The India lesson: what affiliates can learn from a market shutdown

In August 2025, India’s parliament voted to remove one of the largest addressable markets our industry has ever had from legal existence. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act cleared both houses in barely 48 hours and received presidential assent on 22 August 2025. 

But the enforceable floor only landed months later: the government notified the implementing Rules on 22 April 2026 and brought the Act and Rules into full force on 1 May 2026, standing up a new regulator, the Online Gaming Authority of India. For affiliates, the gap between those two dates is the most instructive part of the whole episode.

The snowball effect

The act prohibits all online real-money games nationwide, whether skill or chance, including fantasy sports, rummy and poker, and bans both their advertising and the financial transactions behind them, with operator penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment and one crore rupees, equivalent to over $104,000. 

The remarkable part was the anticipation. Within days of the August 2025 passage, and long before the May 2026 commencement, major platforms including Dream11, MPL, Games24x7 and Zupee voluntarily stripped cash prizes, suspended paid contests and moved to free-to-play. MPL cut roughly 60% of its workforce; Dream11 walked away from a roughly $44 million national cricket sponsorship. 

An industry TechCrunch once valued at around $23 billion began dismantling itself ahead of a law that had not yet formally commenced. By 1 May 2026, most of the demolition was already done.

Affiliates took the hit

An operator can relocate, pivot to free-to-play or write off a market. An affiliate’s position is more exposed for one structural reason: the act not only removes the product we send traffic to, but it also criminalises the act of promoting it. 

In a single stroke, the compliant onshore inventory vanished, and the marketing activity itself became an offence. There is no licensed operator left to point a rupee of Indian traffic at, and no legal way to advertise the offshore ones that remain, in a market that carried hundreds of millions of players and a decade of affiliate infrastructure built on the assumption that this demand would stay legal and reachable.

But the demand didn’t die

This is the part every affiliate strategist should sit with. India’s ban did not end real-money play; it relocated it beyond the regulator’s reach. 

A survey by CUTS International (Consumer Unity & Trust Society) of former real-money users found that a quarter began using offshore betting apps only after the ban, with roughly one in three migrating offshore overall. The high-spend segment actually expanded. Meanwhile, enforcement plays out as pure whack-a-mole: India had blocked over 7,800 illegal betting links, yet traffic to the top offshore platforms, operators based comfortably in Cyprus or Estonia, kept rising through mirror domains, VPNs and crypto.

Even before the ban, critics cautioned that prohibition tends to hand the market to grey and black operators. With roughly 450 million players losing an estimated $2.3 billion a year, that is not a rounding error; it is the whole market, relocated to jurisdictions where neither the taxman nor the compliant affiliate can follow. Serving it now means serving an illegal, unadvertisable, offshore product. That is the fork every affiliate touching India now stands at, and the legislation removed the compliant middle on purpose.

The tax the state decided not to collect

From a revenue seat, the most striking feature of the Indian approach is what it gives up. A market of that size is also a tax base of that size, and India chose to forgo the recurring version while still pursuing the retrospective one.

 In May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld a 28% GST on the full face value of bets, applied retrospectively, reviving demands approaching 2.5 lakh crore rupees (well over $25 billion), sums several times larger than the revenues those companies ever earned. Read commercially, that is a state collecting back taxes from an industry it has simultaneously outlawed going forward, swapping a recurring, taxable, onshore revenue stream for a one-off clawback while live demand pays its money to operators in Cyprus.

Brazil took the other road

Brazil started where India did: an enormous, entrenched grey market that had served local players for years without a domestic rulebook. It reached the opposite conclusion. On 1 January 2025, under Law No. 14,790/2023, Brazil launched a licensed online betting market overseen by the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets. One year in, the contrast writes itself: the regulated market produced around 37 billion reais in gross gaming revenue, roughly $7 billion, with some 25.2 million Brazilians betting on licensed platforms and close to 10 billion reais collected in tax. Crucially for us, affiliates were written into the regulated chain rather than out of it — they can promote only authorised operators and carry their own liability for non-compliant campaigns.

We lived the other version of this at MoveUp. ThePlayoffs, our Brazilian sports media, went through the regulated-market transition in 2025 from the inside: new rules, new compliance obligations, a stricter advertising regime and direct liability for affiliates on non-compliant campaigns since July 2026. We absorbed all of it within a market that still legally existed, with licensed operators to send traffic to and a tax authority that collected rather than confiscated. That is the difference between the two roads: Brazil made the market harder to operate in; India made it disappear.

The Indian lesson

The takeaway is not "avoid India." It is that a regulatory regime is an asset you rent, never one you own, and India showed how fast the lease can be cancelled. 

If your entire value rests on privileged access to one market, you are one parliamentary session from zero, with no notice and no compensation. A market position is a snapshot of a system somebody else controls. A first-party audience — the subscriber, the community member, the opted-in contact — is different, because it exists for reasons that have nothing to do with the operator you monetise it with. ToffeeWeb, the Everton community we run in the UK, has followed the club for more than two decades, through several rewrites of British gambling rules, and would still be there the morning after any ban. 

When a market closes, the operator rebuilds. The affiliate who owns an audience decides how to serve it next: another product, another partner or the same market when it reopens.

One final question 

India’s ban will be litigated for years, challenges are consolidated before the Supreme Court, and the pendulum may yet swing back toward a Brazil-style framework once the state notices how much taxable revenue it handed to Cyprus. But the direction of travel is set, and the next market to have its rules rewritten is a matter of when, not if. 

So the question every affiliate should be able to answer honestly is: if the market you depend on most were legislated away next week, what would you still own?

If the answer is “rankings and a media buy”, you are exposed; If it is “an audience that would follow us to the next jurisdiction”, you are safe. India just showed everyone the difference, at full scale, in real time.