Fortuna Edge Media’s CEO and Co-Founder, Aidan Toolan (AT), sits down with SBC Americas (SBCA) to explain why the traditional affiliate model is changing, how technology and first-party data are reshaping acquisition strategies, and what the future holds for performance-driven growth in the gaming industry.
SBC Americas: For years, much of the affiliate market was built around capturing users through search intent. Do you think that model still reflects how betting and gaming consumers discover brands today?
Aidan Toolan: No, and the gap is widening fast. The affiliate model was built on a simple assumption: that consumers discover brands by searching for them. For a long time that held. It no longer does.
Discovery has moved upstream of search. Users now spend their time inside mobile apps, social feeds and digital ecosystems, and they form an impression of a brand long before they ever type a query, if they even type one at all. The intent the affiliate industry was built to capture is increasingly being formed somewhere else entirely.
AI is accelerating that shift. If I look at my own behaviour, I get most of my answers from AI-generated responses now rather than clicking through to a list of links. Millions of people are doing the same thing, and that changes the economics of search-led acquisition at a structural level.
The next generation of acquisition will be won by businesses that can reach users where their attention already sits, not by those waiting for users to arrive through a search engine.
SBCA: Has the role of the acquisition partner evolved beyond simply delivering traffic, and if so, what are operators expecting from partners in 2026?
AT: Significantly. For years, operators treated acquisition partners as a source of volume. Send traffic, report the clicks, repeat. That relationship is disappearing.
Operators now expect partners to contribute across the entire acquisition journey, not just at the moment of the click. The most valuable partners bring audience, data, attribution, optimisation, fraud prevention and compliance together into a single system, and they are measured on business outcomes rather than impressions.
The real shift is that the modern acquisition partner is moving away from affiliate marketing and towards acquisition infrastructure. The category is moving from supplying traffic to supplying infrastructure, and operators in 2026 are buying accordingly.
SBCA: Are operators becoming more focused on the quality and value of users acquired rather than the volume of traffic delivered?
AT: Yes, and it is one of the healthiest changes the market has been through. As the U.S. market has matured, operators have shifted their attention from how much traffic arrives to how good it is.
Five years ago, most acquisition conversations were about scale. Today they are about efficiency. Operators want to know how many users convert, how long they stay active, what they are worth over time and whether they are genuinely incremental. A million impressions mean very little if they do not produce valuable customers.
We see far more scrutiny now around player quality, retention and lifetime value than ever before.
SBCA: How important is first-party data becoming in helping operators acquire and retain valuable customers?
AT: First-party data is arguably the single most valuable asset an operator owns.
As privacy regulation tightens and third-party tracking struggles, the operators who understand and activate their own customer data will hold a real competitive advantage in both acquisition and retention. The value goes well beyond marketing.
We believe acquisition is increasingly going to be won at the intersection of first-party data, intelligent targeting and real-time optimisation. The operators who connect those three things will be in the strongest position to grow efficiently in a market that only gets more competitive.
SBCA: Where do you think the biggest inefficiencies still exist in the customer acquisition process for operators?
AT: The biggest one is that the industry still cannot reliably tell what is actually driving growth.
We have become very good at measuring attribution. But attribution and incrementality are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of budget quietly leaks. A channel can take credit for a conversion without having created the demand behind it.
Part of the difficulty is that customer journeys are now fragmented across apps, social platforms, web and multiple devices. Attribution has improved enormously over the last decade, but it still has a long way to go before it answers the question operators really care about.
SBCA: How would you describe Fortuna Edge Media’s position within the acquisition ecosystem today?
AT: From day one, our goal was never to build another content site or work inside the traditional affiliate model. We believed acquisition would come to be driven by technology, data, automation and mobile-first distribution, so that is what we built.
Over the last few years we have invested heavily in the foundations of what is now our Mobile User Acquisition Platform, or MUAP. The aim is to provide the infrastructure layer that lets operators acquire customers more efficiently, measure performance more accurately and scale more effectively. In practice, we help operators reach high-intent users in the mobile environments where traditional affiliate models struggle to compete, and we work as an extension of their acquisition teams.
We operate within the affiliate ecosystem today, but our long-term shape is much closer to a technology and SaaS business than a publisher. We believe the eventual winners in this space will be the companies that own the acquisition infrastructure rather than the companies that own the traffic. That is the category we have deliberately built Fortuna Edge Media to serve.
SBCA: Do you think the industry needs a new way of categorising performance-driven acquisition businesses?
AT: I think so. “Affiliate” served the industry well, but it was coined in an era when nearly every acquisition business was about content, publishing and traffic.
Today a large share of performance-driven businesses are building technology, running sophisticated campaigns and developing attribution capability that sits much deeper inside the operator’s acquisition process. Whether the industry lands on a single new label, I genuinely don’t know. What matters more is recognising that acquisition partners no longer all look the same.
SBCA: As operators become more disciplined with marketing spend, will the key question become whether a partner is creating new demand rather than simply claiming credit for users who were already going to convert?
AT: This will become the defining question of the next few years. For most of its history, the industry has asked who got the conversion. The harder and more valuable question is who created it.
Attribution tells you where a conversion was recorded. It does not tell you whether that conversion would have happened anyway. A partner can win the attribution report while having added nothing, simply by standing in the path of a customer who was already on their way.
As operators get more disciplined with spend, they are asking the tougher version of the question: did this channel bring in a genuinely new customer, or did it intercept one we were going to acquire regardless? We believe incrementality will become one of the most important concepts in acquisition, and the operators who understand it best will make the best investment decisions.
SBCA: Do you see attribution models becoming more sophisticated as operators seek clearer evidence of incremental growth?
AT: Without question. As operators get more focused on profitability, the pressure to move past traditional attribution and understand what is genuinely driving growth will only build.
The complication is that customer journeys have become much more layered. A user might touch several channels, platforms and devices before converting, and any single attribution model will miss most of that. So we expect operators to lean harder into incrementality testing, multi-touch attribution and proper customer-journey analysis. The goal is not to mark where the conversion landed. It is to understand which channels actually moved the outcome.
SBCA: Fortuna Edge Media has been nominated at the SBC Awards. What achievements over the past 12 months do you think contributed most to this recognition?
AT: Several factors have contributed, but the biggest has probably been our ability to execute on the vision we set out with when we started.
Over the last twelve months we have expanded our presence across the U.S. market, deepened partnerships with leading operators and grown our market access. That has let us scale our acquisition activity, widen our reach and further establish ourselves as a trusted acquisition partner. On growth, we have continued a run of strong double and triple-digit percentage expansion, driven by our focus on mobile-first acquisition and performance-led execution.
Most importantly, we kept investing in our Mobile User Acquisition Platform, which sits at the centre of the long-term vision. We believe acquisition will increasingly run on technology, automation and infrastructure, and MUAP is a major step towards that.
SBCA: Looking ahead, what do you think the acquisition landscape will look like in three to five years, and where does Fortuna Edge Media see itself within that evolution?
AT: In three to five years it will look fundamentally different from today.
The lines between affiliate marketing, performance marketing and acquisition technology will keep blurring until they are hard to tell apart. Operators will weigh incrementality, first-party data, automation and measurable outcomes far more heavily, and simply buying traffic and counting clicks will feel like a relic. Acquisition will stop being treated as a collection of separate channels and start being run as a single system, where audience, data, attribution, optimisation and compliance work together.
