a cheap advantage.

5. Running a portfolio through one partner base.
Operators with several brands can place different brands with the same partners on differentiated terms, targeting different player segments without competing against themselves. This requires per-brand tracking and reporting that stays separated, which is exactly where generic affiliate tooling fails.

Trackdesk’s tracking supports unlimited brands on a single platform with no per-brand fees.

6. Using program data to win better partners.
Partners allocate their traffic toward the operators who let them see what is working. Real-time reporting, clear attribution and predictable payouts are recruitment arguments, not back-office details. 

An operator who can show a partner their own conversion and player-value data will win deals against an operator offering a higher rate and monthly spreadsheets.

Trackdesk gives each partner a live dashboard of their own numbers, which makes that a term you can negotiate on rather than a claim you have to be trusted on.

Where Casino Affiliate Marketing and Sportsbook Programs Diverge

The two behave differently enough to warrant separate commercial terms.

Casino revenue is smoother and more predictable per player, with variance concentrated in occasional large wins. Bonus abuse is the dominant fraud pattern, which makes qualification rules and hold periods the controls that matter. Player value builds gradually, so revenue share terms tend to be more favourable to the operator.

Sportsbook revenue is event-driven and margin-volatile. A single result across a weekend can move an entire cohort into negative net revenue, which is precisely why negative carryover is contested harder in sportsbook agreements. A program built without seasonality modelled in will misread its own performance twice a year.

Operators running both under one brand need commission structures that reflect the difference. Applying a single revenue share rate across casino and sportsbook is one of the more common and more expensive simplifications.

What Breaks in the First 90 Days

Four failures show up repeatedly in new programs.

Paying on registration. Registration is free to produce and therefore free to fake. Commission should attach to a qualified deposit with a threshold, not to an account being created.

No attribution window policy. If you have not decided what happens when a player touches three partners before depositing, your platform has decided for you, and your partners will find out before you do.

Fraud scoring after commission fires. Detection that runs post-payout turns fraud into a recovery problem. It needs to run before the commission is released. This is where fraud detection and prevention belongs in the sequence.

One structure for every partner. A comparison site with ten years of ranked content and a Telegram channel started last month should not be on the same terms. Segment by partner type and traffic quality from the first cohort, because retrofitting tiered terms onto an existing partner base is a negotiation you will lose.

Measuring What Comes Back

Everything above depends on seeing the channel at player level. Program totals will tell you it works. They will not tell you which partner to renew, which to promote, and which to cut.

It’s more important to measure cohorts, not months. A partner's January players are the unit of analysis, tracked forward. A calendar view mixes every cohort together and hides the partner whose traffic quality started degrading in March. Check each cohort at 30, 90 and 180 days, because iGaming player value does not resolve inside a single reporting period.

The numbers that decide renewals:

• First-time depositors by partner, qualified rather than raw

• Commission paid per qualified depositor, which is your real cost per player by partner

• Net gaming revenue per cohort at each checkpoint, not at the point of conversion

• Deposit value per referred player

• Share of each cohort still active at 30 and 90 days

• Fraud and bonus-abuse rate by traffic source

• Payback period, meaning how long a cohort takes to cover the commission paid on it

Volume is the least informative of these on its own. Note what the largest partners now measure themselves on: Better Collective introduced its deposit-value metric precisely because the count of players says less about traffic quality than what those players put in.

The mechanics that make it possible. Attribution has to run server-side rather than on cookies alone, because cookie windows expire and players move between devices between the review page and the deposit. Every deposit and every bonus cost needs to be traced back to one partner, which means the attribution rule for affiliate traffic and the rule for your own media have to be the same rule, or you will pay twice for the same player. And the commission needs to calculate from the same NGR figure your finance team uses, not a parallel one.

None of this is available from reporting that stops at program level. If you are evaluating what to instrument before launch, our iGaming affiliate software comparison covers what to look for. 

If you are already running a program and cannot produce a cohort view by partner from your current reporting, the iGaming operator use case shows how Trackdesk handles player-level attribution, multi-brand separation and NGR-based commission calculation.

 

FAQ

1. How long before an affiliate program produces meaningful revenue?
   Expect two to three months to first material volume with revenue share terms, and longer in competitive markets. Partners test new brands with limited traffic before committing, and revenue share income compounds rather than arriving at once.
   
   
2. What commission rate should a new operator offer?
   Revenue share in iGaming is commonly negotiated between 25% and 45% of net gaming revenue, with the rate reflecting market, brand strength and partner leverage. New brands without a track record usually pay toward the upper end or offer hybrid terms to win early partners.
   
   
3. Does an operator need an affiliate manager?
   Yes, from the point you exceed roughly twenty active partners. Partner relationships in iGaming are negotiated individually and renegotiated often. Programs left to run on automated terms lose their best partners to operators who answer the phone.
   
   
4. Who is responsible if an affiliate breaks advertising rules?
   The operator, in most regulated jurisdictions. Licensing conditions in markets including the UK and Malta hold the licence holder accountable for promotions made on its behalf, which makes partner vetting and ongoing monitoring a licensing requirement rather than a preference.
   
   
5. Can an operator run affiliate marketing and paid media together?
   Yes, and most do where paid inventory remains available. The two need separate attribution rules to prevent partners being credited for players acquired through your own media, which is one of the more common sources of overpayment in mixed programs.