A fresh SiGMA interview suggests the iGaming affiliate market is maturing fast. The big shift is from raw CPA logic toward KPI-driven deals, stronger analytics, and wider AI use in day-to-day execution.
One of the clearest market signals this month came from SiGMA’s interview with Trident CEO Nikita Koshelyuk. His message is simple: iGaming affiliate marketing in 2026 is becoming more mature, the classic CPA model is losing its monopoly, and KPI-based structures are becoming more important. AI is also moving deeper into real workflows, especially in creative production and analytics.
That matters because KPI logic changes how buyers are judged. Cheap front-end volume becomes less impressive when operators care more about downstream quality, deposit behavior, and the actual value of acquired users. In plain media-buying terms, the market is becoming less tolerant of brute-force buying and more interested in traffic that survives backend scrutiny.
The useful part here is not the buzzword layer. It is the market maturity layer. Once the industry moves from “how many leads” to “what kind of users did you actually bring,” weak buying styles start aging fast. That does not make traffic harder by definition, but it does make sloppy volume less profitable than it used to be.
