Dr Andreas Ditsche: the professor embedding RG in iGaming.com’s evolution

How would you describe what iGaming.com does today and how has that changed in recent years? 

We help players find safe and licensed operators that are worth their time and operators reach the right audiences.  What has changed is the weight we put on the word "safe." A few years ago, the industry treated affiliates almost purely as a traffic engine. We've spent the last two years repositioning around trust and player welfare, because that is where the regulatory pressure, the technology and the long-term commercial value are all heading at once. We no longer want to be a click factory. We want to be the quality filter. 

Affiliates are often cast as part of the problem in responsible-gambling debates. What's the case for affiliates being part of the solution? 

Affiliates sit between the player and the operator, which is exactly where protection is most effective. We are the first touchpoint. We decide which operators get visibility, and which messages reach the player before they ever deposit. That is enormous leverage for good. We can steer demand toward licensed products, surface safer-gambling tools and refuse to amplify the worst actors. An affiliate that takes that seriously is doing prevention work at the top of the funnel, which is the cheapest and most humane place to do it. 

Your research found that most German gambling searches point to products outside the regulated market. What is that number telling regulators? 

We analysed around 40 popular gambling keywords representing roughly a quarter of a million monthly searches, and only about 14% of that weighted volume explicitly pointed to products licensed by Germany's gambling regulator.  

When 85% of intent flows toward the unregulated market or simply does not care if it is legal or illegal, that is not a population of criminals. It is ordinary players whose preferences the legal framework no longer matches. Repression on its own, the bans and blocked terms and punitive limits, only works if the legal offer is good enough that players want to stay inside it. Regulation must balance repression and attraction, otherwise players will keep searching the black market. Read the figure as a channelling failure, not a moral one. 

At SBC Rio you talked about the shift from SEO to 'GEO'. As users increasingly get answers from AI rather than clicking links, what happens to the affiliate model? 

It is the biggest structural shift since mobile. When a generative engine answers the question directly, the affiliate page sitting among the ten blue links can disappear from view. So, the game moves from ranking for a keyword to being the source the AI trusts and cites. The good news is that the algorithms are now trained to look for the signals real players already care about, things like experience, expertise, authority and trust, and you can't fake those at scale anymore. For us that means transparent methodology and named experts who stand behind the work. That's exactly why we put so much weight on the integrity of our recommendations. Every operator in our vetted lists of licensed casino sites earns its place only after we check licensing and player-safety standards first, performance second. Trust becomes the moat, because it is the one thing a generative engine cannot manufacture on its own. 

Relevo, the Spanish sports title, is now part of iGaming.com Group. Why does an affiliate company take on a newsroom?  

People return to sites when the content is useful and the brand feels trusted. For affiliates, that means recurring visitors, community and recognition will increasingly matter more than simply ranking for a keyword. Relevo.com gives us an established Spanish sports brand with an audience built on reporting, not rankings. It is free to access, with no display advertising or paywalled sections, and the 2026–27 La Liga season will be its first major editorial cycle under this structure. For us, it is a long-term commitment to Spain and to real publishing; for the industry, it points to a wider shift from arbitrage to authority. 

How is the newsroom kept separate from the affiliate business? 

By making the rules explicit. Editorial decisions sit with Relevo’s editorial team and advertisers, sponsors and commercial partners cannot influence them. Betting content is limited to operators licensed by Spain’s regulator, the DGOJ, affiliate links are clearly disclosed, and no operator can pay for preferential placement or a better rating. If editors cannot hold you to a rule, it is not a rule. 

You operate across very different regimes: Germany, the Nordics, LatAm. What's the most underrated market, and what's the most misunderstood? 

The most underrated is Peru. Everyone fixates on Brazil, understandably, with LatAm iGaming revenue there running into the tens of billions of reais, but Peru moved early on sensible regulation and has real upside without the crowding. The most misunderstood is Germany, my home market. People abroad see a huge leakage figure and conclude Germans don't want to gamble legally. That is the wrong lesson. They want to gamble legally, they just want a legal product that doesn't feel like a punishment. Fix the offer and the channelisation follows. 

Twelve months from now, what's the one change you most want to be talking about? 

What I want to be talking about is regulators treating channelisation rate as the headline metric, and a couple of markets proving that an attractive legal offer beats prohibition. That would change the whole conversation.