Affiliates are publishers paid by results. They write comparison pages, run betting media, publish reviews and bonus listings, and send readers to operators through tracked links. When a reader registers and plays, the affiliate is paid.
The arrangement is older than online gambling and more consequential than it looks, because in several markets affiliates are now licensed in their own right, and the advertising rules that bind operators bind them too.
The three deal structures
| Structure | How the affiliate is paid | Who carries the risk |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue share | A percentage of the net revenue the referred players generate, usually for their lifetime | Shared: the affiliate earns nothing if the player does not lose |
| Cost per acquisition | A fixed fee per player who registers and meets a qualifying condition | The operator: it pays whether the player is valuable or not |
| Hybrid | A smaller fee per acquisition plus a smaller revenue share | Shared, with the affiliate taking some cash early |
Which structure an affiliate prefers says a lot about its traffic. An affiliate confident that its readers are long-term players takes revenue share, because the lifetime value exceeds any realistic fee. An affiliate whose traffic converts once takes cost per acquisition. Operators, naturally, prefer the opposite in each case, and the negotiation is largely about who is better informed.
The clauses that decide everything
- Negative carryover. If referred players win in a month, does the affiliate's negative balance carry into the next month or reset? With carryover, one large winner can wipe out an affiliate's income for months. It is the most contested term in the industry.
- Deductions. What comes off before the share is calculated: bonuses, gambling tax, payment fees, chargebacks and in some agreements an administrative charge. The headline percentage means little until this is defined.
- Attribution window. How long after a click a registration still counts, and what happens if the player clicked through two affiliates.
- Qualifying player. For cost-per-acquisition deals, what the player must actually do: deposit a minimum, stake it, or remain active for a period.
- Term and tail. What happens when the agreement ends. Does the affiliate keep earning from players already referred, or does the revenue stop?
Why affiliates are now licensed
For most of the industry's history affiliates were unregulated intermediaries. Several markets have changed that, on the straightforward argument that an affiliate page promoting gambling is advertising, and advertising rules are meaningless if they stop at the operator.
Romania requires affiliates to hold a Class 2 licence, and publishes the list. Other markets reach the same place differently: by making the operator responsible for everything its affiliates publish, which has produced a compliance regime in which operators audit affiliate pages and terminate partners over wording.
The practical result is that a single affiliate page cannot be served to every country. Bonus terms that are legal in one market are prohibited in another, and in markets with advertising bans the page cannot exist at all.
How the business has changed
Classic affiliate economics depended on search visibility for commercial queries, which was never under the affiliate's control. Search algorithm changes have repeatedly removed large portions of the revenue of companies that did nothing wrong, and the structural response has been to buy audiences rather than rent them.
That is why the largest listed affiliates have moved into owning sports media with direct readerships, where gambling monetisation sits behind editorial rather than in front of it. It is more defensible and far more expensive, and it changes the business from publishing comparison tables to running a newsroom.
The newer pressure is that acquisition costs rise as a market matures. In a market that has just opened, every customer is new; five years later, most customers already have accounts, and the affiliate is being paid to move someone between operators rather than to introduce them to the category.