Your guides cover Slovenia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Vietnam — markets you haven’t lived in. How do you research them without the content becoming generic? Carefully, and by being honest about what I don’t know. For each market I work through official sources — the local gambling authority, central bank guidance on crypto, payment infrastructure. Then I cross-reference with what players in those markets actually use, which is often different from what’s theoretically available. A guide telling a Bangladeshi player to use Coinbase when bKash-to-Binance P2P is the real route is useless. Getting that right takes research, not assumptions. That carried over naturally into affiliate marketing. Same skills, different industry. What pulled me toward iGaming was the world around it more than the games themselves. The conversations, the people, the energy in the room. The idea that a kid from a small Hungarian town could end up talking seriously with people from every corner of the world — that was genuinely exciting to me. You grew up in Hungary but now live in Valletta. What’s the story behind the move to Malta, and how has being there shaped Cocktailspins? I moved to Malta at the age of 36. I had friends here, contacts, and a pretty clear sense that this was where iGaming actually happened. And I was right. Malta is the place where you bump into a casino CEO at the coffee shop, where SiGMA used to take over the whole island every November, where nobody thinks twice when you say you work in affiliate marketing. Being here changes how you understand the industry. When you’re surrounded by operators, providers, and affiliate managers day-to-day, you stop reading about how things work and start actually seeing it. That matters a lot when you’re writing content that’s supposed to reflect how the industry really operates, not how it describes itself in press releases. Where did the name Cocktailspins come from? This is a slightly embarrassing story, but I’ll tell it anyway. When I was in my thirties I went to casinos fairly often. Every single time I sat down at a slot machine I had a cold cocktail next to me. It was just what I did. When I was thinking of a name for the site, that image came straight back — the spin, the anticipation, the glass on the side. It felt right and it felt mine. Did I think of other names? For about five minutes. Nothing else stuck. You launched Cocktailspins as a completely solo operation. What does a typical working day actually look like? Honestly, controlled chaos with some structure underneath. Morning starts with Google Search Console — position movements overnight, new queries, crawl activity. That tells me where the day should go. Then content: geo guides, reviews, news, whatever needs updating. Afternoons are usually outreach and partnerships — responding to affiliate managers, sending proposals, following up. Evenings sometimes turn into technical work: schema fixes, sitemap updates, rebuilding pages. I built it alone because I wanted to understand every part of it myself before handing anything off. When you do everything — even temporarily — you build an instinct for what actually matters. And honestly, it keeps costs low while you’re figuring out whether the model works. The workaholic label is accurate. I won’t argue with it. Zero to 187 indexed pages across 53 geo markets in under six months. How did you manage that as one person? Systems and knowing what to ignore. Every geo guide has a consistent structure — regulation, payment infrastructure, crypto on-ramp, key operators, local-language FAQ. Once I built that properly for five markets, doing the 20th was faster without being worse. I decide which market to cover next based on GSC data — which geo queries are generating impressions but have no matching page on the site? That’s what I build next. Which keyword is sitting at position 12 with decent volume? That’s the next content expansion. The data decides, not me. For FAQ sections in local languages — Serbian, Swedish, German — I don’t rely on auto-translation. I write the content, translate it properly, and verify the terminology. I don’t claim experience I don’t have. The guides are research-based and presented as information, not personal testimony. That matters under GPWA standards, and it also just matters. Fixed monthly fee only — no rev-share, no CPA. Walk us through that decision. Simple logic: if my income depends on how much players lose at a casino, I have a conflict of interest with everything I write about that casino. That’s not a position I wanted to be in. What I give up is upside. On a good month, rev-share at a high-traffic site could pay more than a flat fee. What I get instead is What pulled me toward iGaming was the world around it more than the games themselves. The conversations, the people, the energy in the room. The idea that a kid from a small Hungarian town could end up talking seriously with people from every corner of the world — that was genuinely exciting to me. 57 GPWAtimes.org
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