Affiliate Monitor: October 2023

This latest page rental trend, whereby affiliates trade in some of their margin in return for piggybacking the authority of mainstream media brands up the Google rankings, is of course far from new.

The Telegraph’s Better Collective-powered betting section launched back in 2019 and now ranks for about 44,000 keywords in the UK, according to a recent Sistrix analysis run by SEO consultant Julia Logan for iGBA.

But it continues to accelerate and spread across other geos such as Germany and the US, where smaller affiliates are being pushed down the SERPs for queries such as ‘best online casino’. This is “forcing them to target longer-tail keywords with less volume”, as RB Capital’s Ben Robinson observes on p6.

The big question is how it evolves from here. While Gambling.com Group is applying the brakes, shareholder pressure across the sector mitigates against a wholesale slowdown. Which of course raises the spectre of increased regulatory scrutiny of the strategy given its potential to put gambling-linked content in front of a higher volume of low-intent users.

As always, I would love to hear any feedback you have on this and other iGB Affiliate content. You can reach me at stephen.carter@clariongaming.com.