Social media has become a massive social media platform in recent years. People both young and older are using social media daily to get their fix of beautiful pictures and visual pleasure. Naturally, with so many eyeballs on the app, the online advertising and marketing industry has also taken notice.
Whenever you are scrolling social media, you can expect to be bombarded by promotional material. Some of this is in-your-face, others are more discreet. In this article, we take a look at a phenomenon called casino affiliating and how it pertains to social media. In addition, we also go over the proverbial rise and fall of Finnish social media casino affiliates in particular.
Anyone who still has a television knows that television programs tend to be full of commercials. Every 15 to 20 minutes or so, your regularly scheduled programming is interrupted by an array of TV ads, hoping to sell you on any number of random products. More often than not, these ads actually showcase products that you might not even be in the target audience for.
Affiliate marketing is a bit different from traditional marketing.
In affiliate marketing, the ads are not supposed to interrupt what you are doing. Instead, they are supposed to come to you simultaneously when you are consuming what you were wanting to consume. In a sense, affiliate marketing is not that far from product placement, where products and logos are conveniently placed in the background in a movie or a TV show. Product placement is also when your favorite character is drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola or munching on a Snickers bar.
On social media, affiliate marketing often includes social media stars using and showcasing certain products. For instance, a supermodel might be wearing the newest Gucci sunglasses or carrying around a bag from Louis Vuitton. More often than not, these products have been given to the influencers who are happy to give their followers a discount code to buy the same products themselves.
Whenever a follower clicks the link and buys what the social media influencer is advertising, the influencer gets a small cut of the proceeds. This way, the product manufacturer and the influencer both benefit. Of course, in the best case scenario, the person making the actual purchase will also be happy with their choice.
For casino companies, affiliate marketing is an extremely important way of promotion. In Finland, one popular affiliate is verovapaatnettikasinot.net. This website reviews several Finnish online casinos, providing links to their pages for those wanting to find tax-free and safe alternatives. For every customer that clicks the links and ends up depositing money, the website gets a small piece of the pie.
Typically, online casino affiliates can only be found on Google. Much like casinos themselves, casino affiliates have limited legal ways to market their products. Because of this, some casinos as well as affiliates might turn to social media to spread their message.
In Finland, online casino gambling is especially popular. As a result, there used to be a time when many casino companies would contact social media influencers to do some marketing for them. This caused a snowball effect with several Finnish top stars posting links to casinos, claiming they were using them to go for huge jackpots.
In a small and sparsely populated country like Finland, social media is incredibly popular. The top Finnish social media influencers can have hundreds of thousands of followers. This is also the reason why some online casinos were quick to gain thousands of new customers through influencers on platforms such as social media and Facebook.
However, the glory days of Finnish social media marketing for casinos turned out to be short-lived. This is because Finland, even to this day, maintains a full-fledged state-run monopoly on gambling. This monopoly is set to end at the start of 2027, but for now, the only organization that is allowed to market gambling to Finnish audiences is the state-owned Veikkaus.
A handful of years ago, several Finnish social media influencers would receive takedown notices from the National Police Board of Finland, threatening to take legal action unless all casino affiliate marketing on their accounts was terminated. Ultimately, this marked the end of the Finnish casino affiliate marketing business on platforms such as social media.
Nowadays, those participating in affiliate marketing are required to follow strict rules on just about any social media platform. To keep things transparent, the inclusion of any promotional material must be disclosed at the start of every post. This way, the followers will always know when they are looking at an ad instead of a completely genuine and unbiased recommendation.