Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB): 5 FORCES Analysis [Nov-2025 Updated]

So, you want to know exactly where Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB) stands in the online gambling marketing space as we head into late 2025? Honestly, the picture is sharp: while the company's 94.55% gross margin in Q2 2025 shows serious supplier control and high barriers to entry for new, regulated platforms, the intense rivalry and rising negotiation power from big operator customers-who generated 476,000 new depositing customers for partners last year-present real pressure. We see the threat of substitutes managed by their compliance expertise, but the core question is whether their projected $171 million to $175 million revenue for 2025 can outpace the competitive heat. Dive in below to see how these five forces defintely shape the landscape for GAMB.

Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB) - Porter's Five Forces: Bargaining power of suppliers

For Gambling.com Group Limited, the bargaining power of its suppliers generally sits in the low-to-moderate range, though specific categories present distinct pressures. You see this dynamic reflected in the company's strong profitability metrics. For instance, the reported gross profit margin for Q2 2025 stood at an impressive 94.55%, which suggests that the direct costs associated with delivering their core services-the cost of sales-are relatively low compared to the revenue generated. This high margin inherently limits the pricing power of many transactional suppliers, such as basic content providers or generic platform service vendors.

However, the strategic landscape is shifting, particularly concerning data. Gambling.com Group Limited has actively worked to internalize key assets, significantly reducing reliance on external sports data providers. The acquisition of Odds Holdings, the parent company of OddsJam, finalized on January 1, 2025, is the prime example. OddsJam is described as the industry's most advanced technology platform, processing an average of over one million requests per second across nearly 300 sportsbooks. By owning this capability, which generated sports data services revenue of $10 million in Q2 2025 (quadrupling year-over-year), Gambling.com Group Limited controls a critical, high-value input, thereby lowering the power of third-party data aggregators.

The most significant leverage point for suppliers comes from specialized human capital. The core supplier here is high-quality talent, specifically scarce SEO and compliance experts. As Gambling.com Group Limited navigates challenges like recent Google core algorithm updates impacting marketing revenue, the need for top-tier, AI-resistant digital marketing and compliance specialists becomes acute. This scarcity grants these individuals considerable leverage over compensation and terms, a risk Gambling.com Group Limited is managing by diversifying traffic sources.

To better map out these supplier dynamics, consider this breakdown:

The company's overall scale, evidenced by its Q2 2025 revenue of $39.6 million and revised full-year revenue guidance around $165 million, helps temper the power of suppliers for commoditized services. When you are processing that volume, you have a stronger voice at the negotiation table for things like affiliate tracking software licenses or general cloud services. However, this scale does not negate the specialized talent issue.

Here are the key supplier categories and the associated leverage points you should watch:

• Technology and Content: Power is constrained by the 94.55% Q2 2025 gross margin.
• Sports Data: Power is actively being neutralized through internal asset ownership (OddsJam).
• Human Capital: High leverage due to the scarcity of proven SEO and compliance mastery.
• Platform Costs: Negotiating leverage is supported by scale, targeting $58-$64 million Adjusted EBITDA for FY2025.

Finance: draft 13-week cash view by Friday.

Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB) - Porter's Five Forces: Bargaining power of customers

The bargaining power of customers-the online gambling operators-is best characterized as moderate. On one hand, the digital nature of affiliate marketing means that, theoretically, an operator can switch from Gambling.com Group Limited to a competitor with relative ease. However, this ease of switching is significantly offset by the high, often unquantifiable, cost of replacing the quality of traffic Gambling.com Group Limited delivers. Operators are not just buying clicks; they are buying compliant, high-intent, high-Lifetime Value (LTV) depositing customers, which is difficult and expensive to source elsewhere, especially given the evolving regulatory landscape.

Operators are definitely pushing for payment structures that better align with their own LTV models. This means a clear, observable trend away from simple, one-time Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) payments toward more sophisticated, performance-based models. You see this as operators seek to maximize returns over the entire lifecycle of a referred player, not just the initial deposit.

This shift in preference is countered by the sheer scale of traffic Gambling.com Group Limited moves, which creates a form of switching cost for the operator. Consider the volume: Gambling.com Group Limited facilitated over 476,000 new depositing customers for its partners in the full year 2024. Even with headwinds in search, the volume remains substantial, as evidenced by delivering more than 101,000 NDCs in the third quarter of 2025 alone. Losing access to that pipeline forces an operator to rapidly scale up its own marketing spend or find another affiliate capable of matching that flow, which is a significant operational hurdle.

The market itself is driving this dynamic. We are seeing clear signs of consolidation among the major operator groups, as well as among affiliates themselves. As operator groups get larger-think of the dominant players in the U.S. market-their purchasing power naturally increases. These larger entities can demand more favorable terms, such as better revenue share percentages or higher volume rebates, simply because their contracts represent a larger portion of an affiliate's total performance marketing revenue.

Here's a look at how Gambling.com Group Limited's revenue mix has evolved, which speaks directly to how they manage this customer power dynamic:

The data shows that while performance marketing is still the largest single stream, the massive growth in subscription revenue-which was $10.0 million in Q2 2025, representing 25.3% of the total $39.6 million revenue-is a direct strategic action to mitigate customer power. Subscription revenue is inherently more predictable and less subject to the direct, deal-by-deal negotiation pressure that CPA and Revenue Share contracts face.

The key levers that keep customer power in check for Gambling.com Group Limited include:

• Traffic volume delivered: Over 476,000 NDCs in 2024.
• Compliance expertise in regulated markets.
• Diversification into high-margin, recurring revenue streams.
• Strong organic growth in key markets like North America, which grew 56% in Q2 2025.
• Acquisition of data services, like OddsJam, which provide non-affiliate revenue.

Finance: finalize the Q4 2025 revenue share percentage breakdown by end of day Tuesday.

Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB) - Porter's Five Forces: Competitive rivalry

Rivalry is intense in the fast-paced, high-growth online gambling performance marketing sector. You see this pressure because the barrier to entry for starting a simple affiliate site is low, even if scaling to a major player is hard. The fight for top organic search rankings is a zero-sum game, meaning one player's gain is often another's loss in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Key competitors include large, multi-market affiliates and media companies in North America and Europe. While precise market share data for every single affiliate is not public, we know established rivals like Better Collective are actively pursuing growth, recognized higher in the EGR Power Affiliates rankings as of April 2025. Other entities in the broader competitive set include Polymarket, Betfair, TVG Network Betfair US, and Sks365 Group, showing the rivalry spans both direct affiliates and operators.

Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB)'s projected 2025 revenue of $171 million to $175 million shows significant scale, but the market is fragmented. To be fair, the latest guidance adjustment, reflecting Q3 headwinds, brought the full-year revenue expectation down to approximately $165 million. This market fragmentation means that while GAMB is a large player, it still competes against numerous smaller, nimble entities vying for the same advertiser spend.

Strategic acquisitions are used to diversify and reduce direct rivalry in core verticals. The purchase of Spotlight.Vegas, for up to $30 million (with $8 million upfront and up to $22 million in earnouts), is a clear move to enter the ticketing and entertainment booking space, diversifying away from pure performance marketing. This strategy helps insulate the company from direct, head-to-head competition in the most saturated areas. Here's a quick look at some of the scale and strategic moves driving this dynamic:

Rivalry is heightened by constant Google algorithm updates, which can quickly impact organic search rankings. This is a major near-term risk; the recent guidance revision to $165 million explicitly cites the 'continued headwind of poor organic search dynamics' that affected the marketing business through the third quarter. This volatility means that the effectiveness of GAMB's core traffic generation engine can change rapidly, forcing continuous investment in SEO and content to maintain position against competitors who are also fighting for visibility. You need to watch their organic traffic performance closely.

• Rivalry intensity: High in performance marketing.
• Diversification focus: Moving into ticketing and data subscriptions.
• Search dependency risk: Significant due to algorithm changes.
• Key competitor activity: Acquisitions and ranking battles persist.

Finance: draft 13-week cash view by Friday.

Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB) - Porter's Five Forces: Threat of substitutes

You're looking at the substitutes for Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB), and honestly, the biggest threat comes from the operators themselves trying to cut out the middleman. Direct operator advertising-think those massive TV spots or social media pushes-is the classic substitute for affiliate marketing. But here's the scale of the channel GAMB operates in: affiliate marketing spend in the US is projected to pass $12 billion in 2025. That's the size of the pond where GAMB is fishing for clicks, and it shows how much money operators could spend directly instead of paying affiliate commissions.

Operators can also decide to build out their in-house content and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) teams. When they do that, they are directly substituting the specialized expertise and scale that Gambling.com Group Limited brings to the table. It's a build-vs-buy decision for them, and if they decide to build, it eats into the core marketing revenue stream.

Still, Gambling.com Group Limited is actively mitigating this threat by diversifying its revenue models. The shift toward subscription-based sports data services is key here. For the second quarter of 2025, this segment represented 25% of total revenue, which was $10.0 million of the quarter's $39.6 million in total revenue. This move away from pure performance-based affiliate revenue provides a more predictable, high-margin stream, which operators can't easily substitute with their own marketing efforts.

Here's a quick look at the market dynamics we're seeing, comparing the substitute threat's scale to GAMB's diversification efforts as of Q2 2025:

The substitute threats are definitely present, but they are somewhat mitigated by Gambling.com Group Limited's strategic focus on regulated markets. You see, the regulatory environment for gambling operators in Q3 2025 has reached unprecedented levels of complexity and stringency. For Gambling.com Group Limited, this means their compliance expertise acts as a high barrier to entry for smaller, less sophisticated affiliates, and it's a key differentiator when selling services to major operators who need to stay compliant.

The company's overall outlook for 2025 reflects this strategy, with full-year revenue guidance sitting between $171 million and $175 million, and Adjusted EBITDA projected between $62 million and $64 million. This financial guidance suggests confidence that their value proposition-especially the compliance and data services-outweighs the pure substitution risk from direct operator spending.

You should keep an eye on these key areas:

• Operator investment in in-house SEO teams.
• The growth rate of the subscription revenue stream.
• Regulatory changes that might increase compliance barriers.
• The continued pullback in traditional TV advertising spend.

Finance: draft the Q3 2025 cash flow impact analysis from the Spotlight.Vegas integration by next Tuesday.

Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB) - Porter's Five Forces: Threat of new entrants

You're looking at the barriers to entry in the online gambling media and data space as of late 2025. Honestly, the landscape is bifurcated. For small, non-compliant affiliates trying to game search engines, the barrier to entry is low, but that's a race to the bottom with high regulatory risk. For anyone serious about building a large-scale, authoritative, and regulated platform like Gambling.com Group Limited, the hurdles are substantial, requiring significant capital and time.

New entrants definitely struggle to match the digital footprint Gambling.com Group Limited has built. Domain authority and search engine ranking are the lifeblood of affiliate marketing, and that takes years of consistent, high-quality content and link building. A newcomer can't just buy that trust overnight. The company's marketing business saw revenue of $29.8 million in the third quarter of 2025, built on established brand recognition, even while facing headwinds from poor organic search dynamics.

The regulatory maze in the US is where the real capital barrier kicks in. To operate legally, you need state-by-state licensing, and those fees are steep. This complexity forces new entrants to commit serious capital before they even see a dollar of revenue. Consider the initial outlay required just to get a seat at the table in key markets.

The financial commitment required for compliance is a major deterrent. A new, unscaled entrant would find it incredibly difficult to absorb these upfront costs while simultaneously trying to build the operational scale needed to compete on marketing spend or data infrastructure. The company's own Q3 2025 Adjusted EBITDA margin was 33%, and the revised full-year 2025 expectation hovers around 35%; achieving that level of profitability without the scale of Gambling.com Group Limited's existing platform is a tough ask.

The shift toward high-margin data services further raises the bar. New entrants must not only master affiliate marketing but also develop or acquire sophisticated sports data platforms. Gambling.com Group Limited's sports data services revenue hit $9.2 million in Q3 2025, growing 304% year-over-year and making up 24% of total revenue. This segment demands specialized technology and enterprise sales capabilities.

Here are some of the compliance and operational hurdles that act as deterrents:

• Maintaining KYC/AML compliance across multiple states.
• Securing and maintaining required technical software certifications.
• Establishing a U.S.-based legal entity and registered agent.
• Meeting minimum capital reserve requirements in certain jurisdictions.
• Implementing robust responsible gambling features and policies.

The capital expenditure for regulatory adherence alone acts as a significant moat. For instance, the company reported total cash of $7.4 million as of September 30, 2025, which, while modest, supports a much larger, established compliance infrastructure. A startup would need to raise substantial seed funding just to navigate the initial licensing phase in a few states, putting them years behind established players.