Another One Bites the Dust: UK Affiliate Bet-at-Home Shuts Down Its Program

Another UK-based online gambling affiliate has shut its doors as the regulatory climate there continues to evolve.

The latest casualty: bet-at-home.

Mike Murphy of Murphy Marketing broke the news Monday.

The trend of exiting or shutting off affiliates in the UK continues, @betathomecom announcement came in just now. It is unclear if the brands is leaving the UK market, or just shutting off UK affiliates. pic.twitter.com/8SyuIUaOmO

— MichaelJMurphy (@MichaelJMurphy) July 4, 2022

The abrupt message from bet-at-home reads:

"Our industry is changing constantly.  Due to strategic decisions, we are interrupting our affiliate programme in Great Britain!  Please remove all affiliate links and banners on advertising materials for Great Britain as soon as possible!  We would like to thank you for your cooperation and understanding.  We will of course keep our partners up-to-date on all market specific developments."

No word on whether bet-at-home will continue to honor payments on past customers referred to the company.

In 2020, Rightlander.com published a special report to tackle non-compliant affiliates that allows operators to easily recognise affiliate pages offering rewards alongside an operator’s brand while also highlighting keywords suggesting gambling can change a person's life by either improving their lifestyle or appearance during these critical times where the population is more vulnerable.

Ian Sims, Rightlander.com founder said at the time: “Judging from the influx of requests we’ve received this announcement made a sudden and big impact. Rightlander is ideally positioned to make these sorts of snap decisions as we already have a substantial database of Spanish language affiliate sites that we scan regularly, although, until now that has mainly been for affiliate links to non-ES domains, as per the local regulator’s guidelines.”

A number of online gambling sites over the years have shut down their affiliate program to the UK market.

In 2018, 888.com began severing ties with many of its UK focused affiliates.

“I’ve been anticipating this particular move for a while now," Duncan Garvie, who ran affiliate and mediation site ThePogg, said at the time. "With the punitive approach the UK authorities have been taking towards operators and affiliates we’ve already seen a number of programmes close up completely or implement very aggressive terms."

The UK Gambling Commission also requires that operators and affiliates working on behalf of them age-gate and geo-gate correctly, this includes any content promoting online gambling.

And it's not just the United Kingdom that has come under intense scrutiny.

General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, was set up in 2018 to ensure better protection of consumers’ information, both online and offline, by enforcing regulations on how data is collected, processed and secured.

Data subjects must be made aware of the data being collected on them, why it is being collected, what will be done with it, and how long it will be retained for.

Operators fear being held liable should one of their ad partners fails to abide by these rules.  As such, they have opted to take drastic steps to abolish their affiliate programme entirely.

- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com