The first decision
An affiliate business is defined by where it competes. The market decides the language, the legal position, the operators available, the commission levels, the competition and the regulatory risk, and it decides them before a single page is written. Most affiliates that fail chose a market by accident, usually the one they lived in, and discovered its economics afterwards. This lesson is the framework for choosing on purpose.
Regulated, regulating and grey
Every market falls into one of three states, and the affiliate's position is different in each.
Regulated markets have a local licensing regime, licensed operators with affiliate programmes, published marketing rules, and, increasingly, requirements on affiliates themselves. Competition is established, commissions are transparent, the legal position is clear, and the ceiling is high because the operators are large and the customers are worth a great deal. The cost of entry is compliance, licensing where required, and out-ranking incumbents who have been there for years.
Regulating markets are moving from grey to regulated: a law has passed or is about to, licences are being issued, and the market will reset when it opens. This is the affiliate industry's best opportunity and its most reliable one. The operators arriving need customers and pay for them; the grey-market affiliates that ranked for years either get compliant or lose their operator relationships; and the affiliate that has a compliant, local-language site ready on the day the market opens takes positions that last. Brazil, where only operators authorised by the federal Secretariat of Prizes and Betting could operate from 1 January 2025 until fixed-odds betting was prohibited in September 2026, Ontario, whose regulated online market opened on 4 April 2022, and each American state at its launch followed the pattern. In Ontario the reset reached affiliates directly: operators must ensure that the affiliates they pay do not also promote online gaming sites that take bets from Ontario players without an AGCO registration (Registrar's Standard 1.21).
Grey markets have no local licensing regime and do not clearly prohibit offshore operators. Affiliates promote internationally licensed operators to them, commissions are often generous because the operators need the channel, and the legal position is ambiguous and can change without notice. The exposure is real: when a market regulates, the affiliate's grey-market pages become promotion of unlicensed operators, and rules such as Ontario's standard 1.21 mean licensed operators must drop affiliates that keep promoting unregistered sites to local players. The Offshore Gambling Explained guide covers the distinction.
The strategic choice most successful affiliates have made is to concentrate on regulated and regulating markets, accept the compliance cost, and treat grey-market revenue as something to be wound down rather than built.
Reading a regulating market
Timing a regulating market is a skill, and the signals are public.
The legislative calendar: a bill passed, a regulator named, an implementation date set. The licensing process: applications opened, first licences issued, the number of operators expected. The marketing rules: what an affiliate page may say, whether bonuses may be advertised (Brazil's law barred operators from granting any bonus or advance to induce a bet, Article 29, which removed the affiliate industry's main conversion tool at a stroke), whether affiliates must register. The operators: which international brands are applying and which local ones exist, because they are the affiliate's customers. The competition: which affiliates already rank in the local language, and whether they can survive the rules.
The work before launch is a local-language keyword map, a compliant site template built to the published rules, reference content (what the new law says, how to check a licence, what changes for players) that ranks before the commercial terms are contestable, and relationships with the operators applying for licences. The iGaming SEO course's lesson on markets covers the search side.
The American states
The United States is not one market but about forty, each with its own rules, and it deserves separate treatment because the affiliate economics there are unlike anywhere else.
Commissions are high, because customers are valuable and operators are in a land grab. Licensing or registration is required in many states, with the level often depending on whether the affiliate is paid on performance, and the cost varies state by state: in Pennsylvania, for example, an interactive gaming service provider certification costs $5,000 for five years and a registration $2,500, plus non-refundable application deposits that cover the background investigation, and the Affiliate Compliance and Licensing course has the detail. The market opens in stages, one state at a time, and each launch is a regulating-market opportunity in miniature. The American Gaming Association's state map lists 39 states and the District of Columbia with legal sports betting, most of them online; online casino was lawful in seven states in 2025, when it generated $10.73 billion, and Maine's legalisation became law in early 2026, and the casino states are where the revenue-share value is. And the sweepstakes and prediction-market segments, which operate outside state gambling licensing, including in states with licensed sportsbooks, have become a source of affiliate revenue and a large source of legal exposure: in 2025 five states passed laws prohibiting sweepstakes casinos and authorities in 16 states took action against prediction-market sports contracts.
An affiliate entering the United States needs a licensing budget, a state-by-state permission matrix, and a view on which segments it will and will not promote.
Verticals
Within a market, the vertical decides the customer value and the competition.
Online casino produces the highest-value customers and the longest revenue-share tails, and it is the most competitive and most regulated vertical. Slots dominate: in Great Britain in the year to March 2026, online casino games generated £5.7 billion of the £8.3 billion remote gambling yield, £4.8 billion of it from slots, against £2.4 billion for remote betting. Live casino and specific game types are growing niches. Casino affiliates live and die by review quality and bonus content, and by what the market's rules allow them to say about bonuses.
Sports betting produces more customers at lower individual value, with strong seasonality, and rewards content that sport fans want anyway: odds, previews, statistics, tips. Sports affiliates have more routes to a genuine audience and more ways to monetise it beyond commissions.
Poker is small, technical, community-driven and loyal; poker affiliates are specialists with deep audiences and a product (rakeback deals, tools, training) beyond referral.
Lottery, bingo and others are niches with less competition, lower values and, in lottery, a mostly state-run supply side that pays little.
Prediction markets and sweepstakes are the new verticals, high in demand and unsettled in law; the affiliates promoting them are earning well and carrying the risk described above.
Most affiliates start in one vertical and expand, and the expansion that works is into an adjacent audience (casino to live casino, sports to fantasy) rather than across the board.
Language and localisation
A market is a language before it is a jurisdiction. Content translated from English ranks poorly, converts worse and reads as foreign to the people it is meant to persuade. The affiliates that win a market write in it, with people who gamble in it, using the terms its players use, referencing its operators, payment methods and rules. A single affiliate can do this in two or three markets with a small team; the listed groups do it at scale through local editorial teams and acquisitions, as Better Collective does: its 2025 annual report says its products cover more than 30 languages, with regional brands tailored to each country's regulations, sports, betting behaviour and languages. An affiliate that cannot localise properly should choose fewer markets.
Portfolio
A mature affiliate business runs a portfolio of markets and verticals, and manages it as one: concentration risk (a third of revenue from one market is a business that loses a third of its revenue when that market changes its rules), regulatory stage (a mix of regulated cash generators and regulating growth bets), and the operator base (dependence on one or two operators is the same risk in another form). The listed affiliates report revenue by geography, which shows investors where each is exposed: Better Collective took 24 per cent of its 2025 revenue from the United States, 23 per cent from the United Kingdom and 15 per cent from Brazil.
What to take from this lesson
Choose markets on purpose: regulated for stable value, regulating for the reset opportunity, grey only with eyes open and an exit plan. Read a regulating market from the public signals and be ready on day one. Treat the United States as forty markets with a licensing budget. Pick a vertical by customer value and by the content you can genuinely produce, write in the market's language, and manage the whole as a portfolio with concentration limits.