KAX Media new Gambling.com owner
KAX Media revealed as buyer of Gambling.com domain sold for £1.5m last week.
Affiliate business KAX Media, which operates the WSN.com sports betting portal, has confirmed itself as the buyer of the Gambling.com domain which sold for US$2.5m (£1.5m) last week.
Charles Gillespie, chief executive of the business that secured backing from Sportingbet founder Mark Blandford’s Valhalla Investments in 2008, told eGaming Review that “it was an easy decision given the price”.
“I can confirm KAX Media is the buyer of Gambling.com. We had been shopping around for an acquisition in the affiliate space for some time but had not found anything attractive. We’d basically stopped looking and then this came up. It ticked all the right boxes.”
Gillespie said KAX would now look to grow the portal business sold by Media Corp last week for a fraction of the US$20m it bought it for back in 2005, before passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in the US and a Google penalty slashed the site’s traffic and advertising revenues.
“It’s a classic private equity buyout where new management comes in and implements an aggressive growth strategy. KAX has an affiliate software platform that was purpose built to run this exact kind of site so the overlap with our current business and technology platform is nearly one to one,” said Gillespie.
The Gambling.com portal will remain focused on the casino vertical and the UK market during the short term, the KAX chief executive told eGaming Review. Medium term we will take it into other English-speaking markets and we have our fingers crossed for any form of US regulation.”