In-house vs affiliates: who is winning the traffic war in 2026
The media buying market in gambling is undergoing a structural shift. Operators are building their own teams, and large affiliates are consolidating and squeezing out smaller ones. A growing number of companies that moved in-house in 2023-2024 are now returning to hybrid models. What is actually happening, and where does high profitability live? Roman Chesanovskyi (pictured left), owner of media buying company Traffic.one, and Nikita Koshelyuk (pictured right), CEO of Trident Media, answer these questions in exclusive interviews with SiGMA News.
Why operators are moving in-house
The growth of in-house teams is not a trend or an imitation of Western practice. Four concrete reasons are driving it.
First – economics at scale. “At high volumes, affiliate commissions become a massive cost line. For the average operator, an in-house team saves anywhere from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars a year,” says Nikita Koshelyuk. Roman Chesanovskyi confirms the logic: many operators are convinced it is cheaper to hire a strong media buyer on a fixed salary than to keep paying an external agency.
Second – the point of optimisation has moved into the CRM. An external buyer works with what is available to them, typically the first deposit. Everything that happens to a player after they are handed over to the operator remains out of view. “Given the shift to new KPI-based models, the optimisation point sits inside the operator’s CRM: deposit amount, retention, LTV. Integrating buying and retention teams creates a seamless strategy where data is used to optimise the entire funnel, from the first touchpoint to building player loyalty,” Koshelyuk explains.
Third – speed and flexibility. A team embedded in the product responds faster: it knows the bonus mechanics, understands the target audience, and adapts quickly to regulatory changes. “The moment Meta, TikTok or Google updates its algorithm, our products adjust almost instantly,” Koshelyuk notes, referring to the Trident Apps infrastructure.
Fourth – transparency. Operators want visibility into buying costs, targeting settings, visuals, and creative scripts. An in-house team provides full access to that information, which matters increasingly in a tightening regulatory environment.
Chesanovskyi observes the same shift at the market level: “Competition has intensified to the point where there is barely room for new players. Larger media buying operations keep growing, crowding out smaller ones.”
Why affiliates are not going anywhere
Despite the rise of in-house teams, both experts agree: the affiliate model is not exhausting itself; it is transforming.
“Some operators who built internal teams in 2023–2024 are rolling back to a hybrid buying model,” Koshelyuk acknowledges. There are two reasons.
The first is diversification of testing strategies. A single in-house team inevitably works to one template and loses variety. A network of dozens of affiliates generates a range of approaches that one department cannot replicate.
The second is a salary ceiling. “A top buyer in an in-house role hits a pay ceiling, whereas in the affiliate market there is no ceiling, and holding onto that person is hard,” Koshelyuk says. Chesanovskyi adds: “Buyers targeting $10K+ a month will choose the external market, because in-house teams simply cannot offer those conditions.”
External affiliates continue to outperform in-house operations across five key areas: speed of testing, work in new geos, aggressive scaling, finding new traffic sources, and unconventional player acquisition approaches. Chesanovskyi sums it up:
Both models have always existed and will continue to exist in parallel. They can only strengthen each other, not replace each other.
Traffic is changing, and so is its price
Alongside structural changes in team composition, the traffic itself is transforming. Chesanovskyi identifies an important trend reshaping the economics of the market:
Advertisers are revising their return-on-investment expectations for crash traffic, and approaches to evaluating it are changing fundamentally.
With the growing share of crash and instant-game traffic, the key profitability driver is the ability to retain those players and move them into classic slots or live formats. According to Chesanovskyi, operators who have already mastered this are unlocking a new audience and reaching payback faster. Media buyers who have learned to work with this type of traffic are seeing significantly higher profits.
The market’s tier structure helps explain where the greatest commercial value lies. Chesanovskyi describes it as follows:
- Tier 1 forms the foundation: around 60 per cent of traffic, the most stable tier in terms of profitability, accounting for up to 50-60 per cent of leading operators’ traffic, including Facebook.
- Tier 2 accounts for around 20 per cent of traffic; the audience is highly engaged online, with higher volumes at acceptable quality, which is why it is often called the goldmine.
- Tier 3 covers the remaining 20 per cent: developing markets with no volume ceiling but serious monetisation challenges, minimal regulation, and an unstable environment that advertisers are not yet willing to back with comparable budgets.
Local media buying: when a geo-specific in-house setup makes sense
A separate question is whether building in-house teams for specific markets is worthwhile at all. Koshelyuk’s view: “More yes than no.”
Local teams have a better feel for the audience’s mindset; they understand cultural context, local humour, slang, and behavioural triggers. That makes creatives more native and drives higher engagement. Knowledge of local payment solutions, such as PIX in Brazil and M-Pesa in Africa, and of the specifics of advertising regulation reduces the risk of fines. Direct relationships with local influencers secure better placement terms.
The result is a lower CPA and a higher LTV: players acquired through culturally relevant campaigns tend to stay longer.
However, there are three situations where a localised in-house team is not cost-effective: a small market volume where team costs would exceed potential revenue; a universal product with no need for deep cultural adaptation; and a shortage of qualified staff in the region.
Chesanovskyi singles out Africa as a case apart: “This is the future driver of online gambling as a whole. The market is only just forming, brands are only just entering, and the potential audience is over a billion people, many of whom are getting their first connected device in the form of a smartphone. Those who enter now will have a substantial head start.”
What an ideal partnership looks like
Whatever the structure, in-house, affiliate, or hybrid, the quality of the relationship between operator and media buyer is becoming a competitive factor in its own right.
Chesanovskyi describes the ideal model as starting with transparency: before the first campaign goes live, both parties agree on KPIs in writing in a shared channel. That is followed by deep integration with real-time player data: GGR, deposit amounts, activity. This allows the media buyer to optimise acquisition quickly. On the operator’s side, fast payouts and a product that converts traffic effectively are baseline requirements. On the media buyer’s side – meeting agreed volume commitments and a willingness to share geo-specific experience.
Koshelyuk frames the same principle at the product level: “Our products are built in collaboration with our own media buyers, for other media buyers. We test and refine the tools on our own traffic volumes first, and only then bring them to market.”
How the buyer’s role is changing
Both experts agree: the media buyer’s profession is undergoing a fundamental transformation.
“Campaign setup is increasingly being handled by algorithms. Buyers will spend less and less time launching and optimising campaigns, and more and more time on analysis and developing new testing hypotheses,” says Koshelyuk. Chesanovskyi concurs: “The initial launch of advertising campaigns can already be handled by AI tools, leaving the buyer to focus on analytics and strategy.”
Following algorithm updates, Meta now requires dozens of creatives to train its systems, and AI significantly accelerates that process. Large teams are already creating dedicated units for user-generated content (UGC) and working with AI models.
Koshelyuk’s near-term forecast is unambiguous: “In a couple of years, the role will split entirely: into those who produce and analyse creatives, and those who build analytics and predictive models. There will be no middle ground.”
Both speakers are nevertheless clear that AI strengthens teams rather than replacing them. “AI accelerates the execution of ideas but does not replace the human. It does not understand the product, the offer, the audience, or the market context the way a person does. The more automation enters the market, the more valuable strategic thinking becomes,” Koshelyuk explains.
Where the market is heading
Both experts paint a similar picture of the future, each from their own vantage point.
Koshelyuk: “Media buying in gambling is becoming no less technology-driven than the product itself. Cheap traffic as a competitive advantage is running out. When everyone uses the same AI tools, competition shifts from buying to analytics. The edge shifts to whoever has the highest-quality data on the real value of a player.”
Chesanovskyi: “The barrier to entry has risen substantially. Scaling now requires a minimum advertising budget of $1-2 million. The market is maturing, and only those who can scale quickly will survive.”
Weaker players operating purely on volume are exiting, and both experts view this as a healthy development. What will remain are teams with strong analytics, proprietary BI systems, fast testing cycles, and a clear operational model.
In a mature market, the winner is whoever has infrastructure that delivers results.
“The future of media buying is strong teams armed with AI,” Koshelyuk concludes.
This article was first published on the Russian SiGMA News page on 9 June 2026.
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