gentoomedia.com Alternatives: The Q2 2026 Peer Set

Gentoo Media’s genuine alternatives are the other listed iGaming affiliates, not content-marketing software. Q2 2026 filings put four of five peers in revenue decline, show EBITDA margin ranking independently of company size, and — at two firms four times apart in scale — put affiliate revenue at close to 11% of the deposit value they drove. This page compares them on disclosed numbers.

What is gentoomedia.com, and who are its actual peers?

Gentoo Media Inc is a listed iGaming affiliate. It carried the name Gaming Innovation Group Inc until a shareholder vote on 23 September 2024, after which it renamed to Gentoo Media and completed a legal split on 30 September 2024. The platform and sportsbook division left as GiG Software plc; what remained is a pure media and affiliate business, dual-listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (G2MNO) and Nasdaq Stockholm (G2M).

That history matters for anyone searching for alternatives, because it fixes the category. Gentoo does not sell content-management software, editorial workflow tooling or guest-post inventory. It acquires players for gambling operators and is paid out of what those players subsequently deposit and lose. A substitute has to do the same job. The companies that do are Better Collective, Grandstand (formerly Gambling.com Group), Catena Media and Raketech — all listed, all publishing quarterly numbers you can check rather than vendor claims you cannot.

Second-quarter 2026 reports for all five landed between 13 and 26 August 2026, which makes them directly comparable. The table below uses each company’s own disclosures.

How did the listed iGaming affiliates perform in Q2 2026?

Company	Q2 2026 revenue	YoY	EBITDA (adj. / pre-special)	Margin	Acquired players disclosed
Better Collective	EUR 89.1m	+9%	EUR 27m	30%	373,000 NDCs
Gentoo Media	EUR 22.9m	−9%	EUR 8.9m	39%	101,900 FTDs
Grandstand	USD 37.8m	−5%	USD 7.7m	~20%	not disclosed
Catena Media	EUR 9.5m	−1%	EUR 1.2m	13%	24,781 NDCs
Raketech	EUR 5.6m	−17.6%	EUR 1.3m	24%	not disclosed

Three things in that table are worth more than the revenue column.

Margin does not follow scale. Gentoo ran the highest margin in the group at 39% before special items, up from 34% a year earlier, on roughly a quarter of Better Collective’s revenue. Catena Media, the smallest euro-reporting affiliate here, ran 13%, down from 14%. Grandstand’s adjusted EBITDA of USD 7.7m on USD 37.8m works out near 20%, after a 44% year-on-year decline in that line. Whatever separates a 13% affiliate from a 39% affiliate, it is not size.

Growth and guidance moved in opposite directions at the same company. Gentoo’s EBITDA before special items rose 5% while revenue fell 9%, and it still cut full-year guidance to EUR 97–100m from EUR 105–115m, with EBITDA guidance reduced to EUR 44–47m from EUR 49–54m. Margin expansion was cost discipline, not demand. The market read it that way: the shares fell sharply on the day.

One company grew, and not through search. Better Collective’s 9% revenue growth came with sponsorship revenue up 39% and North American CPA revenue up 50% on prediction markets. Its EBITDA before special items rose 20%, lifting margin two percentage points to 30%.

What does a new depositing customer actually earn an affiliate?

Two of these companies disclose both revenue and the number of players they acquired, which lets you derive the figure neither of them prints: revenue per acquired player. A third, Catena Media, discloses it by segment, which turns out to explain most of the spread.

Metric	Gentoo Media	Better Collective	Catena Media
Acquired players (quarter)	101,900 FTDs	373,000 NDCs	24,781 NDCs
Revenue per acquired player	~EUR 225	~EUR 239	~EUR 383
Value of deposits driven	EUR 207m	EUR 836m	not disclosed
Deposits per acquired player	~EUR 2,031	~EUR 2,241	not disclosed
Revenue as share of deposits	11.1%	10.7%	not disclosed

Two findings come out of that arithmetic.

The first is the convergence in the bottom row. Gentoo Media earned 11.1% of the deposit value it drove; Better Collective earned 10.7%. These are independent companies with different market mixes, different commercial teams and a roughly fourfold difference in revenue, landing within 0.4 percentage points of each other. If you are modelling an affiliate book without access to a settlement feed, roughly 11% of driven deposit value is a defensible starting assumption — and a useful check on any counterparty quoting something far outside it.

The second is that the apparent efficiency gap between Catena and the other two is mostly product mix. Catena’s headline EUR 383 per NDC sits well above Gentoo’s EUR 225, but Catena reports its segments separately: EUR 8.5m of casino revenue on 20,342 casino NDCs works out at roughly EUR 418, while EUR 1.0m of sports revenue on 4,439 sports NDCs works out at roughly EUR 225. Casino players were worth about 1.85 times sports players in the same company, in the same quarter, under the same commercial terms. Gentoo’s and Better Collective’s blended figures — both sports-weighted businesses — sit almost exactly on Catena’s sports number. The spread is what the players were acquired for, not how well they were acquired.

Two caveats are load-bearing here. These are blended group figures, so revenue not paid per acquired player (Grandstand’s data services line, Better Collective’s sponsorship line, Raketech’s subaffiliation line) is inside the numerator and inflates the per-player result. And a quarter’s revenue is recognised revenue, not the cohort’s eventual value — which is the next problem.

Why do quarterly per-player figures understate what a player is worth?

Every figure above is a year-zero snapshot. On a revenue-share book, the cohort keeps paying for years, and the quarter in which it was acquired captures only the first slice.

Our own acquisition ledger is the check. Measuring a 2,932-player book across report-years 2020 to 2026, revenue accrual indexed to 1.00 in the acquisition year reached 4.58 by year six. Roughly 22% of the eventual six-year value was visible in year zero, and about 45% by the end of year one. Applied to the table above, a quarterly per-NDC figure is a floor on a revenue-share book, not an estimate of the asset.

This cuts in a specific direction when you are negotiating. A fixed CPA rate is a claim on a number that keeps moving, and the party quoting it is pricing against the full curve while the party accepting it usually sees only the first slice. The correct reading of EUR 383 per NDC is a ceiling on what an affiliate can pay to acquire that player today, not a description of what the player is worth.

The curve does not transfer everywhere. It came from a casino-led revenue-share programme; CPA-settled deals recognise nearly all value at conversion, and sports books decay differently. Nothing above should be applied to a sports-led book without re-measuring it.

What is actually changing across the category?

Four of the five shrank, and all four named the same cause. Catena Media’s chief executive attributed the quarter to industry-wide headwinds in organic search, describing it as a pause after several strong quarters. Grandstand now takes two-thirds of marketing revenue from non-SEO channels, and its sports data services line grew 12% while marketing revenue fell by double digits. Raketech is phasing out its paid publisher network inside the subaffiliation segment — the main driver of its 17.6% revenue decline — while affiliation marketing, at 71.8% of revenue, grew 1.9% sequentially on media-led products. Better Collective, the one grower, grew on sponsorship and revenue share rather than search.

The pattern is consistent: search-dependent revenue fell, and the lines that did not depend on search held or grew.

That shift is why we instrument our own properties for citation rather than rank. Across eight weekly observations between 17 July and 4 September 2026, this site’s Ahrefs Domain Rating moved from 14 to 13 and back to 14 — net zero — while followed referring domains roughly doubled, from 29 at first measurement to 58. Every one of the ten largest followed referrers was flagged as spam by Ahrefs, so that growth was unsolicited PBN accrual rather than link building. Conventional search moved on a different axis entirely: 5 clicks and 133 impressions in a 28-day window and 36 of 79 URLs indexed, with average position improving from 35.1 to 19.4 over the window after touching 12.7 in mid-August. In the same period the site recorded 156 Copilot citations in a 30-day window at Domain Rating 13.

We report that as a measurement, not a result. One engine, one small site, and citations are not clicks. But it is the reason we treat link-authority metrics as a poor predictor of visibility in answer engines, and it is the same structural break the listed companies are describing in their own language.

Which alternative fits which requirement?

The five are not interchangeable, and the disclosures point at different use cases.

• Volume at scale, sports-weighted. Better Collective acquired 373,000 depositing players in the quarter, more than three times Gentoo’s count, with an all-time-high EUR 836m of deposits behind it. It is the only one of the five that grew, and the growth was in sponsorship and North American revenue share.
• Margin efficiency. Gentoo Media converted 39% of revenue to EBITDA before special items, the highest in the group, alongside a record EUR 207m of driven deposits. The guidance cut is the offsetting fact and should be weighed against it.
• Casino-specific North American reach. Catena Media drew 97% of Q2 revenue from North America and 90% from casino, with casino NDCs up 35% year on year. Its per-NDC economics are the strongest in the set for casino specifically, at a group margin of 13%.
• Data and diversification. Grandstand is deliberately moving away from a pure-marketing model, with sports data services up 12% and a reiterated full-year outlook of USD 165–170m revenue and USD 45–50m adjusted EBITDA.
• Nordic and media-led. Raketech’s affiliation marketing segment grew 1.9% quarter on quarter on new media-led products and it is extending that model into Italy, its first expansion outside the Nordics.

Lucky Universe sits outside this set by design. We are not a listed acquisition business and publish no comparable revenue line; we operate a small editorial portfolio and instrument it for answer-engine citation, which is the measurement discipline described above rather than a competing volume claim. If you need acquired players at scale this quarter, the listed companies are the answer and the table shows what they disclose.

How should you check any of this yourself?

Every figure in this piece is derived from a public filing or a company announcement, and the derivations are deliberately shown so they can be refuted. Three habits make that checkable:

1. Read revenue and player counts from the same report. A per-player figure assembled from two different quarters, or from revenue in one report and NDCs in another, is not a rate.
2. Check the segment table before believing a blended figure. Catena’s EUR 383 looked like an efficiency story until the casino and sports lines were read separately.
3. Treat a quarterly figure as year-zero. On a revenue-share book, the acquisition quarter carried about 22% of six-year value on our own ledger, so the quarterly rate is a floor.

The numbers here describe Q2 2026 and will age. The method will not.