Image credit: Source: company filings and press releases.
The listed betting affiliate business has split into two opposing strategies, and Catena Media and Better Collective mark the two ends of the divide. One shrank to a single region to survive; the other spread across owned media, paid channels, and first-party data to keep growing. Both answer the same problem, and the gap between them tells operators and investors where affiliate value is heading.
Catena Media finished the retreat first. The Malta-based affiliate closed a strategic review begun in May 2022 with the sale of its Italy-facing sports betting and casino assets for 19.8m euros. Counting the 45m euro sale of AskGamblers to Gaming Innovation Group in December 2022 and other disposals, the review raised roughly 76m euros. The company told the market that "stable, regulated markets offer the best framework for long-term engagement," naming North America as "the focal point for the group's growth strategy going forward." A business that once ran across dozens of markets chose to become a focused North American operator with a repaired balance sheet.
Better Collective went the other way. The Copenhagen-listed group kept buying audience and building owned sports media, then layered on paid social distribution and a direct-to-bettor product: not shrinking the map but owning more of the customer relationship across it.
What broke the old betting affiliate model
The classic affiliate model was simple and, for a decade, extremely profitable. Rank a comparison site at the top of Google for "best betting sites," send the click to an operator, and collect a cost-per-acquisition fee or revenue share. Two forces broke it.
The first was Google. Successive core and helpful-content updates cut organic visibility for thin comparison pages, and answer engines began resolving "which sportsbook" questions on the results page itself. Ranking stopped being a durable asset, the shift we covered in affiliate SEO running on AI, not cheap content.
The second was the payment model. Operators tightened terms and pushed affiliates from guaranteed upfront CPA toward revenue share, which defers income and ties the affiliate's fortunes to how long the bettor stays and how much the operator holds, the change we traced from CPA to revenue share. Revenue share rewards affiliates that can send high-value players and wait, and punishes those that lived on volume and fast cash.
Together, the two broke the economics of the pure search-and-refer affiliate. The winners had to cut cost to fit the smaller pie or find a new asset Google could not erode.
Catena's answer: cut to the core
Catena picked cost and focus. Selling Italy, Australia, the UK, its esports brands, and AskGamblers stripped the group back to the markets where regulation is settling and revenue is most predictable, chiefly the United States and the wider Americas. The logic is defensive: fewer markets mean fewer compliance regimes, a smaller cost base, and a balance sheet light enough to service debt through a downturn in sports margin.
The disposals were deep, not cosmetic. The Italian sports betting and casino brands, which generated roughly 7.8m euros of revenue and 3.4m euros of EBITDA in the year to September 2023, went for 19.8m euros and carried a 2.7m euro impairment charge on the way out. Proceeds were earmarked to cut debt.
The risk is obvious. A focused North American affiliate is exposed to a single regulatory and competitive environment, where operator marketing budgets have already peaked and the largest books, FanDuel and DraftKings, increasingly acquire players themselves. Catena is betting depth in a maturing, high-value market beats breadth across volatile ones. It is a survivable strategy, not a growth story.
Better Collective's answer: own more of the funnel
Better Collective bet on scale and ownership. Rather than treat affiliation as a referral toll, it moved to own the media producing the audience and the data following the bettor. Its 2025 annual report describes a business organised around publishing and paid media, leaning into revenue-share partnerships that defer income now for a larger lifetime-value book later. That is the same deferral that hurt Catena, taken deliberately as an investment.
The group also pushed past referral with Playbook, an AI product launched in 2025 that engages active bettors across their lifecycle rather than only capturing sign-ups, converting a one-time referral into a recurring relationship and sitting closer to the bet than a review page ever could. It is the clearest sign that the leading affiliates now see themselves as media and data businesses, not lead brokers, the same pivot we described in affiliate first-party data replacing search rankings.
Gambling.com Group sits closer to Better Collective's end, with a sharper focus on profitability. Its succession, with co-founder Kevin McCrystle taking over as CEO and Charles Gillespie moving to an executive chairman role built around M&A, signals a company planning to buy scale rather than shrink to fit. The divergence in Q1 2026 affiliate earnings, with Catena rebounding on a leaner base while others cut, is the financial fingerprint of these opposite choices.
Why the United States forces the choice
The United States is where the two strategies collide most sharply, the market that made affiliation look easy and then made it hard. Early state launches, from New Jersey to Ohio, handed affiliates a rush of high-value sign-ups as operators paid almost any price for market share. That period is over. The largest sportsbooks now hold dominant share, spend less on blanket acquisition, and route more marketing through owned CRM and their own media deals. The affiliate is no longer the cheapest channel by default.
That cuts both ways. Catena's concentration on North America doubles down on the single market where operator budgets are tightening and revenue share is now the norm, betting a lean cost base earns a durable margin on high-value players. Better Collective bets that owning sports media audiences and engaging bettors directly captures value the operators are trying to reclaim. One is optimising the referral; the other is trying to escape it.
For the mid-tier affiliate caught between them, the message is unforgiving. A network of comparison sites with no owned audience, no first-party data, and no single market deep enough to defend has neither Catena's cost discipline nor Better Collective's scale. Those are the natural sellers in the coming consolidation.
What operators and investors should read from it
For operators, the split changes how to buy affiliate traffic. A focused affiliate like Catena is a clean, compliant partner useful for depth in North America and little else. A scaled media-and-data affiliate can move volume across markets, but it wants revenue share, retains the customer relationship, and increasingly competes for the bettor's attention through its own products. The negotiation is no longer about CPA rates but about who owns the data and the bettor.
For investors, the two models will be valued differently. The focused affiliate is a value story: cash-generative, cyclical, capped by its single market. The scaled affiliate is a growth story running on deferred revenue and rising customer-lifetime value, which demands patience and tolerance for reported numbers that lag the book. They are wagers on different futures for the same industry.
Two answers to the same squeeze
The affiliate reset produced two winning templates. Catena Media proved a smaller, disciplined footprint can stabilise a business that grew too broad. Better Collective is testing whether owning media and data can turn a referral middleman into a durable consumer platform. The middle ground, a broad network of thin comparison sites living on Google rankings and CPA cheques, no longer pays. Every affiliate still standing has quietly picked a side, and the ones that have not will have it chosen for them by the next Google update or the next operator that stops paying upfront.