Media firms with extensive local or national programs have considered how to best leverage on the billion-dollar industry as legal sports betting has spread across the nation. Some attached their names to casinos, people signed special promotion deals with particular operators.
Gambling.com Group, a functionality marketing firm, has provided a different route. In the last few decades, it has signed deals with Gannett and McClatchy, two of the region’s biggest newspapers owners, to take over much of their online sports betting policy. Gambling.com creates information designed to draw punters to bookmakers, which pay for each effective referrals. The magazine owner and Gambling.com promote in the income from those recommendations.

The established- up allows both edges to focus on what they do also, according to Gambling.com founder and CEO Charles Gillespie. Newspapers such as USA Today ( owned by Gannett ) and the Miami Herald ( owned by McClatchy ) have avid readers, trusted legacy brands and websites that rank very well in search engines. Gambling.com has encounter in creating glad —such as opinions, explanations and analysis—that makes visitors more likely to reach a button and deposit money into a casino.
Gillespie stated in an interview that “it’s safe to say that this concept has emerged as the highest and best use in terms of methods for legacy media organizations to utilize their resources to make money off of athletics betting.” ” Ultimately working with all of the operators, not a single operator, and leveraging the knowledge, technology and realize- how of the largest efficiency marketing companies to ensure the largest optimum return”.
Sports betting affiliate agreements typically take one of three forms: a fixed fee for each new customer, a fixed percentage of the customer’s lifetime revenue, or a hybrid of the two. Peter McGough, Gambling.com’s SVP for investor relations, declined to comment on the specifics of the company’s media deals, but said the strategy makes up roughly 15 % of the company’s total revenue, which was$ 108.7 million in 2023.
The company’s quarterly filings provide a bit more insight. The majority of Gambling.com’s sales are paid for by its media partners ‘ share of referrals ( the company’s annual report states that payment solutions based on subscription revenue are included ). In fiscal 2023, the company reported cost of sales of$ 9.1 million. If, for example, the revenue split is 50- 50, that means the media strategy brought in almost$ 18 million in 2023.
Gannett ( NYSE: GCI), which owns more than 200 local papers along with USA Today, reaches about 140 million unique people per month, and about 50 million of them are sports fans. According to CEO and chairman Mike Reed, the company has been looking for partnerships that increase audience engagement and generate additional revenue to support its journalism.
” So how do we monetize that audience knowing they’re not all going to be paid subscribers for news”, Reed said in an interview. ” We can create new revenue streams that we did n’t have before by signing up for partnerships like we have with Gambling.com.”

The company has other performance marketing deals—in areas like personal finance and home services—but the relationship with Gambling.com is its most lucrative, Reed said. He declined to provide any specifics about the economy.
According to Reed, Gannett has editorial control over anything that is published under its name. Gambling.com’s content is made with USA Today’s help, which lists the creators. Additionally, it lists its editorial staff’s involvement with the creation of the content and the company’s “may earn a fee if you make a purchase through one of the links in this article.”
For Gambling.com, the strategy is akin to “renting office space”, McGough said. The company has dozens of sites that it owns and operates—such as Casinos.com, or BetCarolina.com—but it takes time and investment for those sites to rank highly in online searches. On the other hand, legacy media companies like Gannett and McClatchy have websites that have been around since the beginning of the Google algorithm.
” You can spend a lot of money building that, or you can partner”, McGough said in an interview. ” It’s a build or rent approach to a portfolio of assets”.
This media partnership concept was created in Europe. Better Collective, another performance marketing company, signed a 2019 partnership with the U. K.’s Daily Telegraph, and now has additional deals with Goal, the New York Post and Germany’s Sport1. In addition to the two U. S. media partnerships, Gambling.com recently signed one with The Independent in the U. K., its first in this strategy outside North America.
The company could benefit from a new gambler signing up for DraftKings via BetCarolina.com as opposed to a link on USA Today, but the media partnership approach generates high margin revenue. And the legal U. S. market, which saw$ 120 billion in wagers last year, has a lot of room to grow.
For starters, legal sports wagering is currently live in 38 states, and does n’t yet include the two most populous, California and Texas. The network of papers under the Gannett and McClatchy umbrellas ( such as the Charlotte Observer ) grow into lucrative business opportunities as new states emerge ( like recently newcomer North Carolina ).
Additionally, there is a rise in penetration in states that have already begun, brand-new marketing campaigns targeting groups ( like women ) that were frequently overlooked in the beginning, and new residents turning 21. Online casino gaming, or iGaming, holds another round of opportunity, with a much larger addressable market, if more states legalize it in the coming years.
That does n’t mean Gambling.com is rushing to find new media partners in the U. S. The company’s strategy is to work with the biggest, McGough said, and between Gannett and McClatchy they have a lot of the country covered.
” We’ve tried to go to the No. 1 and No. 2 biggest player in news media in those markets and pull the trigger”, he said. ” When you think of’ go big or go home,’ there’s only one or two partnerships in the U. S”.
( In paragraph seven of this story, a new number for the number of papers Gannett owns has been added. )