Gambling Act reform: how could this affect the affiliate channel?

Many of you will know that the Gambling Related Harm All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), responsible for looking into gambling-related harm, published its recommendations on 16 June. They contained some good and some not-so-good recommendations for sweeping changes across the industry, which will inevitably give rise to lots of heated debate. But for this article, I am going to concentrate on the ‘advertising’ recommendations put forward.

It is important to point out that these are just recommendations at this stage, but being a betting man, I’d say it was more likely than not that a good deal of this will form the basis of a new UK Gambling Act in the next few months. To get to the crux of the matter, here is what they say: “From the evidence we have heard […] there is a clear case for banning all gambling advertising, marketing and inducements across all channels.”

Clearly this leaves plenty of room for interpretation and the word that is perhaps most ambiguous here is ‘marketing’. The obvious question is, where does that leave affiliates since the report earlier states that around a quarter of all advertising spend is via the affiliate channel.

Thankfully, it is glaringly obvious to even the most uninformed observer that prohibiting licensed operators from using the affiliate channel would be counterproductive. Google will fill up with affiliates promoting attractive incentives from offshore unlicensed operators and any attempt to protect vulnerable gamblers will have been thrown to the wind.

Ad exposure

What I would say is that there is a big difference between someone having a thought or emotion triggered involuntarily through a Facebook, newspaper or website advert, and someone going to a search engine and choosing to conduct a gambling search and knowingly visiting a gambling website. You’d hope that the new Act won’t be too Orwellian and will recognise that a conscious decision to gamble also bears some of the responsibility.

The elephants in the room here are the unlicensed operators who are dismissed with a rather disturbing statement that suggests the APPG doesn’t clearly understand the issue: “[…] when stakes were reduced to £2, there was no evidence of gambling users being driven to illegal sites.” They are referring to the FOBT limit, but why would that send people to illegal sites? They don’t exist in the high street and if the players go online, for the moment at least, the regulated options are top of the pile. It doesn’t make sense for them to go to an unlicensed operator. Yet.

The APPG has also probably assumed that unlicensed operators are bad apples. From a regulatory perspective, maybe they are, but from a player perspective, many are actually very good. Adding the £2 bet limit, removing incentives and VIP schemes, layered on top of the already intrusive source of wealth checks, will mean that more gamblers will go to search engines to find other options.

What has also not been considered is just how affiliates could be consulted in assisting to implement these reforms. My biggest concern is that many will feel £2 bet limits, intrusive ‘welfare’ checks and lack of incentives will take the fun away from gambling, and many will desert to other operators anyway.

My feeling overall is that the report has good intentions but that it lays out the utopian vision of a disapproving non-gambler and dismisses the potentially serious consequences that undermine the whole project. There is a real danger in that trying to protect children and vulnerable gamblers they instead have the opposite effect and pull the safety blanket out from under them.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.