Cost Per FTD: What Clipping Actually Costs an iGaming Operator vs Affiliate CPA

An FTD is a first-time depositor: a registered player who has funded an account with real money. Cost per FTD is total acquisition spend divided by the FTDs produced in the same period.

Four related terms recur across operator and affiliate contracts. NGR is net gaming revenue, what the operator keeps after bonuses, taxes and fees. GGR is gross gaming revenue, before those deductions. CPA is a fixed fee paid per FTD. Revenue share pays a partner a percentage of NGR for as long as the player keeps playing, and a hybrid deal pays a smaller CPA plus a smaller percentage.

Operators manage to cost per FTD rather than to cost per registration, because a registration that never funds returns nothing.

The metric travels between channels, so a media buyer, an affiliate manager and an agency running how iGaming brands market without ads can all be held to one figure.

A Tier-1 casino FTD bought through affiliates costs USD 150 to USD 400, median USD 250, according to affiliate-tracking platform Track360's Affiliate Commission Rates Benchmark 2026, published July 18, 2026. Sportsbook sits lower, USD 120 to USD 350.

Read the Track360 benchmark for what it is. The figure comes from a tracking platform, not from a regulatory return or an audited filing, and no sample size is published with it. The benchmark is still the most specific published number in the category, and operators negotiate inside those bands every week, so it is the right reference point. It is not a fact about your own account.

Revenue share does not compare head to head with CPA and should never be averaged against it. A CPA deal ends when the fee is paid; revenue share at 25 to 45 percent of NGR keeps paying for the life of the player. Published operator rate cards line up with that band: Rewards Affiliates lists 25, 30 and 35 percent tiers, and 1xBet advertises up to 40 percent. An operator who converts revenue share into an implied cost per FTD is assuming a player lifetime, and that assumption does more work than the percentage does.

Three listed operators spent a combined USD 5.22 billion on sales and marketing in FY2025. DraftKings reported USD 1.3799 billion, Flutter Entertainment USD 3,678 million and Rush Street Interactive USD 164.7 million.

Company FY2025 filings; the percentages are Lumina's own arithmetic on the filed revenue lines.

Three caveats stop those ratios being targets. All three companies report a single combined sales-and-marketing line, so none discloses advertising separately from sales headcount and none breaks spend out by channel. Flutter's percentage sits on a global revenue base while DraftKings and Rush Street Interactive are weighted to the United States and Canada, so the denominators are not the same kind of number. And a marketing ratio moves with a company's size and funding position at least as much as with how well it buys media, as covered in why every benchmark gives a different marketing number.

What the filings are useful for is scale. The money is real, concentrated in a handful of operators, and none of it is currently reported against a channel called clipping.

Better Collective booked 308,000 new depositing customers in Q1 2026, with 77 percent of its partnerships on revenue share rather than fixed CPA. Its revenue mix for the quarter breaks down as 47 percent revenue share, 25 percent CPA, 16 percent sponsorship, 7 percent CPM and 5 percent subscription. Only a quarter of what the largest listed affiliate earns arrives as a fixed fee per depositor.

An operator who models the affiliate channel as a single CPA number is modeling a quarter of it.

Dividing an affiliate's revenue by the depositors it delivered gives a ceiling rather than a rate. Whatever the affiliate earns per depositor is the most the operator can be paying that partner, and a CPA negotiation that lands above the ceiling is one the operator has already lost. Gambling.com Group booked 98,000 new depositing customers in Q4 2025 alone, on FY2025 revenue of USD 165.4 million, and reports performance marketing at 62 percent of revenue. Do that division carefully: the 98,000 covers one quarter and the 62 percent covers a full year, so the two figures do not divide into each other.

Operators do publish CPA bands, which is worth knowing before a negotiation. DraftKings' own affiliate program publishes a USD 100 to USD 300 band for sportsbook signups, per influenceradvisory.com.

The chain has five steps, and four of them are rates the operator has to choose.

The CPM choice matters more than the funnel does. Forbes reported clipping at USD 100 to USD 1,000 per million views on April 26, 2026, and ClipFlip publishes USD 200 per million for the gambling category. Per thousand views, the Forbes band is USD 0.10 to USD 1.00 and the ClipFlip figure is USD 0.20, and both are creator payout rates. USD 3.00 is used here as a deliberately high managed-campaign figure so the model does not flatter itself, and real clipping campaign pricing is quoted per campaign. At a lower CPM every cost per FTD falls in proportion.

Start with the case that loses, and plan on it, because it contains no assumption anybody has to defend.

At a 0.10 percent view-to-visit rate, a 5 percent registration rate and a 15 percent deposit rate, 12,000,000 views produce 12,000 visits, 600 registrations and 90 FTDs. That is USD 400.00 per FTD, well above the affiliate median.

At a 0.15 percent view-to-visit rate, 6 percent registration and 20 percent deposit, the same 12,000,000 views produce 18,000 visits, 1,080 registrations and 216 FTDs. That is USD 166.67 per FTD, which beats the affiliate median comfortably.

At 0.35 percent, 9 percent and 30 percent, the campaign produces 42,000 visits, 3,780 registrations and 1,134 FTDs, at USD 31.75 each. No published dataset measures a view-to-deposit rate for clip traffic. Not Track360, not Forbes, not any operator filing. The bottom row is a planning ceiling, not a forecast, and an agency that quotes it as one is selling an assumption.

USD 36,000 a month, 12 million views, Lumina's own arithmetic. View-to-visit, registration and deposit rates of 0.10 / 5 / 15%, 0.15 / 6 / 20% and 0.35 / 9 / 30%.

At the USD 250 Tier-1 median, a USD 36,000 campaign has to produce 144 FTDs to match what the same money buys through affiliates. Against 12,000,000 views, that is 1.2 FTDs per 100,000 views. That is the whole test.

Set the three cases against that threshold. The case to plan on delivers 0.75 FTDs per 100,000 views and loses. The mid case delivers 1.8 and wins. The ceiling delivers 9.45 and has never been measured. Restate the threshold against your own negotiated CPA rather than the median. Restate it again after the geo haircut: if only 40 percent of views land in licensed markets, the same 144 FTDs have to come out of 4,800,000 views, so break-even moves from 1.2 per 100,000 delivered views to 3.0 per 100,000 licensed views. Clear that number and clipping is cheaper than your affiliate program. Miss it and it is not, whatever the view count says.

The risk framing gets this backwards. A CPA deal converts a variable cost into a fixed one at USD 250 a head, and clipping converts it into a fixed one at USD 36,000 a month regardless of outcome. The question is not who carries the risk. It is which fixed number is smaller at your conversion rates.

The affiliate CPA and the modeled clipping cost only mean something against what a first-time depositor is worth. DraftKings reported average revenue per monthly unique payer of USD 139 for Q4 2025, across 4.8 million monthly unique payers. Rush Street Interactive reported average revenue per monthly active user of USD 331 in the United States and Canada for FY2025, against USD 32 in Latin America. A USD 250 acquisition cost is roughly 1.8 times DraftKings' quarterly per-payer figure and under a year of Rush Street's US and Canada figure, on Lumina's own arithmetic. Neither figure is a lifetime value, and no source publishes lifetime value split by acquisition source, so payback period is the available test.

Short-form platforms restrict gambling links, so a deposit rarely carries a clean path back to the clip that caused it. Three reads work without one.

Agree the measurement window, the holdout market and the reconciliation lag with the agency before the campaign starts, not after the first invoice. There is more on the mechanics in how to measure a clipping campaign.

The Cost Per FTD Break-Even Model below runs the same arithmetic on your own inputs. Here it is in full as text.

At 12,000,000 views delivered, a 0.10 percent view-to-visit rate gives 12,000 visits, a 5 percent registration rate gives 600 registrations, and a 15 percent deposit rate gives 90 FTDs. On a USD 36,000 budget that is USD 400.00 per FTD, or 0.75 FTDs per 100,000 views. Break-even against a USD 250 CPA needs 144 FTDs, which is 1.2 per 100,000 views. If only 40 percent of those views land in licensed markets, the usable base is 4,800,000 and the cost per FTD multiplies by 2.5 to USD 1,000.00.

The verdict thresholds are the same in the tool and here. At or below your entered CPA is green. Up to 20 percent above it is amber. More than 20 percent above it is red.

Track360, Affiliate Commission Rates Benchmark 2026, July 18, 2026.

DraftKings, Flutter Entertainment and Rush Street Interactive FY2025 filings; DraftKings Q4 2025 filing.

Better Collective Q1 2026 report. Gambling.com Group FY2025 results.

Forbes, April 26, 2026. ClipFlip, May 3, 2026.

Rewards Affiliates and 1xBet published affiliate rate cards, 2026. influenceradvisory.com, DraftKings affiliate CPA band.

Every figure on this page is either a filed number, a named published benchmark, or arithmetic shown in full. What is missing from the category is a measured view-to-deposit rate, and it will stay missing until operators run the geo cohorts and publish. Lumina Clippers runs a network of 62,000 vetted clippers, as reported by Forbes on July 23, 2026.