Image credit: Source: Better Collective Q2 2026 interim report. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
Better Collective's Q2 2026 report, published August 20, shows sponsorship revenue up 39% year on year to €16 million while programmatic display revenue fell 16% to €6 million, a trade the company says it is making on purpose rather than absorbing as a market shift. Group revenue rose 9% to €89 million, EBITDA before special items rose 20% to €27 million on a 30% margin, and operating cash flow rose 59% to €30 million, a 111% cash conversion rate.
New depositing customers climbed 24% to 373,000, with 70% arriving through revenue-share agreements rather than one-off CPA deals. Deposit value hit an all-time high of €836 million, up 17%. Revenue-share income itself reached €44 million, up 5%, and now makes up 82% of recurring revenue.
"If we can replace lower-yielding programmatic revenue with higher-value direct sponsorship revenue, that is precisely the trade we want to make," said Jesper Søgaard, Better Collective's co-founder and co-chief executive officer, on the company's earnings call.
Programmatic was already the wrong trade
Programmatic display, the automated buying and selling of ad space by the impression, has been under pressure across gambling media for a while. CPMs for gambling inventory run lower than most verticals because ad exchanges and brand-safety filters treat betting content as higher risk, and advertising bans across Europe have been pushing operator marketing budgets toward channels a regulator cannot switch off with one ruling. A banner sold by the thousand impressions is exactly the kind of inventory that gets squeezed from both directions at once: falling yield on one side, shrinking buyer demand on the other.
Sponsorship inventory does not have that problem in the same way. A direct placement, a branded segment, a talent-led show sold to one advertiser at a negotiated rate is priced on relationship and reach rather than on an exchange auction, and it is harder for a platform-level policy change to zero out overnight. Better Collective's 39% jump in sponsorship revenue against a 16% fall in programmatic is the clearest evidence yet that the company sees the auction-priced side of its ad business as a shrinking, not cyclical, line.
Revenue share is doing the heavy lifting underneath
The sponsorship shift is the headline, but the more structural number is that 70% of new depositing customers this quarter came through revenue-share deals, and revenue share now accounts for 82% of recurring revenue. That continues a pattern this desk has tracked since the CPA-to-revenue-share shift became visible across the sector: operators and affiliates converging on a model that ties affiliate income to how long a referred player keeps playing, not just whether they sign up.
Combined with sponsorship's rise, the picture is an affiliate business deliberately narrowing its exposure to the two revenue types it can least control, one-off CPA payouts and auction-priced programmatic ads, in favor of the two it can shape through direct relationships: revenue share and sponsorship. Both trade short-term optionality for a steadier, more forecastable base, the same logic behind Better Collective's earlier push into first-party audience data as a way to own the relationship rather than rent it from a search engine or an ad exchange.
North America is where that trade is paying off fastest. The region's EBITDA margin improved from 5% in Q2 2025 to 26% in Q2 2026, a swing the company attributes to revenue-share income, talent-led media properties, and early revenue from US prediction markets. Better Collective said it started the year with a single active prediction-market partner and expanded that relationship through the second quarter, with the NFL season flagged as the next test of how much that channel can contribute.
Sponsorship buys certainty, not scale
The trade has a ceiling programmatic never had. An exchange can sell an unlimited number of impressions to an unlimited number of buyers; a sponsorship slot on a named show or a branded segment is one deal with one advertiser, and there are only so many of those an affiliate's owned media can support before it runs out of inventory to sell direct. Better Collective's Q1 2026 affiliate earnings already showed the sector diverging on how each company answers the same search-traffic squeeze; this quarter's numbers suggest Better Collective's answer is to accept a smaller, harder ceiling on ad revenue in exchange for a floor that is less exposed to any single algorithm or exchange policy.
That trade only works for an affiliate with owned media large enough to have sponsorship inventory worth buying in the first place, brands, shows, and audiences an advertiser wants to be next to. A comparison site with rankings and no talent-led programming has nothing to sell an advertiser directly and stays exposed to the programmatic and CPA lines this quarter's report shows shrinking fastest. The affiliates that survive the next round of consolidation are increasingly the ones with a media business behind the links, not just the links.
Related: Affiliate First-Party Data Replaces Search Rankings | From CPA to Revenue Share | Q1 2026 Affiliate Earnings Roundup