iGaming
You are not buying customers. You are underwriting them.
Affiliate-led player acquisition for licensed operators, where a compliance failure costs more than any efficiency gain.
-27%
Reduction in cost per first-time depositor
The problem
Gaming duty is levied on revenue, not on profit. That one structural fact is why a duty change is an acquisition problem before it is a finance problem: every point added to the rate comes straight off the ceiling of what you can afford to pay for a player, immediately, with nothing in the funnel having changed. Rates have been revised upwards across several regulated markets in recent years, and a material revision reprices maximum affordable cost per first-time depositor at a stroke — while the targets the acquisition team is still working to were derived against the position before it.
Duty rarely arrives on its own. The direction of travel across regulated markets is a run of measures that each independently reduce what an acquired player is worth: stake and deposit limits, mandatory affordability or vulnerability checks triggered at falling thresholds, granular per-product and per-channel marketing consent, and restrictions on how bonuses may be structured and cross-sold. Which measures apply differs by jurisdiction. The aggregate effect does not, and it points one way.
Meanwhile the buyable inventory is narrower than in any other vertical. Paid search and paid social sit behind gambling certification granted per website and per territory, and behind named-account permissions that attach to the licensed operator rather than to an agency. We do not run paid media for gambling operators and do not present ourselves as able to. The high-intent search results are in any case largely held by comparison and review affiliates, which makes acquisition here a negotiation over affiliate positions rather than an auction you can outbid — and that negotiation is the part we work on.
Considerations
What we account for
Price acquisition off net gaming revenue, not registrations
A first-time deposit is not revenue. Revenue is what a cohort produces net of bonus cost, chargebacks and processing over the months that follow, and it can be negative in any given period. We report cost per FTD and cost per qualifying player against cohort NGR at thirty, ninety and one hundred and eighty days, with bonus cost tracked as a proportion of gross gaming revenue by acquisition source. Sources that produce bonus-seeking cohorts become visible rather than being flattered by registration volume.
Treat the affiliate programme as a book of contracts
Under revenue share you have not bought a customer, you have written a continuing claim on that player’s net losses. That is a materially different commercial instrument from an ecommerce affiliate fee and it deserves the same scrutiny as any other long-dated liability. We review deal structure across revenue share, CPA and hybrid terms, including qualification criteria, attribution windows and whether negative carryover applies — and we model the portfolio consequence rather than negotiating each deal in isolation.
Own affiliate compliance, because the licence does
In every licensed market we are aware of, the operator remains accountable for what its affiliates publish. Liability does not transfer with the activity, and the fact that a third party wrote the page has never been much of a defence. We run compliance sweeps on an agreed cadence covering affiliate creative, display of bonus headline terms at the point of offer, age-gating, safer gambling messaging and current signposting, content likely to appeal to minors, and the sub-affiliate tail where non-compliant material usually enters. Where affiliates run in more than one territory, the sweep has to be run against each set of rules rather than the strictest one, because the strictest is not always the one that applies. Contracts get a documented termination trigger and a takedown route that has actually been tested.
Design the funnel around required friction
Age and identity verification, and whatever limit prompts, affordability or vulnerability checks your licence conditions impose, are not conversion obstacles to be minimised. They are terms of holding the licence. The productive work is reducing the avoidable drop-off around them — verification that fails on legitimate customers, document upload that breaks on mobile, prompts placed where they are most disruptive rather than where they are actually required — while leaving the required friction completely intact. Registration-to-first-deposit drop-off is usually the largest controllable leak in the funnel and rarely the one getting attention.
Frequently asked
Can you run our Google and Meta accounts for us?
No. We do not run paid search or paid social for gambling operators. Gambling certification attaches to the licensed operator and the specific website, and Meta permission is granted to named ad account identifiers against listed URLs — there is no arrangement where an agency fronts that on your behalf, and any agency suggesting otherwise is describing something that will get an account suspended. Our work here is the affiliate programme, the acquisition economics underneath it, and the compliance regime around both.
Our cost per FTD is within target. Why would we change anything?
Because the target was probably derived against a tax and regulatory position that has since moved. Duty is charged on revenue, so a rate change alters what you can afford to pay for exactly the same player, and a target carried forward from an earlier period will not have accounted for it — nor will it have accounted for the limit and affordability measures that have reduced what that player goes on to be worth. The first useful exercise is re-deriving maximum affordable cost per FTD from current post-duty cohort value, in each market you are licensed in. It frequently produces an uncomfortable number.
How do you monitor affiliates at any real scale?
Automated sweeps for the mechanical checks — term display, age-gating, signposting, brand-bidding breaches, trademark misuse — plus manual review on a rotating sample weighted towards the sub-affiliate tail, which is where non-compliant creative usually originates. The output is an enforcement list with actions taken, not a monitoring report that gets filed.
Start with the audit.
It has a defined scope and a defined deliverable, and it is deliberately separable from anything that follows. If the audit says your current setup is fine, that is a legitimate outcome and we will say so.