How to Find Affiliates for Your iGaming Program (Including Your Competitors' Affiliates)

You launched an affiliate program. The tracking works, the deals are configured, the landing page is live. And the dashboard is empty, because affiliates don't find operators. Operators find affiliates.

Here is the short version: the affiliates you want are already visible. They rank for the searches your players make, they send traffic to your competitors, they gather in a handful of industry communities and events, and they leave footprints in their tracking links. This guide covers where to look, how to run a competitor affiliate analysis step by step, how to vet who you find, and what to offer so they say yes.

Before you prospect: what makes an iGaming affiliate say yes

Recruitment is sales, and the affiliate is the buyer. Good affiliates, the ones with rankings, audiences, and steady traffic, receive partnership pitches every week. Before they join a program, they check four things:

• The deal. Competitive CPA, revenue share, or hybrid terms for their traffic type and market, with clear qualification rules.
• Payment reliability. iGaming affiliates talk to each other. A reputation for late or disputed payments spreads through the community fast and quietly kills recruitment.
• Tracking they can trust. Reliable attribution, tracked links that hold up across devices, and reporting they can check themselves. If your numbers and their numbers disagree, you lose the partner.
• A product that converts and retains. Their income depends on what happens after the click. A brand with strong retention makes every revenue-share deal worth more.

Fix these first. Every recruitment channel below works better when the answer to "why should I promote you" is easy.

Where to find iGaming affiliates: seven channels that work

1. Search what your players search

The fastest map of active affiliates in any market is the search results page. Search the transactional queries your players use: "best casino bonuses in [market]," "[sport] betting sites [country]," "new online casinos [year]," "[competitor brand] review." Nearly every site ranking for those terms is an affiliate, already proven in your exact vertical and geography. Work through the top two pages for your key markets and you have a prospect list of publishers who can demonstrably deliver what you need: rankings for money keywords.

2. Recruit your competitors' affiliates

The publishers already sending traffic to brands like yours are your highest-probability recruits. They know the vertical, they convert gambling traffic, and they are open to new programs when the economics make sense. This deserves its own playbook, so the full step-by-step is in the next section.

3. Work the industry directories and communities

iGaming has dedicated places where affiliates and operators find each other. GPWA (the Gaming Portal Webmasters Association) is the long-running community where casino and sports betting webmasters compare programs. AffPapa maintains a directory pairing iGaming affiliates with operators. iGB Affiliate runs a global directory of gaming affiliates and programs. List your program where affiliates already look, and spend time in the forums where they talk, because that is also where your payment reputation is made.

4. Show up where deals get done: conferences

A large share of serious iGaming affiliate relationships still start face to face. SiGMA, SBC Summit, and the iGB Affiliate events exist substantially for this: affiliates walk the floor looking for programs worth their traffic. One good event can fill a recruitment pipeline for months, and a fifteen-minute meeting builds the trust that ten cold emails cannot.

5. Recruit streamers and content creators

Slots streamers on Twitch and Kick, betting tipsters on YouTube and Telegram, and niche social creators drive real player volume in many markets, particularly in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Search the platforms the way a player would, in the local language, and shortlist creators whose audience matches your licensed geos. Creator deals need extra compliance care (more on vetting below), but they reach players that SEO affiliates do not.

6. Let your best affiliates recruit for you

Sub-affiliation turns your partners into recruiters: they refer other affiliates and earn a percentage of what those referrals generate. It compounds, because the affiliates most likely to know other good affiliates are the good affiliates you already have. If your platform supports multi-level structures, switching this on is one of the cheapest recruitment channels available.

7. Make your program findable

Some affiliates will look for you, especially once your brand has any visibility. Give them a program page that answers their questions before they ask: commission structures, payment schedule and methods, accepted traffic types, restricted markets, and who to contact. Then make sure the page ranks for "[your brand] affiliate program." An inbound affiliate who read your terms and signed up anyway is the cheapest recruit you will ever get.

How to find your competitors' affiliates, step by step

This is the highest-value prospecting work an iGaming affiliate manager can do, and almost nobody does it systematically. Five methods, ordered by effort.

Step 1: Mine the SERPs for their promoters. Search "[competitor brand] review," "[competitor brand] bonus," and "[competitor brand] promo code" in each of your target markets and languages. Every ranking site is an active affiliate for that brand. Note which competitors each site promotes and how prominently; a site running your competitor in its number-one toplist slot is a site worth a conversation.

Step 2: Run a backlink analysis on their affiliate program. In Ahrefs or a similar tool, open Site Explorer on the competitor's main domain and, even better, on their affiliate program's landing or signup page. The backlink report is, in large part, a list of their publishers: bonus portals, review sites, and toplists linking to the brand. Filter for the anchors and pages that look commercial ("bonus," "review," market names) and export the list. Fifteen minutes of this per competitor produces hundreds of qualified prospects.

Step 3: Check their referral traffic. Tools like Similarweb show which sites send a domain its referral visits. Run each competitor and look at the top referrers: the affiliate sites appear immediately, ranked by how much traffic they send. This surfaces big partners that a backlink report can undercount, like sites driving clicks through redirects.

Step 4: Follow the tracking-link footprints. iGaming affiliate links leave fingerprints. Hover over or click the outbound links on any bonus portal and watch the URL: parameters like btag= and a=, redirect chains through go. or track. subdomains, and campaign IDs all reveal which programs a site works with, sometimes including deals that never show in backlink data because the links redirect through tracking domains. Working through the top twenty affiliate sites in a market this way gives you a precise picture of who promotes whom.

Step 5: Read the affiliates' own pages. Many established affiliates publish the brands they work with, in footers, "about" pages, or partner lists, and iGaming directories often list which programs an affiliate belongs to. It is the least technical method and a good cross-check on the other four.

Then approach them properly. These affiliates have proof of performance in your vertical, so treat the pitch accordingly: acknowledge what they rank for, and lead with what you offer that their current programs do not. That can be better terms for their traffic type, a market you serve that their brands do not, faster payments, or a product with retention strong enough to make revenue share genuinely attractive. Never open by criticizing the competitor they promote; they chose that program, and it is paying them.

Vet before you sign: quality and compliance

In iGaming, a bad affiliate can cost more than an empty program. Before approving anyone, check:

• Licensing and geo fit. Are they driving traffic from markets you are licensed in? An affiliate whose audience sits in a market you cannot legally serve is a liability, however good their numbers look.
• Responsible gambling and advertising standards. Review how they present gambling content: bonus terms shown honestly, age references, responsible-gambling messaging where regulation requires it. Their compliance failures become your regulatory problem.
• Brand bidding. Decide your policy on affiliates bidding on your brand terms in paid search, write it into your terms, and check for it. Unchecked brand bidding means paying commission for players who were already searching for you.
• Traffic quality signals. Be cautious of prospects who promise volume with no verifiable source, and watch early cohorts for the classic fraud patterns: registration spikes with no deposits, geo mismatches between claimed and actual traffic, and incentivized signups that never wager.
• Content quality. Read the site the way a player would. Thin, scraped, or machine-spun content that ranks today tends to vanish in the next update, taking your acquisition channel with it.

The operational side matters here too: clear terms, deal rules enforced by your platform rather than by memory, and account management that tracks who agreed to what.

Outreach that gets replies

iGaming affiliates ignore template emails because they receive dozens. What works:

• Show you looked. One specific line about their site ("your Ontario casino toplist," "your Serie A betting guides") beats every compliment ever written.
• Lead with the deal. Traffic type, markets, structure, numbers. Affiliates decide on economics, so putting terms in the first message signals you are serious and saves both sides a week.
• Keep it short and make the next step small. Three sentences and "worth a quick call?" outperforms a page of brand story.
• Meet them on their channels. Much of iGaming affiliate business runs on Telegram, Skype, and LinkedIn rather than email. If a prospect lists a Telegram handle, use it.
• Follow up once, then let it go. A single polite follow-up a week later catches the interested-but-busy. More than that burns goodwill in a community where reputations travel.

What to offer: deal structures that attract affiliates

Three structures dominate iGaming, and serious affiliates will expect you to speak all three fluently.

Deal type

How it works

Attracts

CPA

Fixed payment per qualified player, usually gated by a first deposit and minimum activity

Affiliates who want fast, predictable payback on paid or high-volume traffic

Revenue share

Ongoing percentage of the net revenue their players generate

Affiliates with SEO or content traffic playing the long game, if they trust your retention

Hybrid

Reduced CPA plus reduced ongoing share

Established affiliates balancing cash flow and upside; the default ask in many negotiations

Two things make these structures work in practice. First, precise qualification rules: define the deposit, wagering, or activity thresholds that trigger payment, per market if needed, so there is no ambiguity at payout time. Second, flexibility per partner: your best affiliates will negotiate, and you want tooling that lets you configure a specific deal for a specific affiliate rather than forcing everyone into one template.

There is a strategic point inside revenue share worth sitting with: the deal is only as attractive as your retention. An affiliate choosing between two brands at the same percentage picks the one whose players stay longer, and the operators winning those comparisons are the ones running serious iGaming CRM and retention programs behind the acquisition. Recruitment and retention are the same pitch in this vertical.

Found them? Now keep them

Recruitment gets an affiliate's first campaign. What earns the second: an onboarding that gets links live within days, creative assets that fit their placements, reporting they can verify themselves, and payments that arrive when the terms say they will. Give your best partners a named contact and quarterly deal reviews. The affiliate community is small, and how you treat partners is your recruitment reputation. For more on helping partners perform once live, see our guide to affiliate link promotion.

FAQ

How many affiliates does a new iGaming program need? Fewer than most operators think. A handful of proven, well-matched affiliates in your core markets outperforms a hundred inactive signups. Concentrate on activation rate, the share of approved affiliates who send traffic, rather than raw headcount.

Is recruiting competitors' affiliates acceptable practice? Yes. Affiliates are independent businesses, and most promote several programs at once. Nothing stops you from making a better offer, and everything in the competitor-recon workflow above uses publicly visible information. The line to hold is professionalism: compete on your deal and product, never by disparaging the incumbent.

Where do iGaming affiliates spend time? GPWA and similar forums, the iGB Affiliate and AffPapa directories, industry conferences (SiGMA, SBC Summit, iGB Affiliate events), and, day to day, Telegram and Skype. Being visible and responsive in those places is a recruitment channel in itself.

Should we run recruitment in-house or through an agency? In-house wins long term because relationships are the asset, and the methods above are learnable by any affiliate manager. Agencies can bootstrap a network fast in a market you do not know, at the cost of margin and of owning the relationships. Many operators start hybrid and bring recruitment fully in-house as the program matures.

What does the affiliate manager need on day one? A program page with transparent terms, tracking the affiliate can verify, deal structures ready for CPA, revenue share, and hybrid, and a payment process that will not embarrass you. Recruitment amplifies whatever operation sits behind it, in either direction.

Run recruitment on a platform built for it

TheAffiliatePlatform, built for iGaming operators by the team behind Smartico, gives your recruitment a home: flexible deals per affiliate and campaign, multi-level structures for sub-affiliation, reliable tracking affiliates can trust, and real-time reporting that keeps partnerships honest. If you are building or migrating an affiliate program, book a demo and we will show you how operators run this playbook in practice.

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