Diversify Your iGaming Revenue Streams
Affiliate marketing is currently the primary source of income for most iGaming publishers. While affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable ways to monetize your website, depending on a single source of revenue exposes your publishing business to unnecessary risks.
The revenue that your iGaming website earns from its affiliates can drastically change overnight due to algorithm updates or changes made by the gaming operators. To avoid such a scenario, it is essential to diversify your revenue streams to ensure that the loss of income from any one stream does not threaten the financial sustainability of your business.
Diversification does not mean you should give up affiliate marketing. Instead, it means that you can create a revenue strategy for your website that allows you to earn money from various streams, regardless of the changes happening within the industry.
Why Revenue Diversification Matters for iGaming Publishers
Many publishers do not realize that their revenue streams are overly depended upon a few sources.
Examples of overly-dependent revenue streams include:
Relying upon one affiliate program to generate 80% of revenue
Relying upon one traffic source to generate nearly all website visitors
Relying upon one gaming market for all revenue generated
In each of these examples, the publisher can generate significant revenue under normal circumstances. However, if the variables listed above change, the publisher could be negatively impacted.
Publishers that diversify their revenue have a variety of benefits, such as:
More predictable revenue streams
Lower business risk
More negotiating power within affiliate agreements
Greater flexibility in monetizing their website
Better potential for business scalability
A diversified revenue stream provides publishers with the stability that they require to endure periods of growth or market disruption.
Avoid Depending Solely Upon a Single Gaming Operator
The performance of the gaming operators upon whom you rely for revenue can change over time.
Factors that can impact your revenue from an operator include:
Changes to their commission structure
Changes to their licensing
Fluctuations in the number of users that they convert to customers
Availability of the games that you promote
Issues with their payment systems
To avoid depending upon a single gaming operator, diversify your partnerships with a variety of reputable gaming companies.
Compare the Performance of Your Gaming Operator Affiliates
Not all gaming operators will convert visitors to customers at the same rate.
To maximize revenue, it is essential to track a variety of their performance metrics, such as the number of visitors that they receive, the number of users that they register, the number of users that make their first deposit, and the revenue that they generate per click (EPC) and per player.
By comparing the performance of each of your operator affiliates, you can better allocate your traffic and maximize revenue.
Combine Multiple Types of Commission Models
The most profitable revenue stream for most publishers comes from the use of different types of commission structures.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Models offer a set amount of money to publishers each time a visitor is acquired who will play the games that are promoted.
Benefits of using CPA models include:
Faster revenue generation
More predictable revenue models
Lower long-term uncertainty in revenue
CPA models work best for publishers using paid traffic strategies.
Revenue Share models pay publishers a percentage of the revenue that the gaming operator earns from the players that the publisher acquired.
Advantages of using revenue share models include:
Passive revenue streams each month
More lifetime value potential with players
Long-term revenue and business growth
These models are best for publishers who wish to focus on organic traffic.
Hybrid models use the benefits of both CPA and Revenue Share models. Publishers are paid an upfront CPA commission when they acquire a player and are then paid a share of the revenue that the player generates over time.
These models are typically used by experienced publishers who want to maximize their revenue from each visitor.
Expand into Additional Monetization Markets
Many publishers limit their revenue by focusing upon one regulated market for their games.
Expanding into international markets for your games and content can significantly increase your revenue.
Some of the best countries to expand into include:
Canada
Brazil
Latin America
Germany
Sweden
United Kingdom
By expanding your reach into additional markets, you reduce your dependence upon a single revenue market.
Localize Your Website Content for International Audiences
To compete with other publishers and gaming operators in other parts of the world, you must localize your website content.
Localization means making your website content available in the reader’s native language, using their local currencies, and accepting their regional payment methods.
Providing such content increases the relevance of your website, improving your ability to rank for relevant keywords and increasing the number of customers that you convert.
Monetize Your Website’s Informational Content
Not all visitors to your website want to register and play games on your site right away.
Instead, many of them are browsing for information. By creating valuable, informational content on your site, you can monetize these visitors.
Examples of informational content that could generate significant revenue for publishers include:
Beginners’ guides to playing casino games
Sports betting and tournament guides
Information about various available payment methods
Latest gaming and sports news
Regulatory updates in the industry
Such content can increase the visibility of your site in search engines while also introducing visitors to your gaming operators.
Build Your First-Party Audience Assets
While search engine traffic is valuable, it should not be your only traffic source for your gaming website.
Building your first-party audience assets allows you to build a relationship with your website visitors that does not rely upon search engines.
Email Marketing is one of the highest forms of revenue generation for most marketing channels.
Benefits of using email marketing include:
Direct communication with your audience
Increased repeat visits to your site
The ability to offer personalized promotions
Reducing your dependence upon search engine traffic
Using email marketing ensures that your audience does not depend upon search engines to find your content.
Push notifications for your website are another form of first-party audience building.
By allowing your website visitors to subscribe to your push notifications, you can alert them to new games, promotions, tournaments, and other events directly on your site.
These notifications can increase the number of visitors that return to your site.
Increase Your Revenue from Traffic Segmentation
Not all visitors to your website are the same.
By segmenting your traffic, you can present each visitor with offers from gaming operators that match the interests of that individual visitor.
Traffic segmentation can provide information about each visitor’s origin, device, source of traffic, interest in casinos vs. sportsbooks, and other information.
By presenting visitors with offers that match their interests, you can increase their conversion rates.
Optimize the Existing Content on Your Site
Instead of spending significant time creating new content, revenue can also be increased by simply optimizing existing pages.
Elements that can be optimized to increase revenue from gaming operators include:
Call-to-action buttons
Comparison tables between gaming operators
Bonus accuracy between websites
Internal linking between articles
Mobile user experience
Even a slight improvement in the number of visitors that are converted can generate significant revenue for your website.
Use Smart Traffic Distribution Models
Sending all your website visitors to the same gaming operator limits your earning potential.
Traffic distribution models can evaluate the interests of your visitors and direct them to the gaming operator that is most likely to convert them into customers.
Factors that can be evaluated by traffic distribution models include location, device, traffic source, historical traffic, and availability of games.
This traffic distribution model ensures that each visitor generates the highest possible revenue for your website.
Explore Sponsored Content and Partnerships
Many publishers have overlooked a revenue stream that could significantly benefit their websites.
For publishers with significant reputations and high follower counts on social media, forming a partnership with another brand allows them to earn revenue from content that they create.
Other opportunities for publishers and brands to partner include:
Sponsored social media content
Social media brand partnerships
Featured articles in newsletters
Newsletter brand sponsorships
Industry reports and data
Sponsored content creates a revenue stream that is independent of the number of visitors that sign up for the games that you promote.
Monitor Your Monetization Channels
In order to diversify your revenue streams appropriately, you must monitor which channels earn the most revenue for your website.
Revenue can be earned from:
Organic search traffic
Paid traffic
Email campaigns
Social media
Direct traffic
Referral traffic
Monitoring each of these ensures that you can allocate your resources appropriately to earn the highest revenue for your site.
Common Monetization Mistakes by iGaming Publishers
Many of the mistakes that publishers make limit their potential revenue.
Some of the most common include:
Limiting revenue to a single affiliate program
Ignoring opportunities for recurring revenue
Neglecting to localize their content
Ignoring the potential revenue from their existing website pages
Not tracking their EPC from each gaming operator
Underutilizing their first-party audiences
All of these issues, if corrected, could significantly improve the revenue of a publisher.
Future Trends in Publisher Monetization Strategies
The future of publisher revenue streams and monetization will include the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI models can analyze the behavior and preferences of visitors to your site and automatically recommend the best gaming operator to whom to send your visitors to maximize revenue.
Traffic distribution models will be further developed to optimize the revenue that publishers earn from their visitors.
As data from third-party cookies and tools disappears, publishers will rely more upon the data of their first-party audiences: those who subscribe to their newsletters, register on their sites, and display interest in their content.
Final Thoughts
Diversifying revenue streams is one of the smartest strategies available to iGaming publishers. Rather than relying upon a single source of revenue from a single gaming operator with a specific commission, publishers can diversify by increasing the number of revenue sources that generate income for the publisher and depend upon each other to generate the best possible outcome.
By utilizing additional revenue streams and strategies, such as international markets, first-party audiences, traffic optimization, and technological advances in traffic distribution, publishers can significantly reduce the risks associated with publishing while increasing their revenue potential over the long term. In a rapidly growing and changing industry, diversification is not just an option but a necessity for competitive advantage and sustainability in the iGaming world.