Content And Discontent: On Affiliate Struggles And The Commercial-Editorial Divide

“Friction” is a word that pops up often in the gambling world.

Companies try to decrease friction when onboarding a customer, be it with payment processing, KYC checks, or another step in a customer’s journey. But friction isn’t always an external factor between an operator and a customer or an operator and its competitors. Sometimes, friction occurs in-house. 

Consider a contending basketball team. It has an owner lobbying for a new arena, a coach looking to cement his legacy, and a GM who wants his big offseason acquisition or no. 1 draft pick to look like a great signing. And then there is the team, led by a superstar on the downside of his career trying to prove to ownership it can still build a team around him. He’s surrounded by a veteran who took a salary cut to play for a contender and win a long-elusive ring, another veteran who gets a sizable bonus if he averages 28 minutes per game, a young star playing for a max contract deal, a rookie fighting for minutes, and a sixth man who thinks he can start on another team. 

The competition is with other teams. However, while everyone on the team wants to win, the individual players, coaches, executives, and owners are all pulled in different directions by conflicting goals. 

Conflicting goals in the gambling industry

These same internal struggles are pervasive in the gambling world, where different departments within a company possess disparate goals.  

The most obvious is the tension between an operator’s marketing and VIP departments and its compliance and responsible gambling departments.

However, a similar division exists within affiliate companies, where content and SEO teams are often at odds, as are content and marketing/partnerships. This friction can cause the editorial/advertising lines to become quite blurred.

Sports Betting Alliance President Jeremy Kudon broached the topic recently, tweeting, “Should state AGs and/or regulators require employees of companies that receive more than 25% plus of their revenue from affiliate arrangements with gaming operators to disclose these arrangements in tweets and on their websites?”

As I wrote in my Substack newsletter last week: 

“From my own experience, this shouldn’t be a big problem if there is an editorial/advertising divide. When I worked for affiliate companies, I wasn’t aware of every affiliate deal and had little knowledge of which deals generated the most revenue.”

Let me expand on that a little bit. 

Unwritten rules

While I never had a story squashed, there was a not-so-subtle understanding of what could and couldn’t be said and how hard we were allowed to push on stories that concerned some of our affiliate partners. 

Toward the end of my time in the affiliate industry, the balance between the newsroom and the marketing department significantly favored the latter. That is one of the main reasons I extricated myself from it and started my Substack newsletter.  

As I previously wrote, quality content is no longer the entrée. Certain keywords were off-limits, particularly in titles and headers, as they could hurt the Google ranking of some of the site’s core pages. And as I wrote, “And then, guess what happens? The author’s stories get less traffic, and the site complains that nobody is reading their articles, and presto, some non-content producer in an office somewhere determines we are overpaying that now expendable person.”

From bad to worse

From talks with some of the recently departed and others still in the affiliate business, it sounds like the not-so-subtle nudges have become overt ultimatums, and news content has been further de-prioritized. 

As one former affiliate journalist told me, they faced pressure to avoid, modify, or kill stories that portrayed partners negatively. 

Another suggested that affiliates grew too reliant on SEO and external partnerships during the years of plenty and lacked both hindsight and foresight to see the potential troubles (Google changes and fewer state launches) or plan for the lean years. 

Yet another journalist I spoke with pointed to the current struggles stemming from SEO-style thinkers having the final say and a lack of a clear, multi-brand strategy, which led to redundant content and companies cannibalizing their own sites. 

None of these things are likely to be an issue when affiliates are again in demand.

When new states launch, and when every operator is fighting for every potential customer, an operator is far less likely to finger-wag an affiliate for writing about a fine it received, a new class-action lawsuit, or any of its shortcomings, be it product, responsible gambling, or any other bad PR. 

When the landscape favors the operator — when new launches are scarce and in mature markets (the current landscape) — operators have the upper hand, and affiliates must tread cautiously. 

You made your bed, now you have to lie in it

Circling back to Kudon’s question, should affiliates disclose their partnerships with operators?

The short answer is, in most cases, yes. A quick disclaimer that you have a business relationship with the subject of a story or review is as simple as adding 1-800-GAMBLER. However, I don’t see the disclaimer changing the type of coverage, as the stories that aren’t reported are the more significant issue in this space.

And if the bottom line requires SEO over journalism and appeasing affiliate partners, coverage will continue to deteriorate. 

Further, the layoffs have made already small newsrooms even smaller. Companies heavily reliant on SEO and clickbait content have no choice but to invest further in that strategy. They no longer have the content team to shift back, not to mention it would require yet another costly (in time and resources) brand reset.

You might say, there’s a lot of friction preventing affiliates from reversing course.