Buy the traffic or build the brand? Paid vs organic in iGaming

Buy traffic or build a brand first? At AffPapa Conference Madrid 2026, a panel of an SEO and growth specialist, a head of affiliate marketing at a game provider, a director of publishing at a media group and the founder of a TikTok brand-growth agency answer by business model.

In this episode

• One panelist says operators should prioritise brand, while affiliates and B2B firms should start by buying traffic, because building awareness through Google search takes a long time (2:18, 2:44).

• Another warns that opening a partner program and inviting random affiliates without doing anything different leaves you "lost", even with unlimited budget (3:46).

• A panelist argues that ranking through SEO for terms like white label casino software is unrealistic "unless you invest millions", so small B2B brands should push paid traffic (7:42).

• Technical SEO matters from day one: sites must be easy to read for many different AI crawlers, and one panelist describes B2B providers whose sites took 10 to 15 seconds to load (9:27, 11:53).

• User-generated content is named the most underrated channel: language models read forums, and since unhappy users are the ones who post, they may conclude that 90% of comments about a brand are complaints (17:01, 17:42).

• On who wins, one panelist calls budget an "amplificator" of growth and says the performance-brand mix keeps shifting; another says the key is to stay adaptable (29:52, 30:28).

Panel from AffPapa Conference Madrid 2026 by AffPapa Media, published on YouTube.