Denmark’s gambling channelisation model faces new pressure
Denmark’s gambling regulator secured court orders to block a record 334 illegal websites in 2025, as the country’s channelisation model comes under growing pressure from unlicensed operators, mirror sites and gambling content spread through social platforms.
The figures feed into a wider Nordic debate about channelisation in a market worth €1.54bn, in gross gambling revenue in 2025. Denmark’s answer has generally been to keep the legal market competitive, while still applying consumer protection rules to licensed operators.
That balance is now being tested. Online gambling generated almost three-quarters of Danish gambling revenue in 2025, while online casino became the country’s largest gambling segment. The same shift that has strengthened the regulated market has also widened the space in which illegal operators can reach Danish players.
According to gambling analytics platform Blask, whose index tracks relative online interest across iGaming categories, online casino accounted for about 53.5 per cent of Denmark’s online gambling index over the past year. Online betting followed with 13.0 per cent, while live dealer casino represented 10.2 per cent.
The same dataset shows online casino growing by 46.35 per cent year-on-year, while online betting rose by 14.25 per cent. Prediction markets remained small, at about 0.2 per cent of the Danish online gambling index, but recorded the fastest annual growth, up 135.3 per cent.
The scale of that challenge is reflected in the regulator’s enforcement figures. The authority said its work in 2025 led to “334 websites being ruled illegal by the district court”. A further 36 websites removed or changed their gambling offers after being contacted by the regulator.
However, the rise in websites identified and blocked “does not necessarily indicate an expansion of the illegal gambling market in Denmark”, but rather reflects its “growing focus on combating illegal gambling,” explained the regulator.
Channelisation under pressure
The Danish approach has been presented as a practical one, especially when compared with neighbouring countries such as Sweden. That contrast was central to a seminar organised by the Swedish trade body BOS, where Nordic Legal presented a comparison of the two markets.
The panellists argued that Sweden has leaned more heavily on strict rules and sanctions, while Denmark has placed greater weight on dialogue, proportionality and keeping the licensed market competitive. Its logic is simple: players are more likely to stay inside the regulated market if licensed operators can still offer products, promotions and user experiences that compete with offshore sites. That does not mean lighter regulation. It means applying consumer protection rules without making the legal market so unattractive that players look elsewhere.
That debate has also surfaced in Denmark’s proposed gambling reform. A draft bill would ban revenue-share affiliate marketing based on player losses or turnover from 1 January 2027, including agreements already in force. The Ministry of Taxation argues the measure is needed to strengthen consumer protection, but affiliates warn it could weaken legal marketing channels that direct players towards licensed operators. “If you put too many restrictions on the legal market, you make it impossible for them to compete,” Anders Dorph, director of the Danish Gambling Authority, told SiGMA News in a previous interview.
The Danish Gambling Authority’s new report brings the same question back to enforcement. If Denmark wants licensed operators to remain competitive, it also has to make sure unlicensed sites do not become too easy to find or too simple to use. Channelisation, in that sense, is not only about the offer inside the regulated market. It is also about raising the cost of operating outside it.
Mirror sites challenge old enforcement tools
One important enforcement shift for the Danish regulator concerns mirror sites. Illegal operators can copy a blocked website to a new domain, allowing the same product to reappear almost immediately.
“Mirror sites are often an identical copy of the blocked website, but under a new domain name,” the regulator explained. “The user experience will therefore remain the same, and the player will not necessarily notice that the website name has changed slightly.”
To respond, the Danish Gambling Authority has updated its cooperation agreement with the Danish Telecommunications Industry Association. The new arrangement allows dynamic blocking of mirror sites without a fresh court order, provided a court has already ruled that the original content is illegal.
The regulator said the measure would “reduce the amount of time the illegal website is accessible to Danish users” and help streamline enforcement.
Blocking orders have a measurable effect: after 178 illegal websites were blocked in June 2025, visits from Denmark to those domains fell by about 34 per cent over the next six months compared with the previous six months.
Illegal gambling moves across platforms
The report also points to a broader change in how illegal gambling reaches users. It is no longer confined to stand-alone websites.
The regulator said it had observed “a growing trend toward the sharing of illegal gambling activities taking place in closed groups on communication platforms such as Discord, Telegram, etc.”
It has also found illegal gambling apps, search adverts, YouTube content, Twitch streams and Facebook and Instagram promotions. Through partnerships with Apple, Google, Meta and Twitch, the authority can report illegal gambling content and ask platforms to remove it.
In 2025, Danish licence holders also reported cases where their brands were misused on Facebook in adverts linked to illegal gambling. The regulator said a new process with Meta should allow faster removals.
A political agreement known as “Gambling Package 1” will further widen the authority’s powers. It will allow the regulator to block websites that promote illegal gambling, not only gambling sites themselves, and fund a tool to monitor digital marketing automatically.
The authority is also trying to reach younger audiences before illegal gambling does. It delivered 100 classroom presentations in 2025 and reported rising demand from sports clubs.
“We have very deliberately avoided ‘preachy’ approaches, as well as bans and scare tactics,” the report said.
One arm of channelisation is keeping the licensed market attractive. The other is making the illegal market harder and less rewarding to operate in. Denmark’s 2025 report shows why both matter. The quicker illegal operators are disrupted, the less value there is in targeting Danish players without a licence.
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