Europe has spent the last few years tightening online gambling: national licences, bonus caps, advertising bans, self-exclusion registers. A new report shows the money flowing the other way. According to Gaming Compliance International (GCI), in a study for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, 72% of EU online GGR in 2025 went to operators without a licence in the player’s country — roughly €91.6 billion of a €128 billion total.
The grey segment grew 74% in two years
GCI put unregulated EU online GGR at €52.6 billion in 2023. By 2025 it was €91.6 billion. While regulators tightened rules for licensed operators, the segment outside those rules grew by nearly three quarters. The licensed market is left with about 28%.
One caveat the authors make themselves: “unregulated” does not mean “illegal”. The category includes operators licensed in one EU jurisdiction (Malta, say) but not authorised in the specific country the player is in. For affiliates that is the crucial nuance — more below.
91% of content and 88 million people
The number worth reading the report for: 91% of gambling content that actively engaged users interacted with promoted unregulated operators. In absolute terms, online gambling content reached 121 million Europeans in 2025, and 88 million of them saw material from the unlicensed sector.
The authors name the channels: affiliate sites, social media, advertising, search, apps, payment services, messengers and pirate streams. Over 6,000 operators and thousands of affiliates working as a connected ecosystem, not scattered websites. GCI president Ismail Vali puts it bluntly: by the time the bet is placed, the battle for the customer may already be lost.
What it means for affiliates
Regulatory focus is shifting from operators to traffic. Blocking a casino domain has long been insufficient — the funnel reroutes through another source within a day. So the next step for European regulators is obvious and the report spells it out: advertising, affiliates, payments. Requirements on who shows the first creative, and where, will tighten faster than requirements on operators themselves.
The EU is 27 different GEOs, not one market. An offer accepting traffic from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands may hold a licence in only one of them. A funnel that runs legally in one country is under an advertising ban next door. The most common scaling mistake is copying a working funnel to a “similar” GEO without checking the advertiser’s status there.
What to check before running Europe: whether the operator is licensed in that specific country (regulator registers are public), what that country’s gambling advertising rules are (near-total bans in the Netherlands and Italy, time and format limits in Germany), and how payment providers behave — a bank-side deposit block kills conversion faster than any creative ban.
Context
The report landed on September 23 — the same week Brazil debates an online casino ban and Lula attacks betting from the UN podium. The trend is shared: regulators are moving from fighting websites to examining the whole acquisition chain. For those who earn on that chain it is not a reason to panic, but a reason to check every GEO separately and stop treating “accepts traffic” as a synonym for “can be advertised”.
Running European gambling? Share where the pressure is already showing on the forum.