Welcome, dear community! One of the biggest fears among affiliates who are just planning to run gambling traffic is the risk of ending up in the red. And we’re not talking about burning through a budget with no profit — we mean going negative because a lead turns out to be unusually lucky, wins at the casino, and leaves for good. So what should you do in that case? We explain it here on our media platform.
Before we start, a quick reminder that we’ve already covered the key gambling trends for 2025. Worth a read!
How Can a Player’s Luck Put You in the Red?
When working with gambling, you’ll quickly notice that most offers in the niche run on RevShare. CPA will either be unavailable or reserved for selected partners. Exceptions do happen, of course, but RevShare is the core model.
Overall, this payout model is quite solid: the advertiser shares the profit they themselves receive. Considering that a casino can’t operate at a loss and players are more likely to lose over the long run, it looks like we’ll earn a lot. What could be better?
However, there’s a small catch — losses caused by the player are also shared with us. A “loss” for the casino is when the player wins. Since the casino loses money in that case, we partially cover it too. How do we avoid letting our balance go negative? There are several options.
Work Only with No Negative Carry Offers
Modern gambling offers can be split into two key categories based on how they treat debt, i.e., negative balances.
We can distinguish two types of gambling offers according to their approach to a negative balance:
- Negative Carry Offer, NCO — these offers roll your negative balance over to the next month until you cover the debt. So if after the first run one of your leads hits a high roll, takes the pot, and leaves the casino forever, you may have to run traffic for a long time without profit just to cover the loss.
- No Negative Carry Offer, NNCO — these offers can also put your account in the red, but any debt gets “reset” every month. For example, if you finish February at -$1,420, by March it’s back to 0. You can start fresh and keep the full profit.
And if you’re about to Google NNCO — breathe. Most offers on the market are NNCO; otherwise, no one would run traffic to casinos where you risk ending up only with debt. Still, we had to mention this so you don’t accidentally start with regular NCOs. They’re rarer, but they still exist.
Pay Attention to the Casino You Run Traffic To
Although all casinos are essentially a rip-off trap and a scam, they still differ from one another. The most important metric here is RTP.
As we noted in a separate review, RTP is the percentage of money that will return to a player over a long distance. A respectable figure for modern casinos is around 96% RTP.
This means that over the long run, if a player spends 10,000 UAH, 9,600 UAH should theoretically return to them. Casinos are quite upfront about this, essentially telling players they’ll be in the red in the end. Our task is to choose casinos where the chance that our lead will lose is higher. Accordingly, you want the casino’s RTP to be as low as possible.
Also pay attention to bonuses. Sure, they’re a hook — but if there’s a first-deposit bonus with a low wagering requirement, there’s a higher risk the player can clear it and we end up negative. Wagers of x40–50 almost never clear, but x30 and below — that’s already risky for us.
Overall, it’s crucial to balance between making the offer attractive enough to convert traffic and not putting ourselves at risk. You’ll find the “perfect” offer only through testing — and by learning from the experience of seasoned colleagues.
Other Ways to Optimize the Flow
Unfortunately, you can’t set targeting so that only low-luck players see your ads. Still, there are ways to minimize risks when you run traffic to gambling.
The most obvious solution is to switch to a CPA model or a Hybrid. Prioritize the latter: you get benefits from both models, and when RevShare goes negative, the CPA component can cover the loss.
If you’ve been working with an offer for a while, you can negotiate more favorable terms with the advertiser — e.g., lower fees. That’s the fee the casino deducts when calculating RevShare. The lower the fee deducted from your payout, the more you’ll earn.
Conclusion
Many affiliates choose RevShare for gambling for one key reason: it’s the most profitable payout model in the long run, since the casino is statistically in the black — the more players lose, the better for the one who brought them in.
But the fact that people can occasionally get lucky shouldn’t be ignored. Even then, you can avoid going negative — and we’ve shown how to do it!
Have you ever run traffic and ended up with a real negative balance? Share your stories in our Telegram community, where we always cover the most important news from the world of affiliate marketing!
Sincerely, Your Geek!