New Zealand is About to Ban Affiliate Marketing for Online Casinos. Here is What That Means.
New Zealand is regulating online casino gambling for the first time, and the framework it has chosen is one of the most restrictive any market has proposed for affiliate marketing. Affiliate arrangements and paid influencer endorsements will both be prohibited under the Online Casino Gambling Bill, which was introduced to Parliament in June last year and is expected to pass later in 2026.
The details, outlined by Paul James, Secretary for Internal Affairs, during a presentation at the Regulating The Game conference in Sydney this week, describe a deliberately tight market: a maximum of 15 operating licences, a competitive auction process expected in September, mandatory suitability assessments for all applicants, a ban on credit card and buy-now-pay-later gambling payments, and single-slot-at-a-time restrictions for players. Only licensed operators will be permitted to advertise to New Zealand consumers at all. The maximum fine for illegal advertising will rise from NZD10,000 to NZD5 million for corporate offenders.
The affiliate ban is explicit and total. No affiliate arrangements. No paid endorsements. The two acquisition channels that have become standard infrastructure for online gambling operators in most regulated markets globally are both closed from day one.
Why this market matters to that decision
New Zealand’s starting position explains why the framework looks the way it does. The country has not had a regulated domestic online casino market. While running an online casino from within New Zealand has been illegal, residents have faced no restriction on playing at offshore platforms. Government estimates put Kiwi spending on online casino gambling at around NZD1.3 billion ($790 million) last year, with the majority of that flowing to overseas operators entirely outside New Zealand’s harm-prevention framework. Online casino gambling grew by roughly 10 percent last year alone.
The government is not opening this market because it wants to; it is opening it because the offshore activity is already happening at scale and it has no tools to manage the harm from it. The regulated framework is an attempt to capture that activity, subject it to player protection requirements, and use the licensing architecture to enforce standards that currently cannot be applied to offshore operators at all.
That context shapes the affiliate decision. A regulator building a new framework from scratch, with harm minimisation as an explicit primary objective, looks at affiliate marketing and sees a distribution channel that operates with considerable independence from the licensed operator. Paid endorsements from influencers, comparison sites earning commissions per acquisition, affiliates with SEO strategies designed to surface gambling content to high-intent searchers: all of these are effective, all of them have documented connections to player acquisition among vulnerable demographics, and none of them sit cleanly inside the operator-to-regulator accountability line.
Banning them removes the complexity. It also removes the acquisition infrastructure that the offshore market has relied on.
A pattern that is building across markets
New Zealand is not the first jurisdiction to restrict affiliate marketing as part of gambling regulation, and it will not be the last. Ontario’s regulated market, which launched in 2022, banned the public display of inducements entirely, forcing affiliates operating in that market to strip bonus and offer language from their content and restructure their promotional approach. As we covered in our analysis of how Ontario’s iGaming laws affected affiliates, the result was not the elimination of affiliate activity but a meaningful change in what it could look like: more product comparison, less bonus-led acquisition.
Brazil’s iGaming law, now in full effect, requires operators to register all affiliate partners formally, with regulator-approved disclaimers on all promotion. The direction in the Netherlands and Germany has been similar: progressively tighter constraints on affiliate content, advertising standards applied to affiliates directly rather than just to operators, and enforcement that does not stop at the licensed brand. We have tracked this trajectory in our 2025 regulatory update for iGaming affiliates, and the New Zealand bill is a further point on the same curve.
What New Zealand has done differently is draw the line at the channel itself rather than the content within it. Most regulators have imposed conditions on affiliate marketing. New Zealand has ruled it out entirely within the licensed framework.
What this means in practice for affiliates
For iGaming affiliates who have been watching New Zealand as a potential market opportunity, the bill as proposed closes the licensed channel completely. There is no version of compliance-adjusted affiliate marketing available here. The regulated operators who secure one of the 15 licences will not be running affiliate programs. The acquisition strategy will be direct advertising only, by licensed operators only.
That has a secondary effect worth noting. The offshore market that currently serves New Zealand players will still exist after December 1, 2026. Unlicensed offshore operators will face enforcement tools including payment provider restrictions and takedown notices to social media platforms and ISPs. Whether that enforcement is effective against determined offshore operators remains to be tested. If it is not fully effective, the affiliate sites and influencer partnerships currently driving New Zealand traffic to offshore casinos will continue operating, just in a legally grey or outright prohibited position relative to the new framework.
The dynamic is not unlike what we are currently seeing in the UK, where compliance costs on licensed operators are significant and the unlicensed sector faces comparably little friction. New Zealand has the advantage of designing its enforcement tools from the outset with that gap in mind, but the offshore affiliate ecosystem does not disappear because a domestic framework goes live.
For affiliates currently operating comparison sites, SEO-driven casino content, or influencer partnerships that reach New Zealand audiences, the practical question is whether their activity falls within the scope of the new advertising prohibitions. The bill allows authorities to issue takedown notices to social media platforms and ISPs for illegal advertising of unlicensed services. Affiliates directing New Zealand traffic to offshore operators after December 2026 should take legal advice on where exactly that sits. Our compliance tips for iGaming affiliates offer a baseline framework, though specific legal advice for the New Zealand jurisdiction will be essential.
The broader lesson for the industry
New Zealand joining the list of newly regulated markets is a meaningful development in itself. But the specific choices made in this framework, the hard cap on licences, the credit card ban, the duty-of-care requirement, and the affiliate prohibition, collectively describe what a harm-first regulatory philosophy looks like when applied to online gambling from a clean slate.
Every market that opens under this kind of framework creates less room for the affiliate acquisition model that much of the industry has been built on. That does not make those markets commercially unattractive. It does change who benefits from their opening. The 15 operators that secure New Zealand licences will have a protected domestic market with limited competition and no affiliate spend competing for the same players. That is a different commercial proposition from a market that opens with competitive licensing and affiliate-driven acquisition. The value accrues to the operators, not the distribution layer.
As we have covered in our analysis of how the iGaming affiliate sector is adapting to new regulations and technologies, the affiliates building durable businesses in this environment are those treating compliance as a competitive advantage rather than a constraint. New Zealand does not offer that trade-off. It removes the channel entirely.
For iGaming affiliates watching how global regulation is developing, New Zealand is another data point in a trend we have been tracking consistently: new markets are not opening on the same terms as the markets that built this industry’s affiliate infrastructure. Understanding those differences early is the starting point for building a strategy that survives them. Our iGaming market predictions set out where the remaining opportunities are for affiliates willing to adapt to these tighter conditions.
