On an earnings call after Gambling.com Group posted record quarterly revenue, CEO Charles Gillespie said the effects of Google’s algorithmic shift have been “less pronounced” than expected.
In a March update, the search engine began cracking down on expired domain abuse, tightened rules around third-party pages published on more established sites, and took a tougher stance on what it terms scaled content abuse. Google defines scaled content abuse as, “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.”
The expectation was that this may damage gambling affiliates, which often publish scores of pages with keyword-dense content to rank for specific terms. Google specified that the rule was not just about targeting AI-generated content pages but also human pages with little value to the reader.
Gillespie told investors that although the Google shift had been a challenge to overcome, Gambling.com has not felt as severe an impact as it had been bracing for.
“Google started to deprioritize content from most media partnerships,” Gillespie told investors. “This had an immediate impact on contributions from our media partnerships, which led to the conservative guidance revision we provided on our Q1 call.
“The difference in our Q2 performance compared to the expectations we provided on May 16 is primarily due to the fact that our team was able to respond immediately to the changes and recalibrate our portfolio of owned and operated sites faster than had been initially expected. To date, the effects of the Google policy shift have also been less pronounced than originally expected.”
‘Bright future’ for media partnerships
Gillespie was speaking on Thursday’s call after Gambling.com Group posted record quarterly revenue of $30.5 million (up 18% year-over-year) and adjusted EBITDA of $11.2 million (up 19%).
Gillespie is far from fatalistic on the future of Gambling.com Group’s media partnerships. In fact, he told investors that he believes there is a bright future for the partnerships as long as the company is selective with its deals.
“Moving forward, we now expect cost of sales related to media partnerships to be approximately $6.5 million for the full year 2024 versus the previous guidance of $4.7 million,” he added. “From our perspective, there absolutely remains a bright future for these media partnerships, if they’re the right partnerships. The wheat has been separated from the chaff, big time.”
Gambling.com Group expects no quick impacts of Google monopoly ruling
Gillespie was also asked about the recent court ruling that found that Google has violated U.S. antitrust laws by acting as an illegal monopoly on internet searches.
If the ruling is upheld, the decision could change how Google makes its search engine available to users, as well as how SEO professionals like affiliates operate.
However, Gillespie does not expect any quick impacts on Gambling.com’s business.
“Absolutely nothing is going to happen imminently,” he said. “It might be five years, it might be 10 years before anything happens. Five and 10 years is a long time in technology.”
Gillespie added that despite the proliferation of generative AI and AI-enabled searches, the company’s Google traffic “is higher than ever.”
“Nothing has changed. That obviously gives a lot of confidence, more than a year into the new kind of era of generative AI, that traditional search [and AI are] simply two different products. It’s two different things in two different use cases and people are clearly continuing to use Google in the way they have for a long time.
“I don’t frankly see the search business being terribly impacted, but ask me again in five years.”
