Gaming Industry Eyes Growth as Gambling-Affiliate Buzz Builds Across the Market

25 September 2026

Affiliate marketing is becoming an increasingly powerful growth engine for iGaming operators worldwide, as new data from affiliate network tracker Track360 shows the channel delivering nearly a record 38% share of new depositing players in 2023.

At the same time, the affiliate deals themselves are shifting, with hybrid contracts—an array of any deal type that includes a significant fixed rev-share component—reaching 41% of new partnerships for the first time in 2023. The affiliate buzz, already active in recent years, is now building to a crescendo for the channel as operators lean harder into performance-based marketing.

The move reflects shifting market conditions for operator acquisition. Regulatory headwinds from Amsterdam to Sacramento have progressively reduced the mainstream paid media inventory made available to gambling brands: Roughly 70% of the paid-media inventory is closed or conditional for licensed gambling brands, according to Track360's research on the structure of the igaming market, leaving iGaming operators with limited room for growth via traditional paid channels and few alternatives but established partners, like affiliates.

Affiliates have proven they can deliver solid player acquisition, with 70% of newly acquired players coming from affiliate programs according to data published by Track360. By 2023, however, the affiliate channel had become more than just a solid newsfeed for new player numbers: Affiliates were driving between 30% and 60% of a licensed operator's new depositing players, in many cases making the channel the operators' No. 1 or 2 acquisition channel, outpacing the performance of traditional direct-to-market channels like search and social, the regulatory tracker said.

Track360 examined affiliate data exclusively: Hybrids overall reached 41% of new agreements, pushing ahead of RevShare on a purely volume basis for the first time in 2023. The data will probably surprise some, but the move has been in progress, as established western operators, up against it in faster-growing Asian and Latin American markets, need fast transactions and high-quality customers, and so are rewarding them handsomely early in the partnership, while retaining an ongoing Revenue Share deal. Operators are hedging their bets, on a contractor, and putting up more money to secure those contracts up-front: affiliate Cost-per-Acquisition has climbed 12% year over year, to $145 on average.

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The Trends to Watch

For its 2023 report on the state of affiliate marketing in the igaming market, Track360 analyzed data from affiliate offers created between 2023-01-01 and 2023-10-18 as an indicator of the affiliate market's overall trajectory and certain channels' current and growing importance.

The chart offerings from the Track360 affiliate report also illustrate a rising reliance on certain types of affiliate, with the biggest priority of affiliate operators, by far, being in SEO Review and Editorial channels. Affiliates using these SEO referral tactics, which include paying or bartering links to amplifier sites like casino forum sites or casino review sites, delivered 44% of the affiliates' new depositing players in 2023. As operators ramped their spending to reward the SEO referral affiliate, other types of affiliate saw their influence grow, too. Streaming and video creators have only been a small slice of the affiliate pie but growth and influence is increasing, with their share of income climbing from 8% in 2021 to 13% in 2023. Affiliates also produced 14% of all signup referrals relegating them, on the full spectrum chart, to delivering healthy numbers but less important ones, with those referrals injecting them as the highest-risk player source, according to Track360, triggering an automatic flag for fraud detection 11 times out of every 100. Multi-accounting and bonus abuse, in the fraud-control systems of iGaming operators, were flagging affiliate players at twice the regular rate for player activity in 2023.

However, in the production of Track360's 2024 base-case forecast, this anomaly in affiliate contribution, deliveries and quality, was a corrected mathematical factor, and affiliates were estimated to be the growth opportunity of the market. Track360 said in its report that affiliate partnerships would account for 40% to 42% of new player numbers by 2024, as operators double down their acquisition on affiliate partnerships.

Conclusion: The affiliate channel's rapid rise in the igaming space is unlikely to slow, with as many as 48% of newly acquired customers becoming affiliate customers by 2023, according to Track360's 2023 outlook.