Driving traffic to gambling and betting offers remains highly profitable – but traditional sources like Google and Facebook are becoming increasingly difficult to work with. Policies are tightening, accounts get banned in bulk, and competition continues to rise year after year.
Amid these challenges, adult traffic has emerged as a powerful and underutilized channel. In fact, over the last three years, we've seen a sharp increase in gambling brands actively entering adult ad networks. Today, gambling traffic on adult platforms has overtaken even dating in terms of volume, second only to WebCam verticals – a clear indicator of its profitability.
What makes this channel even more appealing is its flexibility. It's not just suitable for direct product promotion; it's also highly effective for affiliate marketers and media buyers. With a bit of creative work on your funnel and ad creatives, adult platforms can deliver strong conversion rates – often more easily than on mainstream networks like Google or Facebook.
Let’s Talk Numbers
To understand the scale of opportunity, let’s take a look at the data.
According to internal data from TrafficStars, one of the world’s leading adult advertising networks, ad impressions exceed 300 billion per month. This aligns with findings from third-party analytics platforms like SimilarWeb, which reports that 1 in every 10 websites visited globally is an adult site. Even slightly more conservative tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs estimate that adult traffic accounts for at least 6-8% of all web traffic worldwide.
In this article, we’ll explore how to successfully promote gambling and betting offers using adult traffic, highlight the differences between product-side campaigns and affiliate-driven strategies, discuss the vertical’s growth potential, and share what it takes to launch your first campaign effectively – all backed by our experience at TrafficStars.
Keep in mind that these figures are averages – in some GEOs, the share of adult traffic is even higher. For example, in India, xHamster ranks just behind Facebook in terms of traffic volume.
519M visits on xHamster vs. 534M on Facebook – in India alone
It’s also worth noting the significant overlap between the audiences of adult and gambling verticals. For example, the age distribution of the male audience on adult platforms mirrors gambling audience data almost perfectly. Of course, not every adult site visitor is a gambler – but nearly 99.9% of casino players do visit adult sites. The average user profiles across both verticals are nearly identical.
When it comes to female audiences, there are minor differences: around 38% of adult site users are women, compared to approximately 35% in gambling. However, the age group distribution is nearly identical, making segmentation much easier for media buyers and webmasters – no need to reinvent the targeting strategy from scratch.
There’s also a strong similarity in terms of device usage. As expected, the majority of traffic in both verticals comes from mobile devices. As for traffic distribution by tier, here’s how it looks:
Overall, traffic distribution by tier mirrors global population – meaning adult traffic is in demand worldwide, without skewing toward any single tier.
Here’s the translated and adapted version of this section for the TrafficStars blog, keeping a professional tone and positioning your platform as the authority:
Why Adult Traffic Works So Well for Gambling and Betting Campaigns
Beyond the nearly identical audience profiles and clear age distribution overlap between adult and gambling verticals, promoting gambling and betting offers through adult websites offers several key advantages:
1. Lower Costs
The cost per lead from adult platforms is significantly lower than what you’d pay on mainstream auction-based platforms like Facebook or Google. This not only improves ROI, but also gives advertisers more flexibility for granular targeting. Even highly specific targeting on adult traffic remains more affordable than broad targeting on Google or Facebook – we’ll dive deeper into this later, but it’s worth keeping in mind from the start.
2. No Account
Bans
This benefit affects more than just numbers – it also saves a great deal of time and stress. Instead of constantly worrying whether your campaign will be blocked or shut down, you can focus on optimizing performance. The only thing you really need to watch for is ad fatigue. There's no need for complex infrastructure or backup accounts, which streamlines the entire workflow.
3. Easy to Scale
This advantage builds on the previous one. With no need to maintain large farming teams, juggle payment cards, or invest in additional resources, scaling becomes much more accessible – especially for solo affiliates.
4. Format Variety
Adult platforms offer a wide range of high-performing formats such as video ads, popunders, and banners. Each can be tied to specific ad spots on a page, offering dozens of placement options right out of the gate. Layer in your landing or pre-landing pages, and the number of possible combinations multiplies – giving you more creative flexibility than any other platform, including Facebook or Google.
5. Flexible Targeting
Thanks to the combination of low costs and rich format variety, targeting on adult traffic becomes exceptionally effective. You can segment your audience not only through platform targeting settings, but also through the formats themselves. Even the most narrow targeting options still cost less than mainstream alternatives – enabling high ROI and premium traffic quality that any offer would welcome.
And the advantages of driving traffic to gambling and betting through adult platforms don’t end there. However, it’s important to understand that both affiliates and product owners use this source – meaning the benefits can differ depending on your approach.
Benefits of Using Adult Sites for Product Campaigns
When choosing a strategy focused on broad reach, it’s important to consider not only eCPA based on direct conversions but also the indirect impact on brand awareness and organic traffic. By showing your ads to millions of users, you’re not just chasing immediate FTDs – you’re building brand recognition, boosting search interest, and shaping future audience behavior. To track these effects, analyze data from tools like Google Analytics and Google Trends.
For example, investing $1,000 in SEO traffic might bring you 20 FTDs from 10,000 impressions, while the same $1,000 on adult platforms could yield 15 FTDs but reach 1,000,000 users. While the first option looks better by eCPA, the second can significantly boost brand awareness and drive organic conversions over time.
Additionally, adult sites offer several key advantages:
- Reliable Brand Exposure – It’s important to understand that before a user finds content they enjoy, they will see your creatives multiple times. On average, during a single session on an adult site, a user encounters the same brand 8 to 15 times – sometimes many more. This comfortably exceeds the minimum “7-10 exposures” needed to make an impression.
- Easy Expansion into New GEOs – Because gambling and betting ads aren’t banned and campaigns aren’t frequently blocked, you can confidently enter new GEOs and quickly build audiences in untapped markets.
- Micro-level Campaign Control – When advertising on Facebook, Google, or traditional teaser networks, advertisers usually can’t see exactly where their ads were shown. Adult sites, however, offer this transparency. At TrafficStars, we provide tools that allow advertisers to visit specific sites and replay the user journey – giving even greater control over campaigns.
Since 2020, the adult industry has undergone significant changes. As highlighted in the Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, the market has seen the rise of premium adult sites where content quality control is even stricter than on YouTube – uploading videos is no longer open to just anyone.
At TrafficStars, we ensure that brands advertising with us have their ads shown alongside high-quality, studio-produced content that undergoes thorough moderation. This not only builds audience trust but also strengthens brand reputation in a safe and well-controlled environment.
Plus, we provide our own in-house service for creating video creatives from scratch, making campaign setup faster and easier.
Advantages of Using Adult Sites for Traffic Arbitrage
At TrafficStars, we understand that unlike product marketers, arbitrageurs typically can’t run broad campaigns—mainly because affiliate programs rarely pay for reach rather than deposits. However, driving traffic to gambling and betting offers through adult sources remains extremely profitable for webmasters for several reasons:
- Minimal Competition – Compared to Facebook and Google, competition on adult sites is minimal. While many webmasters already advertise here, the space is far from saturated. This gives arbitrageurs a unique opportunity to grab the low-hanging fruit and test their boldest hypotheses, thanks to the low cost of traffic.
- Ease of Testing – Adult sites offer straightforward and reliable testing conditions. Because bans are rare, you get clear, continuous campaign data instead of fragmented statistics from banned accounts. Detailed targeting options let you adjust campaigns in just a few clicks. Plus, adding a pixel is easy and delivers more granular insights than Facebook’s pixel.
- Independence from Infrastructure – Many gambling and betting campaigns struggle with infrastructure issues like farming accounts and maintaining them. With adult sources, you don’t need this complex infrastructure, which makes scaling easier and more flexible.
- Targeting Automation – Using our platform, you can manage targeting either manually or automate it with our Optimizer tool. This flexibility supports advertisers still exploring the best converting networks and those who prefer full manual control.
These are just some of the key advantages we see for arbitrageurs using adult traffic. There are more benefits, but we’ll keep this overview focused and concise.
Which Approaches Convert Best When Driving Gambling and Betting Traffic from Adult Sites?
To determine the most effective approaches, we first look at the highest-converting ad formats: video creatives, pop-unders, and banners. All three formats can generate profit, but some patterns emerge depending on the tier of the GEO:
- In Tier-1 regions, banner ads perform the worst, making up only 7.8% of conversions.
- Pop-unders currently lead with 49.1% of conversions.
- Video creatives follow closely at 43.1%.
However, it’s important to note that over the last 1.5 to 2 years, video creatives have been steadily gaining ground on pop-unders. If this trend continues – as we see no reason why it wouldn’t – video ads are expected to become the clear conversion leader within the next year or so. This shift aligns with broader trends in digital advertising, not just within gambling and betting traffic from adult sites.
In Tier-2 regions, banners still hold a significant share, accounting for nearly one-third (29.2%) of conversions. Video ads follow closely with 30.5%, while pop-unders remain the leader at 40.3%. However, similar to Tier-1, video creatives and banners have only recently started gaining ground, so this trend is still unfolding.
The situation in Tier-3 is especially interesting: pop-unders dominate with a massive 82.7% share, while banners and video ads account for just 4.2% and 13.1%, respectively. This distribution is notable because, even here, there’s a clear trend of video creatives and banners gaining ground. Simply put, many advertisers in Tier-3 still underestimate the power of video formats. The growing demand for video ads each year confirms their effectiveness. This creates a rare opportunity for advertisers to leverage a proven tool in an environment with relatively low competition.
That said, when choosing the most converting approach, it’s important to remember that "conversion" means different things for different players. For a product owner, it might be a deposit or a brand mention. For an affiliate, it’s strictly deposits.
With that in mind, here’s how we break it down. If your campaign goal is:
Brand awareness – the best-performing strategy is combining popunders and video creatives at a 1:2 ratio, with a stronger emphasis on video. Why lean toward video if popunders are more widely used? Precisely because of that – lower competition means a better chance of sticking in the user's memory. For Tier-2, the ideal mix is 1:2:1 – popunders, video, and banners respectively.
Driving player deposits – while all formats can convert, video creatives are the clear winner here. First, because video taps into both visual and auditory perception. Second, because it evokes stronger emotions. This significantly increases the chance of immediate action – a user clicking through now rather than days later. Still, popunders shouldn’t be written off entirely – if left open in a browser tab, they often boost engagement simply through visibility.
How to Run Gambling and Betting Campaigns via Adult Networks
As a leading platform in the adult advertising space, we at TrafficStars often get asked how to effectively promote gambling and betting offers using adult traffic. Since this vertical is still relatively new and public case studies are scarce, we’re happy to share our perspective based on what we see across our platform every day.
First, it depends on who you are. Today, the biggest buyers of adult traffic are the gambling and betting products themselves – and that’s no surprise. For them, adult networks offer massive reach without the headaches of moderation, account bans, or infrastructure challenges that come with FB*, Google, or SEO.
Speaking specifically about TrafficStars traffic, we see that it’s actively used by these brands for launching into new markets, running retention campaigns, building brand awareness, and scaling reach. Judging by the growth in gambling and betting traffic volumes on our side – it’s working very well.
What about affiliate media buyers?
Affiliates may not buy in the same volumes as direct advertisers, but they’re still very active in adult teaser networks like ours. Most often, they start with banner ads that drive interested users to pre-landers. From there, they either warm the users up or drop a pixel for retargeting – then follow up with popunders to close the loop. Those who manage to fine-tune targeting for a specific GEO tend to scale efficiently and profitably.
Why are popunders still leading if video creatives convert better?
In our opinion, popunders remain popular simply because they’re easy to launch and understand. But that also means there’s more competition. Meanwhile, we’ve seen consistent growth in video pre-roll volumes across all three tiers. In Tier-1, they’re already catching up to popunders. Growth in Tier-3 is slower, but it’s happening – it’s only a matter of time before video becomes the top-performing format across the board.
How much budget does it take to get started with gambling traffic via adult sources?
If you’re starting from scratch – meaning you need to test and learn – we recommend budgeting $500–$1,000 to properly test one placement (spot) using the common 100 clicks per 10 conversion rule of thumb. If you already have a proven funnel and just need traffic, it’s possible to start seeing profit with as little as $100. That said, we can’t overstate the importance of testing – creative angles, targeting combinations, and landing flows. The good news is: testing on TrafficStars is significantly cheaper than on Facebook or Google.
Wrapping Up
To summarize, running gambling and betting traffic through adult ad networks is a highly promising direction. Many products are already leveraging it extensively, and the fact that the share of gambling traffic is growing exponentially each quarter only proves the effectiveness of this source. For media buyers, the opportunity is even more exciting – they can tap into a proven yet far-from-saturated traffic channel, with low competition, affordable CPMs, and granular targeting options.
