Sub-affiliate programs explained

What a sub-affiliate program is, and why operators offer one

A sub-affiliate program pays you a slice of what someone else earns. You refer another affiliate to a program; they sign up through your referral link; from then on the program pays you a percentage of their commission, out of its own margin. The person you referred is your sub-affiliate, and you are their master affiliate. Some programs call the same thing a referral tier, a second-tier commission, or simply "refer an affiliate".

Operators offer it because recruiting affiliates is expensive. An affiliate manager can work three conferences a year and still add only a handful of productive partners. Paying an existing partner four or five percent of a new partner's commission costs the program nothing until that new partner produces revenue, and it turns every affiliate into a recruiter. It is an acquisition cost that only fires on success.

Our own conflict of interest, stated plainly

This site is a sub-affiliate. When you join a program through a link in our affiliate program directory, the program pays us a share of the commission you earn, for as long as their terms allow. That is our only revenue. We have no operator relationships, we sell no course, and we take no fee from you.

That creates an incentive: we earn more if you join more programs and earn more from them. It also creates a bad incentive we have to actively fight — the temptation to rank a program highly because its referral tier pays us well rather than because its terms are good. Our written rule is that the referral rate never enters the ranking logic, and every page carrying a referral link says so above the link. The full statement is on our affiliate disclosure page. Read this guide with that in mind, and apply the questions in it to us as readily as to anyone else.

The mechanics: how the referral is tracked, and for how long

The plumbing is ordinary affiliate tracking, one level up. The program gives the referring affiliate a link carrying their affiliate ID in a referral parameter. The new affiliate clicks it, lands on the program's signup form, and the ID is written into a cookie or into a hidden field on the application. When the application is approved, the account is stamped with the referrer's ID in the program's own database. From that point the cookie is irrelevant — the relationship lives in the account record, not in the browser.

Two things follow from that:

• The click matters only once. Unlike player tracking, where a cookie duration of thirty days decides whether you are paid at all, a sub-affiliate referral is fixed at signup and does not expire because someone cleared their browser.
• Applying directly first kills it. If the affiliate already holds an account with that program, the referral usually cannot be attached retrospectively. Some managers will do it manually within a few days of signup; most will not.

The terminology varies more than the mechanism does. If you want the vocabulary in one place, the entries for sub-affiliate, master affiliate and tracking link in our glossary cover the words different programs use for the same three moving parts.

What the percentage is actually applied to — commission, not revenue

This is the most misread line in any referral tier, and it changes the value of the deal by an order of magnitude.

Almost every sub-affiliate rate is a percentage of the referred affiliate's commission. It is not a percentage of their players' net gaming revenue. Work it through with round illustrative numbers:

Had the same 5% been applied to net gaming revenue instead, you would have earned EUR 500 on identical traffic. So "5%" can mean EUR 150 or EUR 500 depending on one preposition in the terms. Read that sentence in the contract before you read anything else, and if it is ambiguous, ask the affiliate manager to confirm it in writing.

A second effect follows: everything that shrinks the referred affiliate's commission shrinks yours. If their deal carries an admin fee or negative carryover, your income inherits both — one level removed, and invisible to you. Our guide to revshare, CPA and hybrid deal maths walks through how those clauses eat a commission line before it reaches anybody.

The arithmetic: what 5% of ten referred affiliates really produces

Headline referral rates invite a simple and wrong calculation: ten affiliates earning EUR 2,000 each is EUR 20,000 of commission, five percent of which is EUR 1,000 a month. No referral list looks like that.

Here is a model closer to what one actually does. Every figure is illustrative — a shape we consider realistic, not a measurement of anyone's results:

Roughly EUR 59 a month, and 76% of it comes from one person. That single fact governs the whole model: a referral tier is not a diversified income line, it is a bet on one or two of your referrals becoming real businesses. Run the same model on your own assumptions with our sub-affiliate income calculator, which is built to let you set the drop-off rates rather than quietly assume everyone stays.

Drop-off is the whole story: most referred affiliates never earn anything

Now apply time. New affiliate sites are abandoned at a high rate in the first year, and the abandonment concentrates in exactly the segment that was producing nothing anyway. Assume the four inactive accounts stay inactive, two of the three marginal ones quit by month twelve, and the serious one grows. The line does not collapse — but it does not compound the way the pitch implies either. Your income tracks the survival of a very small number of people over whom you have no influence and, in most programs, no visibility beyond a monthly total.

The same shape shows up on the traffic side: what looks like a portfolio of many small contributors turns out, once segmented, to be dominated by a handful of pages and a couple of sources. Concentration is the normal state of these businesses, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Lifetime versus fixed-term referral windows

Programs describe the referral window in one of three ways, and the difference is worth more than a percentage point or two:

• Lifetime. You are paid for as long as the referred affiliate is active and the program exists. This is the common phrasing, but check what ends it — many terms terminate the relationship if your account goes dormant for a defined period, typically six or twelve months.
• Fixed term. Twelve or twenty-four months from the referral's signup. Uncommon in iGaming, standard in general affiliate networks. A 10% rate for twelve months is usually worth less than a 4% lifetime rate, provided the referral survives.
• First-deal only. A one-off payment when the referral reaches a milestone, presented as a referral tier. That is a bounty, not a share; price it as one.

The window interacts with the concentration problem. If your income depends on one strong referral, a twenty-four-month cap does not shave a little off the top — it ends the line at the exact point where that referral has become worth something.

Does it cost the referred affiliate anything? No, and here is how to verify that

In every program whose terms we have read, the sub-affiliate share is paid out of the program's own margin. The referred affiliate's rate is unaffected: someone joining a 30% revenue share through a referral link still gets 30%.

Do not take that on our word, or on any other referrer's word. Verify it in three steps before you sign up through anyone's link:

1. Open the program's public terms and search for "referral", "sub-affiliate", "second tier" and "master". Read the clause that defines who pays the referral commission.
2. Compare the commission table on the public program page with the one shown inside the account after signup. They should be identical.
3. Ask the affiliate manager directly, in the application message or the first email: does joining via a referral change my commission tiers in any way? A program that cannot answer that in one sentence has told you something useful.

If any of those three checks comes back wrong, the honest conclusion is to apply to that program directly and not through anyone — including us.

Six questions that expose a weak sub-affiliate deal

Run these against the terms, not the marketing page. They are applied to every program listed on this site, which is why several referral tiers that could be promoted here are described as weak on their program pages.

1. Is the percentage applied to the referred affiliate's commission, or to their players' revenue? As shown above, that is a three-fold difference on identical traffic.
2. Is the window lifetime, and what ends it? Specifically: does your own inactivity terminate the downline, and after how long?
3. Does it apply to CPA deals, or only to revenue share? Many terms pay a referral share on revenue share commission only. If your referral later negotiates a CPA deal, your income can fall to zero without anyone doing anything wrong.
4. Is your sub-affiliate balance netted against your own negative balance? If you also send player traffic and have a negative month, some terms offset it against the referral line before paying anything out.
5. Does sub-affiliate income count towards the minimum payout threshold? A EUR 100 threshold against a EUR 40 monthly referral line means payment roughly every third month, which is fine — as long as the balance genuinely rolls forward instead of expiring.
6. Can the program end or reassign the relationship unilaterally? Look for wording allowing the program to stop referral commission at its discretion, or on a deal renegotiation. It appears more often than you would expect.

For calibration: the published rates we have been able to confirm in terms cluster in a narrow band. Very few programs publish a referral percentage at all. Most that offer a tier record it as negotiable or "on request" rather than printing a number, which is why a referral rate is almost always a manager conversation rather than something you can read off a page before applying. Rates of ten percent and above do appear in public directory listings, but they trace to third-party listings rather than to a program's own published terms, so treat them as unconfirmed until a manager puts one in writing.

When promoting a referral tier is dishonest

Three lines, and we hold ourselves to them:

• Ranking by referral rate. Recommending the program that pays the best referral share rather than the one with the better terms for the reader is the core failure of this model. If a program pays us nothing and is still the right answer, it has to be the answer we give.
• Undisclosed links. A referral link is an affiliate link, and the advertising codes in every market we work in require a commercial recommendation to be identifiable as one. Google adds a narrower, technical duty: mark paid and affiliate links with the sponsored attribute. Every monetised link here carries that attribute and sits beneath a visible disclosure line, because the markup satisfies the crawler and only the disclosure satisfies the reader.
• Promising approval. Nobody can guarantee that a program accepts you, and a referrer who implies otherwise is selling something. What a referrer can honestly offer is a sanity check on the application — which is what the guide to getting approved by affiliate programs covers.

One point is specific to this industry. Content aimed at other affiliates is business-to-business, and is not player marketing. But the moment a page also names an operator, a brand or a bonus, the operator's licence conditions reach it: 18+ only, the licence named, no urgency, and responsible-gambling messaging on the page. Our compliance guide for the UK, Germany, Sweden and Spain sets out what that means market by market.

What we would do this week

1. Open the terms of the two programs you already send traffic to, search them for "referral" and "sub-affiliate", and write down the answer to question one above — commission or revenue — for each of them.
2. Put your own numbers into the sub-affiliate income calculator, using a drop-off assumption you would defend to a sceptic, and decide from the output whether the tier deserves any of your publishing time at all.
3. If the answer is yes, write one page about a program you genuinely use, disclose the referral relationship above the link, and leave the rest of your site alone. If the answer is no, do nothing — an unpromoted referral tier costs nothing to hold.