Table of contents

• How we rank casino affiliate programs
• Data
• Commissions
• grey market versus legal
• How to get your tracking links
• Best conferences for casino affiliates
• New casino affiliate guide
• FAQ

iGaming & Online casino affiliate industry worth

How big is the online casino industry itself? Here are some stats at a glance:

• Online gambling to be worth $153 billion USD by 2030
• CAGR of 11.7% from 2023 to 2030

Grey market versus regulated casino markets

What are grey markets and which market should you choose?

For starters, at StatsDrone we encourage all affiliates to do their due diligence when it comes to local laws, licensing and regulation. The affiliate programs here are for information purposes only and StatsDrone is a company that aims to list every online casino affiliate program that exists.

Grey market casinos often are known as ones licensed in Curacao and accept Bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrencies.

In order to know which marketing you are dealing with, you'll want to look up the license at the bottom of every casino to see which license they actually have. In some cases you might find some casinos that have no reference of any license.

How do we rank casino affiliate programs?

We take many factors into ranking the list of casino affiliate programs here. As someone who's built and ran numerous casino affiliate sites, I can tell that what you want are trustworthy partners, programs that pay on time and ones that deliver a quality product which will translate to the best ROI for your traffic.

We rank casino affiliate programs on the following criteria

1. Data
2. Ad Tools
3. Product quality
4. Reputation
5. Commissions: Revenue share, CPA & Hybrid

Data

These are the following data points that we record and feel that they are important for most affiliates.

Data points

• Software - what affiliate program software does the casino use?
• API - do they give data to affiliates that they can export safely via API
• Data frequency - is the data given to affiliates in real-time, by the hour or updated once a day?

Ad & tracking tools

• Tracking links - your tracking links are the what you need to send traffic to any online casino
• Dynamic variables - does the program offer S2S tracking links?
• Postbacks - are postbacks available for advanced tracking of FTDs?

Product quality

If you are going to refer players to online casinos and recommend them, you want to make sure you're doing the best review you can do. There are many affiliates that write low quality 500 word articles and expect this to rank as well as convert but it won't. Just do a search for any casino site like 'betway casino review' and observe the top ranking affiliate sites. You'll see they have a lot of content and have thoroughly reviewed these casinos and casino games to the best they can.

Reputation

It helps to have a solid reputation and this is what players want. However if you are providing that player with review content, they hope you look up the reputation on their behalf. You can find top rated review sites like CasinoReviews.com or Casino.guru to follow casino reputations as well as monitor their complaints. Casino complaints is not a fun thing to do but these complaints and dispute mediation sites serve a great purpose in the online casino business. They help players know how casino brands treat players.

The reputation of an affiliate program is important for both the program as well as the brands in how players receive those brands. Ideally you want to work with a partner program that treats affiliates and players the best.

A great way to litmus test the reputation of a casino is to do a Google search for the brand in question such as 'BitStarz review' and see what other affiliate sites are saying about this brand. Also pay attention to the ratings of this brand on other websites. It will give you an idea if that competitor is happy working with that particular brand. Also another great way to test the popularity and trustworthiness of a brand is to check rankings within affiliate sites. If you see a brand consistently high ranked, it means it is likely good for players and that the affiliates are happy with the commissions they earn from that program.

You'll also want a dedicated affiliate manager to work with. These partnerships are built on relationships and sometimes this is what can make or break and affiliate program.

How to get your tracking links

When you join an affiliate program, one of the first things you usually would do is get your main tracking link or create a campaign if the affiliate program has this in the backend. Many programs call these different things like campaign links, affiliate links, affiliate tracking links, etc... 

What are Dynamic Variables?

Dynamic variable tracking links are an advanced means of tracking. The more professional and established casinos have this for webmasters that use it. The simplified means of explaining how it works is instead of using the regular tracking link you would find in the backend, you would use one that passes a token along back to the casino. So the user clicks on the 'join casino' link from your site, goes to the casino and a token is passed to the casino. If the player signs up and deposits, you'll get that data back where you know the time of that click and on which page the click came from. This will help you as the affiliate to know which pages are generating more of your conversions. More affiliate programs are switching affiliate program software for this reason to stay up to date with the latest tracking technology which is also referred to as S2S tracking (server-to-server).

If you are interested in integrating this tracking tech into your affiliate sites, contact us for help. Talk to your affiliate partners

Why do affiliates need Postbacks?

Postbacks are similar to dynamic variables in that they are S2S tracking. They can send instant data back to the affiliate when an event has happened like a registration or a first deposit being made. The types of affiliates that want postback data are ones that want another layer of confidence the sales are happening and others are performance marketing affiliates. Any affiliate that does media buying and PPC, will often need to be monitoring their data by the hour or real-time to ensure they are getting a positive ROI from the incoming revenue versus their costs of buying traffic.

Simply put, some affiliates will refuse to work with affiliate programs that don't have Postback tracking.

Commissions & ROI

Let's face it, a program offering 50% revenue share shouldn't be treated the same as a program offering 35% rev share when one converts 4 times better than the other. You want to send your traffic to brands that convert your traffic, retain your players and also have a fair commission structure without predatory terms and conditions.

Some affiliate managers are very difficult to work with and it is up to you to decide who your casino partners are. Other affiliates might have better deals with a program but if the program is asking for unreasonable terms then you can forget it.

What out for these types of programs

1. Have negative carry-over (NCO)
2. Have minimum activity quotas (MAQ)
3. Bundling (negative commissions wipe out positive commissions at other casinos)
4. Reputation for late payments
5. Affiliate managers with poor response time and bad attitude

Avoid these 5 situations above and you'll be fine.

Commissions

Revenue share

Sometimes simply referred to as just revshare, revenue share is perhaps the most popular commission type demanded by an affiliate marketer. You'll sometimes see people write it as just RS for short.

A quick calculation and example. Say you refer a player from one of your casino affiliate sites and that player deposits €500 four times for a total of €2000 and loses it all. At a 30% revenue share deal, you would be earning €600. If that player loses that same amount every month for the next year but has two winning months, then you'll be earning €600 x 10 for €6000 assuming that the program has no negative carryover.

CPA

This stands for Cost Per Acquisition and some sites will describe this as cost per action. Using online casinos as the example, if you refer a depositing player that deposits say $500, whether that player wins or loses, you could be earning a one time commission of $200 CPA. Keep in mind that most programs offer CPA but will grant it after approving a deal. Most affiliate managers will approve deals manually because of past experience with CPA fraud.

Also programs might pay different CPA rates for different GEOs, as in different markets in the world like CPA rates for Norway and India will not be the same. Many programs will have a minimum deposit amount for a player to qualify for a CPA payment.

Hybrid deals

A hybrid deal often involves a mix of revenue share and CPA. Using the 2 examples above, instead of getting a very high rev share deal or a high CPA deal, both are watered down giving you the best of both worlds. You could get for example a 30% revenue share deal with $100 CPA which is still great. You get the guaranteed payment for a depositing player and the added bonus of potential life time revenue with that revenue share. Hybrid deals are not common and typically require approval and you must be able to deliver a certain number of FTDs or NDCs per month.

Flat Fee deals

Flat fees are a bit rare and a program will likely want to see proof of traffic before they agree to these deals. These deals are typically reserved for larger affiliates that sell placements on premium parts of their website, usually the top listings on a homepage. Quite often these deals can be in addition to rev share deals and you'll find larger affiliate & media companies have these deals. Some of the larger affiliates would be ones like Better Collective, Blexr, Raketech, Catena Media and Blue Window.

Sub affiliate program

A sub affiliate program is where you make a commission by referring other casino affiliates to the affiliate program. The average sub-affiliate commission is around 5%. If you do affiliate program reviews or manage accounts for others, they would be sub affiliates.

Negative carry-over explained, aka No NCO

For all gambling affiliate programs, they have products where your referred players can become winners. When your commission is paid out in revenue share, this means you won't get paid on negative amounts.

What negative carry-over means is if you have a negative balance from a winning player, it is carried over the following month and you have a debt to carry forward. So when you see programs advertising they have 'no negative carryover' or 'no NCO', this is what you want. You don't want programs with negative carry-over. Programs that have NCO won't tell you and it is simply inside their terms and conditions. One way to avoid programs that have NCO is to focus on flat fees or CPA deals instead.

Overall, affiliates absolutely hate casino negative carryover on any program. 

Bundling

You might not see this term too much but it is like negative carry-over but just as bad but different. Bundling means that if you promote 4 casinos that are part of the same affiliate program, if they bundle, it means negative commission at 1 casino will wipe out the commissions earned at the other 3 casinos.

Languages

Languages are obviously important for knowing what program to work with or not. Most affiliate programs themselves can be in English but their casinos can be in multiple languages. It helps to start with the brand you want to promote first and see what languages are supported on the casino's site.

GEOs

Sometimes you'll just have to dig in the casino's terms and conditions to know which excluded countries are on the list. Some casinos will make your life easier and state which GEOs they accept. Otherwise you'll have to find this directly on the casino's website usually is found either in the t&cs or if you go to register, you'll see a country dropdown list.

Compliance

Compliance is not a fun word any webmaster wants to read but it is a necessary evil. Many programs require a certain amount of compliance to work with that program. These programs utilize tools to make sure you are complying with the terms and conditions set forth in the affiliate agreement.

Online Casino Licenses

In the footer of most online casinos, you'll see info about the company that owns the casino as well as their gaming licenses. The 2 most popular iGaming licenses that you'll see come from Curacao and Malta, as in MGA. As of 2023, there are more countries opening up their online gambling licensing.

Terminology and Glossary

If you are new to the world of casino affiliate marketing, there are many things to know and it helps to have a grasp of the lingo.

Did you know that the online gambling industry uses the term iGaming to represent online casinos? Some people will use iGaming to refer to all online gambling but iGaming and the keyword gaming are often used. One reason for this is the industry wanted to be ambiguous and not explicitly use the word 'gambling' when back in the day, it was an industry that didn't have the reputation it does today.

• FTD - first time depositors
• NDC - new depositing customers. Some people use NDC over FTD
• NCO - negative carry-over
• CPA - cost per acquisition. This is a commission type paid when making a sale
• NGR - net gaming revenue
• RS - short for revenue share commission
• MAQ - minimum activity quota

Casino affiliate networks

A casino affiliate network is just a network affiliate program where you as the affiliate partner promotes the same casinos except that with a network, you have one affiliate manager and one payment method.

A network indirectly takes a small cut of your profits but the big upside of why affiliates love networks is that they have the power of many affiliates behind it. A network with 1000 gambling sites will collectively be able to get exclusive cpa offers and hybrid revenue share deals better than you could do on your own.

Casino affiliate program vs networks

If you promote 20 online casinos, you could have 20 affiliate accounts to login whereas with a network you have just one backend to deal with.

Casino affiliate programs by software type

Many affiliates actively seek a casino affiliate program that have a specific software type like MyAffiliates, Cellxpert, Affilka, ReferOn and more. Here is a list of the 10 most popular affiliate program software that affiliates recognize and are comfortable using their backends.

1. Cellxpert
2. ReferOn
3. MyAffiliates
4. Intelitics
5. NetRefer
6. The Affiliate Platform
7. Affilka
8. Income Access
9. Post Affiliate Pro
10. Wynta

Top casino CPA offers

How can you get the highest casino CPA deals? That isn't easy and you're going to need to work with a program for at least a month to demonstrate you have legitimate traffic.

New casino affiliate guide

When setting up your new affiliate website you'll want to use an established content management system like WordPress. If you are a streamer or a YouTuber then you'll have a different CMS altogether and your workflow is a lot different.

WordPress casino affiliate sites

WordPress is the number one content management system (CMS) in the world. In any of your searches, more than 50% of these affiliate marketers are using WordPress

WordPress themes

There are a number of WordPress casino themes you can buy that are low cost and an easy means of launching your first site whether casino or any online gambling niche. These themes are:

• FlyTonic
• Poka Theme
• Mercury Theme

Streaming casino affiliates

Streamers have been popular for the past 5 years and are now a major part of the online casino industry. Streamers are often playing online slots and sometimes live casino games. These streamers of course get paid through revenue generated to promote online casinos.

Best conferences for casino affiliates

If you are a casino affiliate or want to get into casino affiliation then there are some must-attend events you should consider. Almost always, iGaming conferences are usually free for affiliates to go!

The top 4 iGaming industry events where you will find many affiliates in the gambling niche.

1. London Affiliate Conference
2. SiGMA Malta
3. SBC Summit
4. iGaming NEXT

To learn more about related events, see our affiliate conference list to find more affiliate and SEO conferences.

FAQ

How Do Online Casino Affiliate Programs Work?

It is extremely rare to find any online casinos without an affiliate program. If you scroll to the footer of any of these sites, you'll find a link to the 'affiliate program' or 'partners' page. When you signup, usually you have to list your website you own. Once you are approved, you can start getting tracking links and promoting casinos. The casinos will pay you usually with revshare or with a CPA deal.

What is the Highest Paying Affiliate Program?

Online casinos have been known to have CPAs in the $200 region and going well past $400. This is some of the highest player values in all forms of online gambling. When it comes to recurring revenue, casino brands are what generates the largest commissions.

What other niches do casino affiliates work in?

When it comes to promoting online casinos, these affiliates will work with other programs where the business and commission models are similar. This includes other online gambling verticals like sports betting, poker, bingo and lottery. You'll find these affiliates also focusing on finance related and personal finance sites where you can get very good CPA deals and solid revenue share deals. The player value associated with these products can be as high as casino. After casino, our sports betting affiliate programs page is one of the more popular ones. 

How Much Do Casino Affiliates Make?

There is not too much public data on how much casino sites can earn but you can sometimes find these answers in affiliate interviews. If you look on LinkedIn for the number of people that work for a larger affiliate, that should give you an idea of the earning potential you can make from online casinos. Overall, online casino affiliate programs are some of the highest paying affiliate programs around.

When you get paid on revenue share or anything that involves a percentage of net revenue, this is considered a form of passive income.

How Do I Promote Casino Affiliate Links?

All you need to do is login to the casino affiliate program that you have joined and depending on the affiliate software used, you can find your tracking links. Many times you can find a default campaign for a tracker but you can always create a campaign and give it a custom name.

How do I get paid?

Usually your commissions are not paid until the previous month has closed. Some programs pay affiliates on the 1st day of the next month and others can pay late all the way to the end of the month.

You can get paid with numerous payment methods and the most common ones are bank transfer. Checks as possible and the other alternatives are usually ewallets such as Neteller, Skrill, PayPal, Paysafecard and AstroPay. There are always multiple payment methods to choose from.

Can I get my affiliate commissions paid in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies?

Some programs have more crypto focused online casinos and therefore their payment methods can be done by Bitcoin or some type of US stable coin like USDT for example, as in Tether. Some casinos also make their payments via the player wallet. Just be mindful that if you are averse to playing video slots that you might end up wasting your commissions back to the casino. This happens more than you think.

Is Raketech AffiliationCloud a casino affiliate network or an alternative to StatsDrone?

The AffiliationCloud by Raketech is like an alternative to StatsDrone but is managed like a casino or sports betting affiliate network. The AffiliationCloud will give you your stats, tracking links, deals, sort your payments and be one login to cover many brands and bonuses.