Affiliate Disclosure — How GambleDragon Makes Money

Plain English version: GambleDragon earns money when you sign up to a casino through one of our tracked links. The casino pays us a referral commission. The commission does not change our rating, and we publish brands that pay us nothing alongside brands that pay us a lot. If anything on the site reads like an advert, that is on us — please write to editor@gambledragon.com and we will rewrite it.

This page is the long version, written to satisfy the UK Information Requirements 2014 and the broader transparency expectations of the CAP Code on gambling advertising, the US FTC’s Endorsement Guides, and the affiliate disclosure norms set by casino.guru and similar independent hubs.

What is affiliate marketing?

When you click a “Visit casino” or “Claim bonus” button on GambleDragon, the link is tagged with a unique tracking ID. If you register at the casino and meet the operator’s qualifying conditions (typically a first deposit), the operator pays us a commission.

There are three common commission models in iGaming affiliate marketing, and we work across all three:

CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). Fixed payment per qualifying player. Typically £100-£400 in our target markets.
Revenue share. A percentage (typically 20-50%) of the operator’s net revenue from players we refer, paid monthly for as long as the player is active.
Hybrid. A smaller CPA plus a smaller revenue share.

We negotiate these terms before recommending any operator. We do not negotiate ratings.

How commission affects our content

It does not affect ratings. It does affect what we cover.

We do not cover operators that fail our methodology even if they pay above-market rates. Several brands have offered us boosted CPAs to publish a review; we have declined every time.
We do cover operators with no affiliate programme when they pass methodology and are relevant to our readers — most of those reviews earn us nothing.
We do not boost rankings for higher commissions. Our best-of lists are sorted by the methodology score from our methodology page. The commission rate per signup is not an input to the rating function.

If you want to verify this, compare our top-5 in any best-of list with our internal CPA table (we publish it on request to journalists and researchers). The correlation between rank and commission is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

What “tracked link” looks like

Affiliate links on GambleDragon are always one of:

A standard HTML link with a data-tracker attribute to our sf-tracker endpoint
A redirect through gambledragon.com/go/<operator-slug> which logs the click and forwards to the operator with our tracking parameters

We do not use cloaking, hidden redirects, or JavaScript fingerprinting to attribute clicks. If you have a tracker blocker installed, the click still goes through to the operator — we just do not get paid for that particular signup. That is a conscious design choice; we would rather lose the commission than fight your privacy preferences.

Where the money goes

Affiliate commissions fund:

The team. Tom Ashby (editor-in-chief) and contributors are paid through the same revenue stream.
The testing budget. We deposit real money at every casino we review. A typical test cycle costs £20-50 per operator, and we lose roughly 65% of it to standard house edge — that is the cost of producing a real-world review rather than a desk review.
Dispute support. We absorb the time cost of mediating player disputes; readers do not pay for it.
Hosting and tooling. Cloudflare Pages, content production, and the small bits of software we use.

We do not run display ads. We do not sell email addresses. We do not have a paid newsletter tier (yet).

What we will not do

We will not write a positive review in exchange for a higher commission rate. This has been offered.
We will not remove a negative review in exchange for a media buy. This has been offered.
We will not delay a critical update in exchange for an exclusive bonus offer. This has been offered.
We will not use undisclosed “sponsored content” formats. If something is paid placement, it would be labelled “Sponsored” in a colour that contrasts with the rest of the page. We currently have zero sponsored content on the site.

How to spot a non-disclosed affiliate site

Several signals tell you a site is selling, not reviewing:

The affiliate disclosure is in 8-point grey text in the footer, or absent entirely
Every review is 8.5-9.5/10 (statistically impossible)
No methodology page
No author attribution, or fake stock-photo authors
“Last updated” dates that change daily without content changes (cron-job freshness gaming)
Casino comparisons that mysteriously rotate the top-3 every visit
No mention of player complaints, lawsuits, or licence revocations

If a casino review never mentions a single negative — about any casino — it is not a review.

Our legal basis for affiliate disclosure

We disclose because we are required to, and because it is right.

UK: The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the CAP Code on gambling require commercial intent to be clear to a reasonable reader.
Ireland: Section 43 of the Consumer Protection Act 2007 and the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland code.
Canada: Provincial consumer protection acts and the Competition Act’s prohibition on misleading representations.
New Zealand: The Fair Trading Act 1986.
Netherlands (English info): The Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) guidelines on commercial communications.

Where the locale requires a specific phrasing, the per-locale footer carries it. Where the locale only requires “clear and prominent” disclosure, we comply with the spirit of the rule rather than the letter.

How we handle conflicts of interest

If a member of the GambleDragon team has a personal relationship with an operator — for example, having worked there in a previous role — that conflict is disclosed at the bottom of any relevant review, and the rating is independently verified by a non-conflicted team member.

Tom Ashby has not held a paid role at any operator we currently review. Any future conflicts will be disclosed here within 14 days of their arising.

Contact

If anything on this page is unclear, write to disclosure@gambledragon.com. We aim to reply within 48 hours.

If you are a journalist or researcher and want to see our commission table or our internal scoring rubric, write to press@gambledragon.com. We share these on request, under a light NDA covering operator-specific rates (because we have negotiated some of them and the operator considers them confidential).

If you bet more than you can afford to lose, please contact BeGambleAware or GamCare (0808 8020 133, UK).