At the earnings conference following the announcement of Gambling.com Group’s record quarterly revenue, CEO Charles Gillespie noted that the impact of Google’s algorithm changes was “less significant” than anticipated.
In March, Google released an update aimed at combating abuses of expired domains, tightening rules for third-party pages on prominent sites, and taking a firmer stance against what it terms “scaled content abuse.” This term refers to “the creation of numerous pages aimed at manipulating search rankings rather than providing useful information to users.”
It was anticipated that this could harm affiliate marketers in the gambling sector, who often create dozens of keyword-rich pages to rank for specific queries. Google clarified that the rule applies not only to AI-generated content but also to human-written pages that offer little value to readers.
Gillespie informed investors that, despite the challenging nature of Google’s changes, Gambling.com did not experience the significant impact the company had prepared 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 spoke on a conference call Thursday after Gambling.com Group reported a record quarterly revenue of $30.5 million (an 18% increase from the previous year) and adjusted EBITDA of $11.2 million (a 19% rise).
Gillespie is not pessimistic about the future of Gambling.com Group’s media partnerships. On the contrary, he assured investors that the partnerships have a bright future, provided the company takes a careful approach to selecting 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 also commented on the recent court ruling that Google violated U.S. antitrust laws by operating as an illegal monopoly in the internet search space.
If the ruling is ultimately upheld, it could change the way Google delivers its search engine to users and impact the work of SEOs, including affiliates.
However, Gillespie does not expect any immediate impact 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 rise of generative AI and AI-powered search, Google’s traffic is “higher than it’s ever been.”
“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.”
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