Long-tail masters: the affiliate ecosystem in Brazil

It’s testament to the scale and opportunity of federally regulated igaming in LatAm’s largest country that there’s still so much industry noise around the bet.br sector nearly 18 months on from its launch.

Affiliates have had to navigate some bumps in the road from grey to regulated, not least the mandatory player re-registration requirement and ban on welcome bonuses which caused such a well-publicised disruption to revenue share income from the geo for Better Collective and the other listed scale players last year.

With around 80 operators running approximately 140 brands within the regulated market, affiliates have plenty of choice when it comes to partners and where to send their traffic.

And now that the market has had time to settle into the regulated framework we thought this an opportune time to dig into our data to explore how affiliate traffic and behaviour has adjusted and changed.

This deep dive will centre around the upper echelons of the long-tail of operators active in the regulated markets, the second or mid-tier just below the defined group of approx. 13 brands identified by local sources such as ENV.MEDIA as the most recognised and trusted by players. It will investigate:

• Who are the "super affiliates" of the mid-tier market
• Which bet.br casinos are building the most aggressive affiliate networks
• How they are disguising their links - breaking down whether the market is driven by real content, image banners or automated ‘black SEO’ spam bots

Who are the ‘super affiliates’ of the mid-tier market?

If you are looking for the best websites to partner with in Brazil, do not just look at who has the most links.

We scanned over 1,355,576 links to find the top partners driving traffic to mid-tier casinos. What expected was to find normal bloggers reviewing casinos. Instead, the numbers showed us three completely different types of websites dominating the market:

Here is the simple breakdown of who these websites are:

• The spammers: The top two websites have the most links by far, but with almost no real visitors. 
• The giant sports teams: Mainstream sports hubs, like the official website for the Atlético Mineiro football club, are acting as partners!
• The perfect matches: Sites like mktesportivo.com (sports marketing) and clubedaposta.com (Betting Club), have great domain ratings and hundreds of thousands of real monthly visitors.

Which casinos are building the most aggressive affiliate networks?

When we looked at the casinos with the most affiliate links, we found a strange pattern. The top three brands have massive link counts (70k+), Even though they have 24 unique affiliate partners, most of those links come from just one or two websites:

Case study 1: The ‘single code’ strategy

On the website tudosobrexanxere.com.br, we found over 71,000 links pointing to Casa de Apostas. When we looked at the tracking data, we found that over 42,000 of those links use one single code: DGPAULOVARELASC:

The other top casino Jogo de Ouro also has tens of thousands of links on single sites (such as agrestenoticia.com), and they use long strings of random letters as ID (like rtateqfaejjzvugblanzppntni):

Case study 2: The ‘healthy networks’

While the brands at the top of the list rely on sheer link volume from a few sources, Ona Bet and F12 Bet reveal what a genuine, diversified affiliate network looks like in the Brazilian market:

Although these brands have fewer total links than the top two sites, their footprint is much larger and more stable. Instead of thousands of links coming from a single rented domain, their traffic is spread across hundreds of independent partners:

The comparison: Who has the ‘healthiest’ network?

To see the difference between these concentrated link counts and a broad, healthy network, we compared the top brands by how many unique websites are actually promoting them:

The bottom line: While the brands at the top of the list have the most links, their traffic is dangerously concentrated on just a few sites.

In contrast, Ona Bet and F12 Bet may have fewer total links, but they have six to 10 times more unique partners promoting them. This means their business is much more stable and spread out across the real Brazilian market.

How are they disguising their links?

After uncovering where the links are coming from, we looked at the anchor text (the actual clickable words). This reveals how affiliates are presenting these links to the Brazilian public:

The data shows very distinct ways these links are disguised:

1. The visual strategy (image banners)

• Over 205,000 links use no text at all (Image Banner/No Text).
• What it means: These are image banners. Most of the traffic in this market is driven by pictures and graphics rather than written words or articles.

2. Repeated keywords and spam software

• The data shows the name of a popular game, "Jogo do Tigre," being repeated three times in a row in a single link.
• At Rank 13, we found a link that literally says: "BLACK SEO LINKS, BACKLINKS, SOFTWARE FOR MASS BACKLINKING." This is direct evidence of automated "spam bots" at work. They are leaving behind advertisements for the "mass backlinking" software used to create the links in the first place.

Conclusion and three main takeaways

The audit of 1.3 million links proves that the opening of the regulated Brazilian market has created a massive divide between artificial scale and organic growth.

• The "super affiliate" illusion: The highest link counts (70k+) are currently held by "The Spammers" sites with almost no traffic. These sites are used as "link farms" by individuals (like the DGPAULOVARELASC ID) who blast thousands of automated links for brands like Casa de Apostas and Jogo de Ouro.
  
  
• The organic winners: Total link count is a misleading metric. While the top brands rely on just 24 sites, Ona Bet and F12 Bet have built the healthiest networks in Brazil. With 150-270+ unique partners, their traffic is spread across hundreds of independent domains, making their business much more stable and authentic.
  
  
• The automated footprint: The mid-tier market is heavily driven by image banners (205,000+ links) and automated bots. The discovery of ‘black SEO’ software advertisements embedded in the links proves that many operators are still using risky, automated scripts to manufacture their presence.