iGaming
You are not simply buying players. You are underwriting them.
Affiliate-driven player acquisition for licensed operators, where one compliance failure outweighs any efficiency gain.
-27%
Lower cost per first-time depositor
The challenge
Gaming duty is charged on revenue, not profit. That single fact is why a duty increase is an acquisition issue before it becomes a finance issue: every extra point on the rate immediately lowers the maximum you can afford to pay for a player, even though nothing in the funnel has changed. Rates have risen across several regulated markets recently, and a significant increase instantly resets the affordable cost per first-time depositor — while the acquisition team may still be working to targets set under the old rate.
Duty seldom changes in isolation. Across regulated markets the trend is a series of measures that each reduce the value of an acquired player: stake and deposit limits, mandatory affordability or vulnerability checks at lower thresholds, detailed per-product and per-channel marketing consent, and limits on how bonuses can be designed and cross-sold. The exact measures vary by jurisdiction. The overall effect does not — and it only moves in one direction.
At the same time, the inventory you can buy is narrower than in any other sector. Paid search and paid social require gambling certification granted per website and per territory, plus account-level permissions tied to the licensed operator rather than to an agency. We do not run paid media for gambling operators and never claim we can. High-intent search results are in any case dominated by comparison and review affiliates, so acquisition here is a negotiation for affiliate placements rather than an auction you can outbid — and that negotiation is where we focus.
Key factors
What we plan for
Price acquisition on net gaming revenue, not sign-ups
A first deposit is not revenue. Revenue is what a cohort generates after bonus costs, chargebacks and processing over the following months, and it can be negative in any single 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 share of gross gaming revenue by source. Sources that attract bonus-hunting players become visible instead of being hidden behind registration volume.
Manage your affiliate programme as a portfolio of contracts
On revenue share you have not bought a customer; you have granted an ongoing claim on that player’s net losses. That is a very different commercial arrangement from an ecommerce affiliate fee and deserves the same scrutiny as any long-term liability. We review deal structures across revenue share, CPA and hybrid terms, including qualification rules, attribution windows and negative carryover — and we model the impact across the whole portfolio instead of negotiating each deal on its own.
Take ownership of affiliate compliance — your licence depends on it
In every licensed market we know of, the operator stays responsible for what its affiliates publish. Liability does not pass on with the activity, and pointing out that a third party wrote the page has rarely helped anyone. We carry out compliance reviews on an agreed schedule covering affiliate creative, visibility of key bonus terms at the point of offer, age restrictions, safer gambling messaging and signposting, content that may appeal to minors, and the sub-affiliate network where non-compliant material usually appears. When affiliates operate in several territories, each review is run against each set of rules rather than only the strictest, because the strictest is not always the one that applies. Contracts include a documented termination trigger and a tested takedown process.
Build the funnel around mandatory friction
Age and identity checks, and any limit prompts, affordability or vulnerability checks your licence requires, are not conversion barriers to be minimised. They are conditions of holding the licence. The valuable work is cutting the avoidable drop-off around them — verification that rejects genuine customers, document uploads that fail on mobile, prompts shown where they cause most disruption rather than where they are needed — while keeping the required friction fully in place. The drop-off between registration and first deposit is usually the biggest fixable leak in the funnel and seldom the one receiving attention.
Services
Services we deliver here
Common questions
Can you manage our Google and Meta ad accounts?
No. We do not run paid search or paid social for gambling operators. Gambling certification belongs to the licensed operator and the specific website, and Meta approval is granted to named ad accounts against listed URLs — no agency can hold that on your behalf, and any agency implying otherwise is describing something that will get an account suspended. Our role here is the affiliate programme, the acquisition economics behind it, and the compliance framework around both.
Our cost per FTD is on target. Why would we change anything?
Because the target was likely set under a tax and regulatory position that has since shifted. Duty is charged on revenue, so a rate change alters what you can afford for the very same player, and a target rolled forward from an earlier period will not reflect it — nor the limits and affordability measures that have reduced that player’s eventual value. The first worthwhile step is recalculating maximum affordable cost per FTD from current post-duty cohort value in every market you are licensed in. The result is often uncomfortable.
How do you monitor affiliates at scale?
Automated checks for the mechanical items — terms display, age restrictions, signposting, brand-bidding breaches and trademark misuse — combined with manual review of a rotating sample weighted towards sub-affiliates, where non-compliant creative usually starts. The result is an enforcement list with actions completed, not a monitoring report that sits in a folder.
Begin with an audit.
The audit has a clear scope and a clear output, and it stands on its own — no obligation to continue. If it shows your current setup is working well, that is a perfectly valid result and we will tell you so.