Join GPWA Page 61 Alberta’s New iGaming Rules Meet Two Solo Affiliates Photo Recaps from London & Florida OCTOBER 2026 GPWAtimes.org How AI scores players from Day 1 Traffic on Trial
SUBSCRIPTIONS For a FREE subscription to the GPWA Times Magazine, visit GPWAtimes.org ADVERTISING To advertise in the GPWA Times Magazine, please e-mail: sales@gpwa.org Copyright © 2026 by the GPWA. All rights reserved. ISSN 1941-9872 (print) ISSN 2834-2348 (online) Executive Director: Michael Corfman Program Director: Anthony Telesca Program Manager: Nicole Sims Member Services: Richard Bard Nancy Troy Editor-in-Chief: Gary Trask Associate Editor: Dan Ippolito Designers: George Choi Zoran Maksimovic´ LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR Issue 66 of the GPWA Times Magazine arrives just as the calendar gets crowded. SBC Summit and the co-located Affiliate Leaders Summit run from 29 September to 1 October at the Feira Internacional de Lisboa, G2E opens at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas that same week, and SiGMA World follows at Fiera Roma in early November. The GPWA team will be at all four events with fresh print copies of the magazine, so if you’re attending any of the four, come find us and say hello. In our final issue of 2026, the cover story takes on a question a lot of affiliates have been circling: what if the early numbers don’t reveal the long-term value of the traffic you send? Viktoriia Grygorenko, CEO of The Playa, explains how behavioral signals available from Day 1 can identify valuable players who may be overlooked when traffic is evaluated using first-deposit and early revenue figures. Regulation gets its turn as well. Alberta’s regulated market went live on 13 July, and Brean Wilkinson, Regulatory Relations Coordinator at Rightlander, explains what affiliates should audit now. Mark Phillip, founder of Are You Watching This?! and MetaBet, tackles a problem sports betting affiliates have been living with since Google’s parasite SEO crackdown and the arrival of AI Overviews. The pre-game preview playbook doesn’t pay the way it once did, but affiliates can still get more value from the visitors already on their sites. You’ll also find our Affiliate Interview Series with two GPWA members with very different backgrounds, an Affiliate Program Q&A with Marina Matviichuk from V.Partners, lively photo galleries from SBC Summit Americas in Fort Lauderdale and iGB L!VE in London, and a new inductee to the APCW Wall of Shame. Thank you for being part of the GPWA community and for making the magazine part of your reading. The conversations that come out of these pages, in the forums and on the show floor, are a big part of why we keep doing it. And, remember, a subscription to the GPWA Times Magazine is FREE. Simply visit GPWAtimes.org/subscribe/ to get your name on the list. Enjoy the issue, and I hope our paths cross at one of the four events before the year is out. Sincerely, Michael Corfman Lisbon, Las Vegas, Rome Photos by Pedro Costa Simeao/Shutterstock, Sean Pavone/Shutterstock, artem evdokimov/Shutterstock. Lisbon Las Vegas Rome GPWAtimes.org 4
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Departments 4 Letter from the Director • 8 By the Numbers • 10 Quotables • 12 GPWA Poll 14 From the Forums • 50 Affiliate Interview Series • 62 GPWA Sponsors 64 Affiliate Program Interview • 68 APCW Wall of Shame • 70 Event Calendar 40 TABLE OF CONTENTS AI Is Putting Traffic Under the Microscope Old acquisition math rewards the wrong players. Viktoriia Grygorenko, CEO of The Playa, explains how behavioral signals picked up in a player’s first days can surface value that first-deposit and month-three revenue numbers average away. Photo Galleries: iGB L!VE & SBC Summit Americas Prediction markets dominated the conversation when SBC Summit Americas met in Fort Lauderdale in June. Three weeks later, iGB L!VE anchored London iGaming Week at the ExCeL. Our photo galleries take you through both. 30 Engage Fans. Monetize the Moment. Google’s parasite SEO crackdown and AI Overviews killed the pre-game preview playbook that carried sports affiliates for years. Mark Phillip, founder of Are You Watching This?! and MetaBet, argues that the money has moved into the live window, and lays out how to capture it. 26 PLAY NOW Alberta’s New iGaming Rules Alberta’s regulated market went live in July, and the compliance bar applies across an affiliate’s entire portfolio rather than site by site. Rightlander’s Brean Wilkinson breaks down the bonus-advertising ban, the deadline for registeredbut-not-live operators, and what needs fixing now. 18 22 GPWAtimes.org 6
BY THE NUMBERS GPWAtimes.org 8 DKK 4.3 billion The total gross gaming revenue for online casino in Denmark in 2025, the first time Danes spent more on online casino than on lotteries. C$49 billion The amount wagered through online casinos in Ontario through the first six months of 2026, more than the province’s entire iGaming handle in its first year of regulated play, from April 2022 to March 2023. €3.1 million The fine that Kansspelautoriteit, the Netherlands’ gambling regulator, imposed on Chestoption for offering gambling services without the required license. $1.9 billion The projected value of Mexico’s iGaming market in five years, with sports betting accounting for 56.4% of the industry, according to PIN-UP Partners. 83% The percentage of U.S. bettors who would use cryptocurrency to fund online sportsbook wagers if regulations allowed it, according to a study by payments platform Paysafe. 251,899 The number of entries at the 2026 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, a record for a single series.
9 GPWAtimes.org A$2.7 million The penalty Tabcorp paid after an Australian Communications and Media Authority investigation found multiple breaches of spam and telemarketing laws. $1.2 million The amount in profits that a Google software engineer living in Switzerland allegedly made through an insider trading scheme on Polymarket, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. £4.75 million The settlement Evolution Malta paid after a U.K. Gambling Commission investigation found its games appeared on six unlicensed websites accessible to players in Great Britain. $1.3 billion The maximum U.K.- based IG Group agreed in July to pay for Underdog, the U.S. daily fantasy sports and prediction markets platform. October 2027 The month Austria’s online gambling monopoly ends and the market opens to multiple operators.
QUOTABLES QUOTABLES “These gambling companies have been having a free ride for too long. They make billions of dollars off misery and loss, heartache, and destroyed families.” —Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, urging the government to go further than its proposed gambling advertising bill and adopt the full ban recommended by the 2023 Murphy Report. “They’re pirates. They’re thieves. We’d be able to offer -102 splits either way as well if we didn’t have all the fees to pay . . . We’re paying all those fees. They don’t. Effectively, they’re thieves.” —Derek Stevens, Circa Sports CEO, regarding prediction markets, as told to CDC Gaming. “Monetizing addiction to fund public education is the wrong direction for Ohio. Who wins when predatory gambling preys on the vulnerable? It’s not our schools; that’s for sure! It’s the trillion-dollar big gambling companies who win. How is this good for Ohio?” —Ohio State Representative Johnathan Newman (R-Troy), on introducing the Save Ohio Sports Act with State Representative Beth Lear (R-Galena), a bill that would ban all collegiate sports betting in Ohio, prohibit certain betting formats and restrict industry marketing practices. “Prediction markets used to advertise themselves as offering the ability to bet on sports, but when they realized that made them sound like sportsbooks, they switched to saying they offer the ability to ‘trade’ on sports. This shouldn’t fool anyone, as nobody trades on sports. People bet on sports, and that is what event contracts on sporting events let people do.” —Benjamin Schiffrin, Director of Securities Policy for Better Markets, in connection with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission telling prediction markets not to use American odds in event contracts. GPWAtimes.org 10
Have You Ever Placed a Bet On a Prediction Market? Prediction markets have gone from a curiosity to one of the most talked-about corners of online wagering, helped along by Kalshi, Polymarket and a run of legal and regulatory fights in the U.S. Betting exchanges have, of course, been part of the picture in the U.K. and elsewhere for years, so how new any of this feels depends a lot on where you sit. We asked GPWA members whether they had ever placed a bet on a prediction market. Half said yes and half said no. But not every no is final: 20% of members said they plan to try prediction markets, with 30% saying they have ruled them out entirely. For more details regarding this poll and to view all of the feedback and comments we received, visit gpwa.org/500. Comments from GPWA members basports.com (PRIVATE MEMBER) “I’ve used Kalshi . . . Every time a winner resolved to a ‘yes’ position, funds were instantly available to withdraw with no fees whatsoever. Compare that with the many offshore sportsbooks that are very slow and reluctantly pay you your winnings.” Franky (PRIVATE MEMBER) “Prediction markets are betting with a fresh coat of paint. Curious where Kalshi and Polymarket end up on the regulatory side though. That’s the more interesting story for the affiliate side of this room than the betting itself.” NoDepositCasinos (PUBLIC MEMBER) “No, I haven’t, and I don’t plan to. That said, prediction markets don’t feel as distant to me personally as other forms of gambling. I think part of the reason is that they often show up in my feeds as news, and I read about them quite frequently.” GPWA MEMBER POLL 30%Yes, and I bet on them occasionally 30%No, and I have no interest 20%No, but I plan to try them 10%Yes, and I bet on them regularly 10%Yes, but only rarely GPWAtimes.org 12
Save The Date SEPTEMBER 27–30, 2027 THE VENETIAN EXPO, LAS VEGAS GLOBALGAMINGEXPO.COM THE FUTURE OF GAMING STARTS HERE
Ask affiliates about backlinks and you’ll hear the same story. The emails go unanswered, the replies that do come back quote prices that don’t make sense, and half of the offers on the table are private blog networks dressed up as editorial placements. A recent GPWA forum thread pulled in a mix of answers. Several members said cold outreach died in this niche years ago, because site owners are buried in spam and have no reason to open a message from a stranger. Others argued the difficulty is self-inflicted: if you’re paying for links rather than earning them, you’re competing on budget alone, and someone always has a bigger one. A few described moving away from the backlink count altogether, towards author and brand authority that attracts links on its own, with visibility in AI search now part of the calculation. The takeaway: the tactics that worked in 2012 are long gone, and paying to replace them gets expensive fast. The members seeing results are either earning links through work worth linking to, or buying carefully with relevance as the first filter rather than domain rating. Excerpts of the thread are below, but to view the thread in its entirety, visit gpwa.org/499. To read thousands of other forum posts like this one, plus industry news and complete archives of our weekly GPWA newsletters and GPWA Times Magazine, please visit GPWA.org. or Not Worth It Earned, Bought, FROM THE FORUMS This thread was edited for clarity and length. Illustration by TarikVision/Shutterstock 14 GPWAtimes.org
#5 QuantumNomad 7 July 2026, 2:49 a.m. Public Member I use pretty much every channel that’s available: sponsored articles, collaborations, link exchanges, forums, HARO, and my own networks. I’m also investing in building a presence on YouTube, Quora, Reddit, Facebook, and other platforms. Personally, I don’t think the fundamentals have changed that much. The biggest difference is that the cost per published article has definitely gone up. Expanding into more GEOs was a smart move, though. In many markets, the price of a placement is significantly lower. Another thing I’ve started paying much closer attention to is AI search, especially ChatGPT and Perplexity. An article on a website with seemingly terrible metrics (according to Ahrefs: no traffic and a DR of 0-9) can sometimes generate a lead that’s just as valuable as an article on a news site that costs $2,500. My main focus has shifted toward building a strong brand through the authority of the website and its authors, rather than blindly growing the backlink profile. That’s why, as an author, I also invest in my own promotion. I run my own channels, collaborate with niche publications, and write expert articles for academic and research-oriented platforms to build my personal reputation as an author. That approach tends to attract backlinks naturally. An even bigger benefit is that reputable publications sometimes reach out asking for permission to quote my work or reuse parts of my articles. Others contact me directly with media collaboration opportunities. To me, that’s far more valuable than getting another backlink to our website. “ Reply With Quote #6 wonderpunter 8 July 2026, 3:33 p.m. Private Member The truth is, nobody in iGaming is getting free links. The 2012 method of emailing other site owners is long dead. Besides, you should focus on new technologies and what’s coming soon. Many of us are evolving into AI. “ Reply With Quote #1 scattermeter 30 June 2026, 11:36 p.m. Brand New Member I’ve been doing SEO for iGaming for a while now, and honestly this niche has the toughest backlink acquisition I’ve ever experienced. Most webmasters either don’t reply, ask for ridiculous prices, or only want link exchanges. How are you guys building links in 2026? Still relying on digital PR, buying placements, or something else? “ Reply With Quote #3 invinciblepoker 5 July 2026, 4:35 p.m. Public Member If you are creative and do the work to earn them, it’s easy. “ Reply With Quote #4 MemePepe 6 July 2026, 11:13 a.m. Brand New Member Preach. Outreach in iGaming nowadays is just getting replied to with $500 demands for junk PBN links. It’s an endless grind and burns through the budget so fast. “ Reply With Quote #2 universal4 30 June 2026, 11:54 p.m. Forum Administrator Most site owners in this niche are tired of the blind link acquisition emails that are honestly nothing more than spam. However, if you would like to purchase or exchange links with gambling site owners you might want to try following up with the hundreds of site owners looking to sell or exchange links in the links section here at the GPWA. If you want to buy, you can start a single thread of what you are looking for and the criteria of the type of sites you are interested in purchasing from. “ Reply With Quote GPWAtimes.org 15
FROM THE FORUMS #7 gamingmodern 10 July 2026, 5:25 a.m. Public Member Acquiring gambling links is easy, just like “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” Domain relevancy is best, but at least page relevancy is very important in the gambling industry. Otherwise there’s no worth in making links. Link exchange is very lengthy work for this industry and results will come similarly, while competitors will always be ahead of you. So the simple way is to find gambling niche sites and buy them. If sites have low metrics then target them with your long semantic keywords, like “How to play Roulette Guide” type anchors. And if the site has good metrics then target your main keywords like “U.K. casino,” “Australian casino,” “online casino” types. “ Reply With Quote #8 CasinosBroker 13 July 2026, 12:39 a.m. Public Member I’d focus more on getting visibility in AI, like ChatGPT, Gemini and so on. People are slowly switching to AI for answers instead of Google search results. “ Reply With Quote #9 Spindex 14 July 2026, 11:16 a.m. Private Member Digital PR and niche-relevant editorial placements have been the biggest winners for us. I’d rather get one solid gambling link than 50 random high-DA links. “ Reply With Quote #10 invinciblepoker 14 July 2026, 5:43 p.m. Public Member It is interesting that the guys who say “yeah, digital PR” can never show you examples of their wins. Usually they are here to try to sell some digital PR, which doesn’t really work well or predictably in iGaming. One finds out quickly. “ Reply With Quote #11 pkslotspro 24 July 2026, 9:28 a.m. Private Member iGaming is a highly specialized niche, so finding relevant sister niches for outreach or link building can be challenging. “ Reply With Quote #12 Furious 28 July 2026, 9:07 a.m. Brand New Member Some SEO forums have a marketplace with different link building packages, some especially designed for the iGaming niche. But most of them are just PBNs, not real websites with traffic and authority. Otherwise, you could try finding expired domain names related to gambling and attempt to revive them using the Wayback Machine. “ Reply With Quote Domain relevancy is best, but at least page relevancy is very important in the gambling industry. Otherwise there’s no worth in making links. Link exchange is very lengthy work for this industry and results will come similarly, while competitors will always be ahead of you. 16 GPWAtimes.org
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AI Microscope Under the Traffic Is Putting GPWAtimes.org 18
New behavioral signals can reveal the value of players that traditional acquisition metrics overlook By Viktoriia Grygorenko Illustration by 3Dsss/Shutterstock 19 GPWAtimes.org
AI IS PUTTING TRAFFIC UNDER THE MICROSCOPE cquisition on its own has never been the whole story. You can bring player after player to a platform, but if they arrive and leave in the first few sessions, all that effort leaks straight out of the bottom. Volume without what comes after isn’t growth – it’s a bucket you keep refilling. For an affiliate, that matters in a specific way. Getting traffic to land is only half the job. What you really want is for that traffic to be recognized as good, and to stick – because a player who converts and stays is worth far more to your operator relationship than one who registers and vanishes. The trouble is that, for most of this industry’s history, neither of those things could be seen early enough to act on. In an era of cheap acquisition and low competition, wide AI adoption was optional. Not anymore: profitability now requires a data-driven approach, and AI is a powerful tool working in your favor. How the Industry is Using AI Earlier this year, we surveyed 151 senior decision-makers across operators, platforms and aggregators for a report titled, “AI in iGaming – What the Industry is Actually Doing,” with NEXT.io. Acquisition is one of the most data-rich, commercially direct parts of the business. Yet, only 40% of operators and platforms apply AI or machine learning to it in any form. Just 11% have it fully deployed; the rest are still testing. And the piece most relevant to anyone who sends traffic for a living – assessing traffic quality – is the least built of all. Only about a third of that already-small group uses AI to judge traffic quality and detect fraud, which works out at roughly one in eight operators overall. Of those who do, nearly three-quarters have never measured what it actually saved them. That gap reflects how hard acquisition is to measure. In areas like customer support or content generation, AI shows a clear result within days. In acquisition, the payoff plays out over months, tangled up with bonuses, product, seasonality, and a dozen other variables. So it’s a reasonable sequence: automate the fast, easy-to-prove wins first, and leave the harder, slower use cases for when the tooling is ready. The Problem with the Way Traffic Gets Judged Until that changes, traffic gets scored on blunt, late signals: registrations, first deposits, early revenue. They’re useful, but they average your strongest players together with your weakest – and when everything is averaged, a genuinely strong source and a mediocre one can look identical for weeks. The affiliate who sent the good players has no way to prove it, and the good players themselves risk being written off before they ever show what they’re worth. Here’s a concrete example of what those blunt tools miss. Working with one operator, we profiled a segment of new players we call “Researchers” – cautious people who don’t rush to deposit. They explore the lobby, place small bets, and study the product before committing. In a standard RFM model (recency, frequency, monetary value), they look unremarkable: low volume and easy to overlook. Behavioral profiling told a completely different story – that segment turned out to make up roughly a fifth of the new-player base and drove a disproportionate share of GGR. Getting traffic to land is only half the job. What you really want is for that traffic to be recognized as good, and to stick – because a player who converts and stays is worth far more to your operator relationship than one who registers and vanishes. GPWAtimes.org 20
Once the operator could actually see them, they could build for them. An onboarding journey designed around how Researchers behave – rewarding exploration rather than pushing deposits – lifted that segment’s turnover per user by roughly 13%, and the gain held after the onboarding window closed. It didn’t just move a metric for a week; it changed how those players engaged. The value was always there; the older tooling simply couldn’t see it in time to act. Traffic like that can look mediocre for weeks before its real value shows. Meanwhile, the affiliate who sent it is judged on a number that doesn’t mean anything yet. How AI Can Change the Game This is where reading real behavior early changes the picture. The signals are there from the first sessions – how a player explores the lobby, what they gravitate toward, how they bet, how quickly they settle in – and AI will read them in real time instead of waiting for a revenue number to form. It can estimate a player’s long-term value (LTV) early, from behavior rather than from a historical average that hasn’t had time to mean anything. It can surface the players who carry the markers of real potential within their first 24 hours, not their first month. It can group new players by how they actually behave – the cautious explorer and the fast, highstakes depositor are different players who need different handling from day one. And it can flag abusive or low-intent patterns that quietly burn budget, while there’s still time to act on them. The value here is being able to tell quickly, and on evidence, which traffic is worth scaling and which player deserves more attention right now. For an affiliate, that’s the difference between good traffic being lost in an average and getting the credit it deserves. A player who starts slowly but carries every early marker of long-term value stops being indistinguishable from one who was never going to stay – and the source that delivered them gets credit sooner, not a quarter too late. But seeing quality early only pays off if that quality is kept – and the same early read that grades a player is what lets the product adapt to them. Knowing who a player is early is what lets an operator tailor the lobby they see, the games they’re shown, and the journey they’re guided through, from Day 1. That matters more than it used to. A generation raised on Steam, Netflix and Amazon reads a lobby that looks identical for everyone as a product that doesn’t know them; conversion increasingly depends on how personal the experience feels after the click, not just the offer that brought them in. Even excellent traffic underperforms against a one-size-fits-all funnel. For affiliates on rev-share, that’s where the deal is actually earned. Higher realized value per player isn’t an operator-side abstraction – it’s the very thing your commission is a share of. Traffic that lands somewhere built to recognize each player and personalize around them is worth more to you than the same traffic dropped into a funnel that treats everyone alike. What it Means for Affiliates Fairer, earlier scoring means your good traffic is recognized as good. Personalization from Day 1 means it’s less likely to leak away. Both push in the same direction: more realized lifetime value from the very same players you already send. And better realized LTV is precisely what makes an operator treat your traffic as premium and ask for more of it. That’s the real upgrade AI offers affiliates – a funnel that finally does justice to the traffic you already bring, which creates more durable operator relationships. Viktoriia Grygorenko is the CEO of The Playa, a company providing AI-driven personalization solutions that help iGaming operators increase player engagement, revenue, and marketing ROI by up to 25%. She leads a team of industry experts with 10+ years in product, data, and machine learning, serving enterprise operators, including those with $10M+ in monthly GGR. Viktoriia has a finance background and is an ex-McKinsey consultant with deep expertise in scaling teams, product strategy, and operational excellence. Acquisition is one of the most data-rich, commercially direct parts of the business. Yet, only 40% of operators and platforms apply AI or machine learning to it in any form. Just 11% have it fully deployed; the rest are still testing. 21 GPWAtimes.org
PLAY NOW Illustration by DDevecee/Shutterstock GPWAtimes.org 22
AilGb ae mr t ai n’ sgRMe gaurlkaet et :d What Affiliates Need to Know How the province’s rules reshape affiliate marketing, and what to fix before your next campaign By Brean Wilkinson lberta officially launched its regulated iGaming market on 13 July, creating an opportunity for affiliates, while introducing new standards for compliance and marketing. For affiliates already operating in Canada, and those looking to enter this new regulated market, the challenge goes far beyond driving traffic to casinos. It’s ensuring every campaign aligns with Alberta’s new regulatory framework. Open for business Alberta’s regulated market went live with more than 20 operator sites, allowing registered iGaming brands to legally accept players from the province. Alberta residents can find registered operators, suppliers, and platforms on the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission (AGLC) website. More companies are expected to be granted a license to operate in Alberta in the weeks and months ahead. It is worth understanding how the province splits responsibility, because it changes how affiliates verify a brand. Alberta runs a dual-track model similar to Ontario’s. AGLC handles registration and regulatory oversight, while the Alberta iGaming Corporation (AiGC) handles the commercial side, including operator agreements. A brand that appears on the AGLC register has cleared only the first step. Until it has signed its AiGC agreement and gone live, it is not authorized to accept wagers, so the register on its own is not proof that a brand is open for business. There is also a date worth putting in the diary. Operators that registered before launch but were not live on Day 1 have until 13 October 2026 to fully launch or exit the market. Alberta link lists will need a review around then. As with many other territories that have introduced regulation in the past, there is likely to be increased competition in Alberta, as iGaming brands jostle for search visibility, affiliate placements, sponsorships, and influencer partnerships. However, with the new commercial opportunity will come some challenges for affiliates and other marketers, as new rules will govern how they promote iGaming products to customers in Alberta. 23 GPWAtimes.org
Compliance for affiliates moves beyond page issues AGLC’s Standards and Requirements for Internet Gaming set out which marketing partners registered operators are allowed to work with, and the test is stricter than it first looks. Operators must not use compensated third-party marketing or player-referral partners that also promote sites accepting Alberta wagers without an AGLC registration. That is not a page-level test. An affiliate whose Alberta content is entirely compliant can still be dropped as a partner because of a separate property in their portfolio that sends Alberta traffic to an unregistered brand. The obligation formally sits with the operator, but the commercial consequence lands on the affiliate. Affiliates do not register with AGLC themselves. The requirements reach them through operator agreements instead, which is why operators are likely to start asking about the rest of your portfolio rather than only the pages carrying their brand. In practice, that means: • Affiliates directing traffic in Alberta should only do so to operators that are both AGLC registered and live. • Operator status should be checked regularly rather than once at launch. • Geo-targeting may be required to avoid Alberta visitors seeing unsuitable promotions. • Alberta-registered operators should be clearly separated from non-registered operators across every property you own. • Audit the wider portfolio for any site sending Alberta traffic to an unregistered brand. P r ohme ao vt iiol yn roef sbt or incut es de s i s Alberta has followed Ontario’s lead on bonuses and other inducements by heavily restricting how they can be marketed. This is traditionally an area where affiliates provide value and drive conversions. Under the standards AGLC last updated on 18 June, advertising of gambling inducements, bonuses and credits is prohibited unless it appears: • on a registered operator’s own site or app, or • in direct marketing from the registered operator to players who have opted in. For Alberta-facing content, that takes the bonus-led page off the table. Best casino bonus listings, offer round-ups and promotional social posts all sit outside the two permitted channels. The same applies to paid search ads carrying bonus offers, bonus codes built into influencer videos, and display banners quoting inducement amounts. None of this stops you covering the operators. It stops you covering their offers. The new framework clearly signals that authorities in Alberta want to shift affiliates away from bonus-led acquisition campaigns and towards product comparisons, game coverage, and player experiences. Protecting minors and responsible gambling messaging Player protection is a priority in every regulated market, and Alberta is no exception. The AGLC made it clear that it does not want registered operators or their marketing partners targeting minors, or groups that are vulnerable to problem gambling—such as self-excluded players. Affiliate marketers need to be careful with who is actually viewing their content. They are likely to draw attention from regulators in Alberta if their content is appealing to minors or vulnerable groups. ALBERTA’S REGULATED IGAMING MARKET For affiliates already operating in Canada, and those looking to enter this new regulated market, the challenge goes far beyond driving traffic to casinos. It’s ensuring every campaign aligns with Alberta’s new regulatory framework. GPWAtimes.org 24
or on websites where the majority of the audience is underage. That last point is worth checking against your own analytics. Affiliates should mark content clearly as intended for adults and be transparent about financial relationships and sponsorships. M afrakcet ut ianlgacnlda iamc cs umr autset b e Alberta regulators require that marketers provide factual and accurate information when discussing gambling products. In particular, they want content that encourages gambling as a way of getting rich, paying off debts, improving status, or attractiveness to be removed from any content aimed at Alberta residents. Advertising that could be deemed to promote excessive play is also prohibited, which catches creative showing repeated spins or extended sessions. This goes beyond responsible gambling messaging. Reviews and comparison tables need to be supported by evidence and kept current, which for most affiliates means a documented update process rather than an occasional check. cOo pn et rroalt oorvse wr mi l laerxkpeet icnt gg rpeaarttenre r s When a market becomes regulated, registered operators tend to want more control over their marketing partners. Expect closer scrutiny of campaigns carrying their brands, and expect affiliate agreements to be rewritten. There are benefits in that for affiliates, but more often it means additional work keeping pace with operator requests. The main thing to keep in mind is that the operator knows their registration is on the line if they make any mistakes or miss anything that they should have been aware of. This can include marketing partners that are not meeting regulatory standards. The sanctions available to AGLC run from warnings and stop orders through to suspension or cancellation of registration, so the caution is not theatre. Expect it from the outset, and it is easier to handle. Tighter operator control does not stop you delivering players in Alberta. It changes what a good partner looks like. For nearly two decades, Brean Wilkinson, Regulatory Relations Coordinator at Rightlander, has been involved in iGaming affiliate marketing. Through his role at Rightlander, Brean has built relationships with regulators, marketers, and software providers to understand how regulation affects iGaming markets around the world. Here is a brief summary of the steps affiliates and other marketers should take to align with new regulatory standards in Alberta: Verify that all advertised iGaming brands hold a valid AGLC registration and are live in the market. Audit your wider portfolio for any site sending Alberta traffic to an unregistered brand. Ensure content for Alberta is distinctly separated from other regional marketing. Remove bonuses and player inducements for Alberta-targeted content. Add responsible gambling information in the appropriate places. Assess content to ensure it does not target minors or vulnerable individuals. Avoid celebrities and influencers likely to appeal to minors, and keep athletes to responsible gambling messaging only. Provide transparency regarding commercial ties and brand sponsorships. Validate all marketing claims for accuracy and check them regularly. Establish an operator approval and content update process. Monitor regulatory changes and recheck AGLC standards. Recheck operator status after 13 October, when registered operators must either be live or out of the market. The affiliate’s Alberta checklist Is your content compliant? The rules here are narrower than a blanket ban, and the distinction matters. Operators cannot use cartoons, influencers or celebrities who would likely be expected to appeal to minors. Athletes are treated separately: active and retired athletes may appear only in responsible gambling messaging, not in general betting or casino advertising. Imagery and graphics that would appeal to younger audiences are out either way. Placement rules apply as well. iGaming advertising cannot run on billboards or outdoor displays next to schools or primarily youth-oriented locations, and it cannot appear in publications 25 GPWAtimes.org
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By Mark Phillip The old playbook is dead, so the question is no longer how to get more traffic. It’s how to get more out of the visitors already on your site. Engage Fans. the Monetize Moment. or decades, the classic online affiliate playbook was simple: publish a pre-game preview, add a static banner featuring a generic welcome bonus, and wait for Google to drop new users on your doorstep. But between Google’s site reputation abuse crackdowns, better known across our industry as the parasite SEO purge, and AI Overviews answering queries before anyone clicks through, that playbook is long gone. Affiliates who built businesses entirely around ranking pre-game previews on Google are watching their funnel dry up. That leaves two options. Fight for organic traffic that keeps getting scarcer and more expensive, or take far more value from the visitors you already have. This piece is about the latter. Illustrations by Net Vector/Shutterstock and Daviddwi10/Shutterstock 27 GPWAtimes.org
Sports affiliates lose a serious amount of high-intent revenue every year by relying on static banner ads and generic betting prompts that fans tune out the second they arrive. When strong editorial is paired with run-of-the-mill ad inventory, users bounce. The problem compounds when you do deliver a new user to a sportsbook. The interface they land in feels like a math test. Users end up in rows and columns of numbers that are full of bets they don’t care about and may not understand. Whtyhme wicrroon-mg oamnsewnetsr are Every few years, the industry falls in love with a new term, and right now everybody wants to talk about micro-moments. Looking at fan engagement that way is a simplistic answer to a real problem. Capturing a six-second highlight clip after an amazing play sounds great on a slide deck, but social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram have an almost unassailable advantage in monetizing micro-moments. By the time a clip lands on screen, the moment is already in the past, and fans are scrolling past it for free in their feeds. Chasing afterthe-fact clips means competing on someone else’s playground, where the social algorithms always win. Live is where the value sits Live sports have the shortest shelf life of any content, and with that comes the biggest opportunity. As the last DVR-resistant genre on TV, the true value lives in that fleeting live window while the game is still in the balance: the outcome undecided, tension peaking, history not yet written. The catch is that fans struggle to find those games in the first place. When I founded Are You Watching This?! in 2006, it grew out of personal frustration at missing them. There’s no worse feeling than waking up to learn I missed a massive upset or triple-overtime thriller while I was raking the leaves or doing laundry. Today, it’s never been harder for sports fans to follow their teams. A third of all days now carry more than 100 sporting events, and Saturdays in the American football season can top 500. Gracenote’s 2025 State of Play report found that viewers spend an average of 14 minutes searching for something to watch, 12 minutes in the U.S., and that two-thirds of respondents want their service to tell them where to find a specific program, even when it sits on a different service. ENGAGE FANS. MONETIZE THE MOMENT. Capturing a six-second highlight clip after an amazing play sounds great on a slide deck. But by the time it lands on screen, the moment is already in the past, and fans are scrolling past it for free. Chasing afterthe-fact clips means competing on someone else’s playground, where the social algorithms always win. GPWAtimes.org 28
What this means for affiliates A large, untapped audience sits in the middle of the bell curve: casual fans who know LeBron and want to chill on a Tuesday night. Affiliates can capture this audience by offering two sides of the same coin. The first is low-friction streaming signups to services like DIRECTV and Sling, where there’s no KYC required just to watch a game. That is a much shorter path to a conversion than a sportsbook registration, and it monetizes visitors who were never going to place a bet. The second is a clear choice at the point of interest: pay 99 cents to watch a penalty shootout right now while it’s still in the balance, or place a quick wager and unlock the live stream for free. Pairing sportsbook feeds like DraftKings and FanDuel with streaming sources like Sling and DIRECTV sharply increases conversion. Placement matters as much as the offer. Sports excitement is deeply personal: I might follow the Yankees and Knicks closely but only pick up the Warriors in the playoffs. A quick stat-checker wants a simple moneyline module right at the top of the page so they can get in and get out. A reader 1,200 words deep into an analysis piece converts best when the specific player prop mentioned in the text links directly. Replacing a five-click journey with a single prompt is where most of the gain comes from. How the technology works This is the thinking behind the Excitement Analytics my team and I developed at Are You Watching This?! Self-learning algorithms process play-by-play data from more than 500,000 games worldwide in real time, tracking win probability across live events. The rule is simple: the more violently that probability curve swings up and down, the higher the thrill. When a fan visits your site during these live moments, a static banner can be a dead end. A more effective approach is to embed relevant live wagering opportunities directly into the content, giving the fan a natural next step while interest is highest. That’s the thinking behind MetaBet, a publisher-facing product. Early results suggest that dynamic, excitement-driven placements can generate stronger engagement than traditional static advertising. e nMg aagkeimn ge nr et aplr- at icmt iec a l On the Mount Rushmore of professional advice I wish I could give my younger self: “No matter how cool the tech is, if the customer can’t integrate it, the project is dead in the water.” The technology also needs to be practical. For publishers, complicated integrations can quickly turn a promising monetization idea into a drain on resources. Our approach uses a single line of JavaScript, while the system analyzes each article’s topics and identifies relevant affiliate opportunities. Attribution is automatically added to outbound links, reducing the technical work required on the publisher side. The window that’s left The old affiliate playbooks are dead. Parasite SEO enforcement and AI Overviews have taken the passive organic traffic; static ads get tuned out, and micro-moments leave social media platforms in control. Social media will always win at monetizing past highlights. The opening for affiliates is the live window, while the game is still hanging in the balance. Affiliates shouldn’t abandon search or post-game content, but they shouldn’t overlook the value of the audience already on their sites. The opportunity is to make those visitors more valuable by connecting them with relevant experiences while the game is still being played. A Brooklyn native, MIT dropout, and lifelong Yankees fan, Mark Phillip is the Founder of Are You Watching This?!, a B2B Sports Excitement Analytics company using patented algorithms to identify Instant Classics in the making in real time, and MetaBet, the leading B2B platform enabling Media Companies and Performance Marketers to extract the maximum value from sports-related content via sportsbook affiliate revenue. For decades, the classic online affiliate playbook was simple: publish a pre-game preview, add a static banner featuring a generic welcome bonus, and wait for Google to drop new users on your doorstep. That playbook is long gone. 29 GPWAtimes.org
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31 GPWAtimes.org London’s second act proved the move was no fluke. iGB L!VE returned to ExCeL on 1-2 July, drawing tens of thousands of iGaming professionals and over 300 exhibitors to a show that has settled into its new home. The Sustainable Gambling Zone returned at its largest size to date, and the Africa Summit made its debut. The iGB Affiliate Manager Academy was back for a second year, and the Startup Accelerator again gave early-stage businesses a place to start. Across the conference program, one subject kept coming back: artificial intelligence, and what it means for content, compliance, attribution, and the cost of running a lean affiliate business. The week closed 31 floors up at The Shard, where the iGB Affiliate Awards were handed out across 22 categories. As the photos in the following pages show, iGB L!VE 2026 was about more than the headline numbers. It was about the deals, the reunions and the relationships that keep this business moving. !VE
erminrajic iGB L!VE Welcome Drinks 32 GPWAtimes.org
Summer Gala 33 GPWAtimes.org
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From the Exhibition Floor 35 GPWAtimes.org
erminrajic iGB L!VE iGB Startup Accelerator 38 GPWAtimes.org
Official Drinks 39 GPWAtimes.org
GPWAtimes.org 40 SBC 2026 Summit Americas
Fort Lauderdale played host again as SBC Summit Americas returned to the Broward County Convention Center from 9-11 June, bringing operators, affiliates, suppliers and regulators from across North and Latin America under one roof. This year’s edition leaned harder into networking with the launch of SBC Connections, built around pre-arranged meetings, speed networking, guided expo tours and themed roundtables. The six-stage agenda featured more than 250 speakers, including executives from bet365, DraftKings and Fanatics, and covered everything from affiliation and payments to regulation and player protection. One subject dominated the week: prediction markets. The Stage One panel drew a standing-room-only crowd, and the conversation carried well past the Prediction Markets Forum into meetups and hallway debates. Regulator turnout was another standout, with officials from Brazil, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Panama and Argentina comparing notes. “SBC has always enjoyed a strong relationship with the Americas region, and it’s a privilege to bring together so many different markets and voices under one roof,” said SBC Founder and CEO Rasmus Sojmark. “We’d like to thank everyone who attended, exhibited and sponsored SBC Summit Americas 2026.” As the photos in the following pages show, SBC Summit Americas did what the best shows do. It sent everyone home with a clearer read on the market and a longer list of people worth calling. Fort Lauderdale photo by Kevin Ruck/Shutterstock 41 GPWAtimes.org
erminrajic SBC SUMMIT AMERICAS 2026 Opening Party at The Wharf GPWAtimes.org 42
SBC First Pitch 43 GPWAtimes.org
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From the Exhibition Floor 45 GPWAtimes.org
erminrajic World Cup Happy Hour SBC SUMMIT AMERICAS 2026 GPWAtimes.org 46
SBC Leaders 47 GPWAtimes.org
SBC Awards SBC SUMMIT AMERICAS 2026 GPWAtimes.org 48
Closing Party at Infinity 49 GPWAtimes.org
For this issue's Affiliate Interview Series, we sit down with two solo affiliates who arrived in iGaming from somewhere else entirely. Waleska Hernández (“NoDepositCasinos”) started out ghostwriting in Bogotá and has posted more than 1,200 times on the GPWA forums behind a Doctor Strange avatar, which left plenty of members assuming she was a man. Tamás Horváth (“Cocktailspins SEO”) is a Hungarian carpenter's son who moved to Malta at 36 and named his site after the cold cocktail he always kept beside the slot machine. Both talk candidly about building alone, testing everything themselves, and why trust still has to be earned. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES Please tell us about your background — you grew up in Chía and now live in Bogotá. What did your path look like before iGaming, and how did a content writer in Colombia end up in the casino affiliate space? I often say that I have one foot in Chía and the other in Bogotá. I was born in Bogotá, but my family moved to Chía when I was one or two years old. I completed my schooling there before returning to Bogotá for university. While I was studying, I took on small transcription, writing, and proofreading jobs to earn some extra money (opportunities that are harder to imagine today with the rise of AI). Without realizing it at the time, those jobs were the first steps to what I am doing today. After graduating, the job offers I received came with very low salaries. So, even though at the time online work was widely looked down upon, I created profiles on some of the largest freelance platforms; shortly after, someone contacted me to work as a ghostwriter on an iGaming project, and the rest is history. You describe yourself first and foremost as a content writer. How does coming at this industry as a writer, rather than an SEO or a marketer, shape the way you build and run your sites? I started out creating content and, although I have since learned about other After four years and more than 1,200 posts, many GPWA members have traded advice with “NoDepositCasinos” and assumed there was a man on the other end. Meet Waleska Hernández. Behind the Avatar Woman Waleska Hernández - NoDepositCasinos Intro image by Marko Aliaksandr/Shutterstock The GPWAtimes.org 50
areas and worked in different roles, writing remains an important part of my identity. It is also the lens through which I tend to view every project I become involved in. As a content writer, my starting point is to find the right balance between the message I want to communicate and what the audience is actually looking for. I then try to present that information in a way that is clear, useful, and enjoyable to read. From there, I can take the SEO, commercial, and strategic actions needed to make the content support either my own business objectives or those of my clients. The affiliate space is still a male-dominated industry, and anyone browsing the forums will notice you post under a Doctor Strange avatar. What has your experience been as a woman in iGaming? My experience has been surprisingly positive overall. At the beginning, I sometimes felt uncomfortable with the attention I received or with people assuming I was someone’s assistant rather than a person running their own project. I think those early experiences were partly why I registered under an ambiguous pseudonym. I was curious to see whether people would interact with me differently. And yes, they often assumed that the person behind the account was a man, but I feel that has not changed their treatment towards me. After several years in the industry, I can say I have generally encountered a great deal of respect. I have met people who were willing to teach me, listen to my perspective, and take a genuine interest in what I could contribute. This is why I say, both professionally and personally, that in this industry you can build relationships that go beyond the screen and last for years. NoDepositCasinos.io is built around an unusual concept — the site is styled as a ledger, and every bonus is treated as an audited entry with a score. Where did the ledger idea come from, and why frame free bonuses in the language of accounting? The ledger-style design is part of a revamp that I began a little over a month ago. Before that, I used a generic WordPress template, so the site looked completely different. I have generally encountered a great deal of respect. I have met people who were willing to teach me, listen to my perspective, and take a genuine interest in what I could contribute. This is why I say, both professionally and personally, that in this industry you can build relationships that go beyond the screen and last for years. 51 GPWAtimes.org
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