iGaming Affiliate Media & Publishers Directory 2026

This directory maps 58 companies and organisations that make up the iGaming affiliate media ecosystem in 2026, grouped into five types: affiliate media groups, comparison and review sites, B2B trade media, affiliate communities and events, and data providers used in media planning. It is written from the operator side of the table. When an acquisition team plans where partner budget goes, the first question is not which site ranks first for a keyword, it is who owns that site, which markets its licence permits it to promote, and whether the same parent already owns three of the other properties on the shortlist. Ownership concentration in this sector is now high enough that a media plan built without an ownership map is negotiating against itself.

How This Directory Is Organized

Five organisation types make up the ecosystem, and they trade on completely different terms. Affiliate media groups own portfolios of revenue-generating properties and negotiate as media businesses with in-house commercial teams. Comparison and review sites are the individual properties that actually convert traffic, whether independently owned or inside a group. Trade media sell advertising, events, and subscriptions to operators rather than sending player traffic. Communities and events are where partner relationships are built rather than where traffic originates. Data providers sell the traffic and market intelligence that both sides use to price a deal. Confusing the types produces the classic media-plan error: paying a trade publisher on a revenue-share basis it can never deliver against, or approaching a listed media group with the terms designed for a single-site affiliate.

Affiliate Media Groups: The Portfolio Owners

Six of the groups below are publicly listed, which makes this the most financially transparent tier of the ecosystem and the easiest to diligence before signing. Better Collective, Catena Media, Gambling.com Group, Gentoo Media, Raketech, and Acroud all publish audited revenue, market splits, and portfolio disclosures, so an operator can see how much of a group's revenue comes from the markets it actually wants before committing budget. The privately held groups require more work: ownership, portfolio scale, and market exposure have to be established from filings, trade coverage, and direct questions during negotiation.

Comparison and Review Sites: Where Traffic Converts

Comparison sites generate the overwhelming majority of organic affiliate conversions in regulated iGaming markets, and most of the well-known ones now sit inside a group rather than standing alone. The practical consequence for an operator is that a shortlist of eight comparison properties can resolve to three commercial counterparties. The table below states the current owner for each property precisely so that a media plan can be deduplicated by parent before rates are discussed, and so that exclusivity or category-lock clauses are negotiated with the entity that can actually grant them.

Trade Media and B2B Publications

Three publishing groups carry most of the sector's B2B attention: Clarion Gaming, which publishes iGaming Business and runs iGB Affiliate and Affiliate Summit; SBC, which publishes SBC News and CasinoBeats and runs SBC Summit; and NEXT.io, which pairs news with its own summit series. Trade media does not send player traffic and should never be bought on a revenue-share basis. It is bought to reach operators, suppliers, and affiliate decision-makers, which makes it a business development and employer-brand channel rather than an acquisition one. Regulatory intelligence publishers such as Vixio sit at the boundary between trade media and data subscription.

One structural shift deserves flagging before any trade-media buy is signed. Several trade publications have been acquired by affiliate groups, most visibly Gambling Insider by Clickout Media, which means editorial coverage and affiliate commercial interests can now sit under a single owner. That is not an accusation against any specific title; it is a diligence point. An operator buying B2B advertising should know whether the publisher's parent also runs consumer properties competing for the same players, because the negotiation, the exclusivity terms, and the value of an editorial mention all change when the answer is yes. The same question applies in reverse to suppliers pitching award submissions and sponsored research.

Affiliate Communities, Forums, and Events

Four event series anchor the affiliate calendar: iGB Affiliate, SBC Summit, SiGMA, and Affiliate World. Between them they cover Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and the recruitment pipeline for most operator programs runs through at least two of them. The forums matter for a different reason. GPWA, AffiliateFIX, Casinomeister's board, and STM Forum are where affiliates publicly compare operator payment behaviour, which means a program that delays payouts or applies undisclosed qualification rules will be discussed there long before it appears in trade coverage.

Data and Intelligence Providers for Media Planning

Seven data providers cover the questions an operator media plan actually has to answer: how much traffic does a property really get, which markets does it reach, how large is the addressable market, and what is legally permitted there. Similarweb, Ahrefs, and Semrush supply the traffic and search visibility estimates used to sanity-check an affiliate's claimed reach. H2 Gambling Capital, Eilers and Krejcik Gaming, and Regulus Partners supply market sizing and policy analysis. Vixio and the regulators themselves supply the compliance layer. Treat every third-party traffic estimate as an order-of-magnitude signal rather than a measurement: the gap between estimated and actual traffic on gambling comparison sites is routinely large in both directions.

Ownership Changes That Reshaped the Ecosystem in 2025 and 2026

Genius Sports paid up to $1.2bn for Legend, the largest affiliate media transaction the sector has recorded, closing on May 1, 2026 with $900m at close and a $300m earnout. That single deal moved Covers.com, Casino.org, and Casino Guru from an independent media group to a listed sports-data company, and it is the clearest signal yet that the boundary between data suppliers and affiliate media is dissolving. The other changes below matter for the same practical reason: several properties that looked independent 18 months ago now answer to a parent that also owns their competitors.

How Operators Should Use This Directory to Build a Media Plan

Operators should sequence a media plan by ownership first and traffic second, because negotiating leverage is decided by counterparty concentration rather than by any individual property's ranking. The commercial models available are the same three in every conversation: RevShare on GGR or NGR, CPA on a qualified first deposit, or a hybrid of the two. What differs is which one a given counterparty will accept, and how much diligence the operator needs to do before agreeing to it. A listed group with audited market splits can be assessed from filings. A single-property affiliate cannot, which is where traffic-source verification and fraud controls earn their keep.

1. Deduplicate the shortlist by parent company using the ownership columns above, so a plan with eight properties is not negotiated as eight separate deals with three owners.
2. Filter by licensing and regulatory fit before commercial fit: confirm the property's market focus matches the jurisdictions your UKGC, MGA, ADM, or other licence actually permits you to promote in, and enforce geo-targeting on the tracking links accordingly.
3. Verify claimed reach with at least two independent data sources, treating every third-party traffic estimate as directional rather than measured.
4. Choose the commission model deliberately: CPA for predictable acquisition cost, RevShare on GGR or NGR for alignment with player lifetime value, hybrid where both parties want front-loaded cash plus a long tail.
5. Write the qualification rules into the agreement before launch, covering minimum deposit, minimum wagering, completed KYC, and the hold period during which bonus abuse, multi-account, and self-referral traffic is stripped out.
6. Agree the NGR deduction list and the negative carryover scope explicitly, because both move real payouts more than the headline percentage does.
7. Set a review cadence per partner, with a defined exit for underperformance, and reconcile affiliate-facing statements against finance-side NGR at least monthly.

Portfolio concentration also changes how partner performance should be read. When one parent owns four of the properties sending traffic, a decline at one property and a rise at another may be the same media group reallocating its own internal effort rather than a genuine market signal, and treating the two movements as independent will produce the wrong optimisation. Track partner performance at both levels: per property, because that is where creative, placement, and traffic quality actually live, and per parent, because that is the level at which budget, exclusivity, and rate negotiations are decided. Programs that only report at one level consistently misread the other.

Fraud and traffic-quality controls do not become optional at the top of this list. A listed media group brings audited financials and reputational exposure, which lowers the probability of deliberate fraud, but it does not eliminate incentivised traffic, brand bidding in breach of trademark terms, or sub-affiliate networks operating beneath a group's own account. Sub-affiliation is explicitly part of the model at several groups in the table above, which means the traffic arriving under one partner ID may originate from dozens of properties the operator has never reviewed. Require disclosure of sub-affiliate sources, keep qualification rules and clawback windows identical across partner tiers, and audit the top partners on the same schedule as the long tail.

How to Use and Cite This Page

Two rules keep citations of this directory accurate. Cite the ownership entry together with its as-of date, because this sector's ownership map changed materially three times in the 18 months to July 2026 and will change again. Cite the type classification rather than treating every entry as an affiliate: several organisations listed here are trade publishers or data vendors that send no player traffic at all, and quoting them as affiliates misrepresents both them and the ecosystem.

Methodology, Inclusion Criteria & Corrections

Three inclusion criteria govern this directory. An organisation is listed if it is a real, currently operating entity in the iGaming affiliate media ecosystem, if its type can be classified unambiguously into one of the five categories, and if its ownership and market focus can be established from public sources such as exchange filings, company announcements, and trade reporting. Entries whose ownership could not be established from public sources are marked "ownership not disclosed" rather than assigned a guessed parent. XLMedia is retained despite its wind-down because its former assets still appear in competitive analyses and readers need to know where they went.

Ownership, listing status, and transaction values are taken from company announcements and exchange filings, with trade coverage from iGaming Business and SBC News used to cross-check dates and deal terms; the AffPapa directory was used as a cross-reference for affiliate and operator entries. Market and regulatory context draws on EGBA published data, IBIA integrity reporting, and the licensing frameworks of the UK Gambling Commission, the Malta Gaming Authority, and Italy's ADM. Attendance figures are as reported by the event organisers. No traffic estimate from a third-party analytics vendor is reproduced here as fact, because those figures are modelled rather than measured.

Last updated July 18, 2026. This directory is reviewed quarterly (January, April, July, October), with out-of-cycle updates when a listed transaction closes or a significant property changes hands. Corrections, additions, and submissions from organisations that believe they meet the inclusion criteria are welcome: send the entity name, type, ownership, markets, and notable properties to the Track360 team and the entry will be assessed in the following review cycle. Organisations already listed may request a correction to any factual field at any time.

Plan the media by parent, not by property. The ranking tells you where the traffic is; the ownership map tells you who you are actually negotiating with, and only one of those two facts changes your rate card.