Affilka H1 2026 Report: Sportsbook GGR Growth Stands Out

Key Points

• Affilka has handled over 2.17 billion unique visits during H1 2026, up 48.64% year-over-year, taking the total traffic number of the platform above 11.3 billion.
• Affiliate Sportsbook GGR has increased 42.32% year-over-year within the Affilka ecosystem, nearly doubling the 22.07% growth registered by the casino segment during the same period.
• Deposit transactions have amounted to 81.8 million during H1 2026, up 38.65% and significantly surpassing the growth of first-time deposits, which is only 13%.

The traffic number alone would be enough to fill most platform reports. More than 2.17 billion unique visits handled within six months, with an increase of 48.64% year-on-year, is a genuine headline. But the quiet fact hidden behind it is a vertical breakdown that reveals much more interesting facts regarding the concentration of affiliate income. And once you uncover it, the traffic number becomes irrelevant.

Affilka, the affiliate management platform developed by SOFTSWISS and launched in 2018, released its performance report for H1 2026 on 11 September 2026. This report refers to the period when the platform managed more than 480 active brands compared to 400 in H1 2025 within a network of 621,869 registered affiliates.

H1 2026 by the Numbers

The core dataset sits below. Every figure is drawn from Affilka’s primary H1 report.

The Deposit Gap That Needs a Closer Look

Most coverage of this report treats the FTD and deposit figures as a single, clean retention story. The gap between them is real; 3.92 million FTD transactions against 81.8 million total deposit transactions yields roughly 20.9 deposit transactions for every FTD transaction recorded during the period. That ratio is significant on its face.

For Affilka, this suggests good retention rates as well as increased value. Perhaps their reasoning is correct. However, what the public disclosure fails to reveal is the exact number of unique players making deposits; hence, we cannot use that ratio to make calculations per individual player’s deposits. This is not the same measurement. It may be that the spike in deposit volume is attributed to all the player base or a certain portion of the higher frequency players who bet a lot of times.

Sportsbook GGR Grew at Nearly Twice the Casino Rate

It is in this section where the most consideration must be paid. Total affiliate GGR from the Affilka platform was up 22.76%. Casino GGR was up 22.07%, while Sportsbook GGR was up 42.32%. This twenty percentage point spread in numbers between two verticals within one ecosystem cannot be ignored even if the whole truth behind the situation is not fully known yet.

In terms of context for this situation, the online gambling industry market report by Track360 in July 2026 revised its GGR projection estimate up to around $121 billion for 2026, where sportsbook accounted for 35% of the total GGR on the global level and increased at about 14% annually at the global level. The 42.32% growth for affiliate sportsbook from Affilka outpaced the global figures, though the figures themselves are not directly comparable.

An entirely separate entity, BETBY, in the H1 2026 report from this independent sportsbook provider, reported 42.7% sportsbook GGR growth year-to-date. Again, another piece of corroboration from a separate company, but not a signal of structural change for the global sportsbook market itself.

What Does the StatsDrone Data Actually Shows?

Apart from the H1 ranking of Affilka, it takes first place in the Q2 2026 StatsDrone Affiliate Software Report created jointly by NousViz and StatsDrone. This recognition is important since the report is a StatsDrone and NousViz dataset; Affilka assisted with the creation of the report but neither creates it nor owns it.

Covering 2,669 affiliate programs and 3,715 active brands in 51 different affiliate platforms, the report puts Affilka in 418 programs with a 19.02% market share of non-proprietary software. It gives Affilka an edge of 34 programs over the closest competitor. Affilka had 142 programs covered in May 2024 with a 194.4% growth rate within about 26 months. According to Angelika Antonova, Head of Sales at Affilka, switching from proprietary solutions to special affiliate software by operators is what drives the growth.

Just one aspect that comes to light from the report: MyAffiliates leads on the active brand number. This shows that program adoptions and operator reach are two different metrics. Both are equally important – confusing them inflates the meaning of the growth of programs.

Three Weeks After the H1 Report

On 30 September 2026, nineteen days after publishing its H1 data, Affilka launched cohort analytics and API-driven campaign creation for affiliate accounts, tools previously available only to operators. Hleb Bichan, Head of Product at Affilka, described the change directly: “Opening up cohort reporting and API campaign generation directly to affiliates fundamentally changes how large-scale partners operate. They no longer need to guess the lifetime value of their traffic or waste hours manually generating links.”

The release is a separate development, not a pre-report product launch. Its relevance is that affiliates now have access to the same data depth operators rely on, which in theory allows them to validate traffic quality claims independently, including the retention interpretation Affilka applies to its own H1 deposit data.

Expert Analysis

We find the 42.32% sportsbook GGR figure significant, but it surfaces a question the H1 report leaves unanswered. If sportsbook is already the fastest-growing vertical inside Affilka’s own ecosystem, growing at nearly double the rate of casino, why does the H2 strategic roadmap address LatAm, Asia and emerging European expansion in general terms without a sportsbook-first commercial framing for those specific markets? Track360’s data puts sportsbooks at 35% of global online GGR and growing faster than casinos across most regulated markets globally. Affilka’s own numbers confirm that same pattern inside its network. Announcing regional expansion without a vertical-specific positioning in the category that is already accelerating fastest feels like a gap worth probing.

Our second concern is the retention narrative built around the deposit-to-FTD ratio. We do not dispute that a 38.65% deposit surge against 13% FTD growth is a meaningful gap; it almost certainly reflects real player engagement. What we would push back on is accepting it as platform-wide evidence of superior retention without cohort-level data, unique depositing-player counts, or geographic breakdowns to support it. The public report does not include any of those. What Affilka offers is its own interpretation of its own aggregated numbers, which is a reasonable starting point, but not the same thing as independently verified retention performance. The cohort analytics tool Affilka just opened to affiliates could theoretically produce that evidence. Whether operators or affiliates share those findings publicly in H2 remains the more interesting open question.