Most iGaming affiliate programmes run on Revenue Share, Cost Per Acquisition, or a hybrid of the two. Revenue Share pays the affiliate a percentage of a player's net losses over time. CPA pays a fixed amount per depositing player, once, regardless of what happens afterwards. Jolly First runs on neither. This is worth explaining directly rather than leaving as an unstated positioning line.
The mechanical problem with Revenue Share
Under Revenue Share, the affiliate's income rises as the referred player loses more money. The commercial incentive of the party writing the recommendation is directly opposed to the financial interest of the reader following it. This is not a hypothetical conflict; it is the mechanical structure of the payment. An affiliate operating under Revenue Share has no financial reason to prefer an operator with stronger responsible-gambling tools over one without them, provided both convert traffic at similar rates, because the metric that determines the affiliate's income is losses, not player wellbeing.
The different problem with CPA
CPA removes the ongoing exposure to losses but replaces it with a different distortion: the affiliate is paid for the deposit event itself, which rewards volume of acquisition over quality or suitability of the match between player and operator. Under CPA, a marginal or high-risk player converted quickly pays the same as a well-suited long-term player, so there is no structural incentive to prefer the latter.
What a fixed retainer changes, and what it does not
Jolly First operates on a fixed monthly retainer with the operators it works with. The fee does not move with player losses, deposit volume, or session length. This does not make Jolly First's assessments neutral in some absolute sense; the site is still commercially engaged with the operators it lists, and that should be stated plainly rather than obscured. What the retainer model removes is the specific mechanism by which most of the industry's commission structures reward outcomes that are bad for the player.
The vetting criteria published on this desk exist because a stated methodology, checkable against public regulatory sources, is a more useful signal than a commission structure asserting its own good faith.
Methodology: every operator named on jollyfirst.com is assessed against a single published standard, not editorial impression. Read the vetting criteria →
