GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 45 - October 2019

So, how big is this market? First, let’s define the market I’m talking about. It’s online casinos where you pawn skins or spend money to buy tokens to gamble with. You win, you lose, and then you exchange those tokens back into currency or skins. There are about 10millionmonthly visits to the top 80 gamer gambling casinos. The biggest players are gamdom.com, sgo500.com, csgoatse. com and wtfskins.com. Together, those four sites bring in about 8 million visits per month. For context, stake.comgets around 1million visits per month, while bet365 gets around 260million visits per month. It’s not a big market right now, but it’s got huge potential. Why? 400 million gamers. Maybe you’ve heard of Unikrn.com ? They specialize in esports and got funding from Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, Binary Capital, Tabcorp and Elisabeth Murdoch. These people invested because they know gamers don’t like traditional iGaming. And where there’s a pain point, there’s an opportunity. While esports is gaining traction, gamer gambling isn’t yet. ECOSYSTEMS AND AFFILIATES You could say an affiliate is a commission-only salesperson. In iGaming, operators need fresh traffic and new customers. One of the best sources of targeted traffic is, of course, search engines. Operators don’t rank on comparison phrases like “best casino.” They need affiliates for that. In gamer gambling, there are very few big search key phrases. For “lucky dip” gambling, you have “loot boxes,” but for casino you only have “skins gambling.” With the lack of clear taxonomy, potential players don’t know what to search for. As a result there are very few big game gambling affiliate sites. Gamers don’t see themselves as helpless gamblers . They see casinoplayers as helpless losers who have no control overwhat they do . 37 G P W A t i m e s . o r g