Ory Weihs: blazing the trail for listed affiliates

Back in the web 1.0 days of 2002, 22-year-old Ory Weihs could never have imagined that he’d become an iGaming industry legend – or that he’d one day take centre stage at London’s Troxy, claiming the iGBA Affiliate Idol lifetime achievement award.

Having just finished his mandatory military service and planning a trip to Asia, Weihs was approached by a friend who invited him to join “a company doing something online”. At the time, he knew “very little about the online world and even less about gaming”, but he took a job as an affiliate manager and learnt on the spot. What seemed like a “pretty random” opportunity quickly became a lifelong passion and the foundation of his career.

“The early entrance into this industry spoiled me for years. To this day, I don’t know many industries that are as enjoyable, exciting and dynamic,” Weihs says. 

From Reef Media to XL

In 2003, Weihs moved back to his hometown Haifa to attend university. But his obsession with iGaming didn’t stall there. Leveraging connections from his previous job and a few “up-and-coming Scandinavian operators”, Weihs soon organised an early affiliate network, which would later become Reef Media.

Within just two years, the business had scaled rapidly. Weihs took what he describes as “a significant step forward”, tapping into his network of freelancers to build casino and poker affiliate sites.

“The trigger to pursue this was my frustration with not figuring out the ‘alchemy’ of successful SEO affiliates,” he recalls. “I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I spent most of my time researching and learning – it had a negative effect on my university grades.”

It turned out Weihs cracked the formula not long after. By 2008, the company’s SEO operations had grown far beyond the network and were expanding quickly. At the same time, the Web Pals business, led by Weihs’s sub-affiliate Assaf Levy and Yaron Nahari, was seeing “incredible” results through media buying and “reaching fast results one could only dream of in the SEO world”. Confident in the trio’s complementary skills and personalities, Weihs proposed merging their businesses, giving rise to a new name with even greater ambition: XLMedia.

Going public

While it was not uncommon for multi-billion-dollar iGaming operators to go public, it had never been on any affiliate’s radar until XLMedia paved the way. 

In 2012, the company sold a stake to a private equity firm, which prompted its listing on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM in 2014, raising an “oversubscribed” $69.5 million in the initial public offering (IPO). “Funnily enough, the original IPO was not mine but theirs,” Weihs notes. “Their goal was to have a long-term exit plan, which makes sense for private equity.”

For XLMedia, the goals were also clear: IPO capital would allow the company to scale more quickly, consolidate players in a fragmented market, boost legitimacy both for XLMedia and the wider affiliate sector and attract stronger talent. But for Weihs, the move meant even more than that. 

“Personally, I saw it as an opportunity to grow professionally and take on a challenge that was both new and very foreign to me,” he recalls. “We had a turbulent ride as a public company, predominantly positive but with more challenging times as well. I learnt from both positive and negative experiences, and I’m grateful for the lessons.” 

Taking the back seat

Following the listing were what Weihs calls “fantastic years”, marked by a string of acquisitions including Freebets and WhichBingo. In 2017, XLMedia reported a record revenue of $137.6 million,  a 33% year-on-year increase. The company also branched out beyond iGaming into personal finance, acquiring assets such as the US-focused financial comparison site Moneyunder30.

In 2019, however, Weihs announced he would step away from day-to-day operations, taking on a non-executive director role as Stuart Simms was appointed group CEO. Weihs is candid about his decision to step back, saying his “motivation was not what it once was”.

“After 16 years of running the company and five years as a public business, I felt that the company would benefit from ‘fresh blood’. I never aspired to run such a large business, and it’s not where I excel,” he explains. “I’m an early-stage guy at heart and always said that my comfort zone is a business with about 25 to 30 people.”

A watershed moment came in 2020, when more than 100 sites from XLMedia’s portfolio were hit by Google’s manual penalties, compounded by the global slowdown caused by the COVID pandemic. Revenue slumped to $54.5 million that year, and the company soon began flash sales, offloading its European and Canadian iGaming assets to Gambling.com Group. Following the sale of its North American assets to Sportradar in October 2024, the group became an AIM Rule 15 cash shell. On 10 June 2025, shareholders approved the delisting of XLMedia, drawing a line under the once-flourishing affiliate empire.

The next chapter

When asked if he would do anything differently with XLMedia, Weihs doesn’t shy away from the missteps: “The main things would be not to get too comfortable with our leading position from 2012 to 2018, pace our scaling more, focus more on sustainable, higher-end products such as websites and be more selective with our new business lines.”

Still, Weihs has no regrets. For the 45-year-old entrepreneur, the demise of XLMedia is just one chapter in a much longer journey. He’s been investing in sectors beyond iGaming for the past 15 years, with interests spanning B2B SaaS and financial services, and was an early backer of the hospitality management platform Mews PMS.

Claiming the iGBA Affiliate Idol award at Troxy came as a total surprise. Now a hermit in the iGaming world, Weihs was chuffed to receive the recognition and spent the night reconnecting with former colleagues.

“The recognition means a lot and takes me on a trip down memory lane, reminding me of all the great friends I’ve made in the gaming world over the last 23 years,” he says. “I am happy that the efforts and faith of so many people, including my partners, team members and investors have been recognised. I would never have reached where I am today without them.”

With listed peers such as Catena Media and Gentoo Media announcing job cuts and strategic shifts in recent quarters, Weihs says the industry’s growing pains are “unfortunate but understandable”. He points out that now is “a challenging time” not only for affiliates, but for online marketing as a whole. Embracing AI tools and the latest technology is key to “working smarter and more efficiently”, but so is building strong teams, refining GTM strategy, targeting a unique audience and “relying as little as possible on third-party platforms”.

Weihs also notes that today’s iGaming C-suites require a different skill set: “They are less traditional ‘managers’ but more innovators. They focus on working with a selected group of high-performing individuals. Furthermore, changes in the workplace with the move to remote working drive the need for different managerial DNA.”

Having sold nearly all of his iGaming holdings except for Glitnor Group, Weihs says he has “minimal exposure to the gaming world these days”, though he would consider investing in software providers with “industry-wide appeal in regulated markets”.

For now, his focus is on running the Shalem Foundation with his wife for the global Jewish community. Although XLMedia is now in the past, the two decades Weihs spent in the industry took him from a curious twentysomething to one of iGaming’s most recognisable figures – a trailblazer who helped change the affiliate game for good.