Independence
and conflicts
Almost everything published about online gambling is paid for by the companies being described. That is the background against which this platform has to be read, so our position is stated here without hedging.
01The core policy
No paid rankings. No rankings at all.
Stated unambiguously, because the industry standard is to state it ambiguously.
The commitment
No company can pay GambleLABS to publish, amend, delay, downgrade or remove a record. There is no ranked list, rating, score, seal, badge or ‘recommended’ designation anywhere on this platform — so there is nothing to buy, and no arrangement under which buying it would be possible.
The mechanism worth understanding is the affiliate model. A conventional gambling ‘review site’ earns a share of the losses of the players it sends to an operator, or a fixed fee per depositing customer. Its rankings are its inventory. The site that lists an operator first is usually the site being paid most per player, and the reader is never told the ordering is a price list.
GambleLABS carries no affiliate links, no tracked outbound links to operators, no advertising and no sponsored placement. Where a record links to a company’s own website, it is because the site is the evidence for a claim — its terms, its licence footer, its corporate details — and the link is marked as external and carries no referral parameters.
We also publish nothing that functions as a recommendation by implication: no ‘safest operators’, no ‘verified’ badge, no trust score. Coverage of a company is not an endorsement of it, and the absence of a record about a company is not a warning about it. We say so on the records themselves rather than relying on readers to infer it.
02Funding
What we will and will not take money for
A negative policy on its own is not credible — an organisation has to be funded by something. Both sides of the line are set out here.
Reader and institutional subscriptions
Payment for access to research, with no influence over what that research says and no subscriber-only exemption from being written about.
Grants and philanthropic funding
Accepted only where the funder has no commercial interest in the gambling industry, exercises no editorial control, and consents to being named publicly as a funder.
Licensing of our own published research
Reuse of work we have already published, on terms that do not restrict what we publish next, and never as a pre-publication arrangement.
Commissioned methodological work for public bodies
Regulators, consumer bodies and academic institutions may commission analysis. The commission is disclosed on the resulting record, and the commissioner gets no approval right over findings.
Money from gambling operators, in any form
No advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate commission, no revenue share, no cost-per-acquisition deal, no ‘partnership’, no listing fee. This extends to their platforms, aggregators, white-label providers, payment processors and marketing affiliates.
Payment for placement, ranking or review
There is nothing to buy, because no ranked list, score, seal, badge or recommendation exists on this platform to be bought.
Payment to amend, delay, downgrade or remove a record
Not to soften a description, not to add a caveat, not to bring forward a review, not to take something down. A correction is issued on evidence and on nothing else.
Reputation-management or ‘brand safety’ retainers
GambleLABS does not sell monitoring, suppression, right-of-reply services or crisis advice to the companies it covers. Right of reply is free and available to every named subject.
Gifts, hospitality, travel or equity from the industry
Staff and contributors do not accept them. Conference attendance is paid for by GambleLABS or not undertaken.
Any funding arrangement that is accepted is disclosed by name, at the point it begins, on this page. No funder — permitted or otherwise — sees a record before publication, and no funding agreement contains a clause granting review, approval or notice.
03People
Conflicts of interest
Applies to everyone who writes, reviews, edits or reviews evidence for GambleLABS, whether employed, contracted or contributing occasionally.
Declared before joining
- Any current or former employment, consultancy or contract with a gambling operator, platform, provider, affiliate, payment processor or industry association — with dates.
- Any shareholding, option or other financial interest in a listed or private gambling company, including through funds where the holding is individually selected.
- Any personal relationship with an officer, director or senior employee of a company we cover.
- Any active dispute, complaint or claim against an operator — including as a player. This does not disqualify anyone; it disqualifies them from that record.
Standing prohibitions
- No one working on a record may hold a financial interest in its subject, or in a competitor of its subject, while the record is in progress.
- No gifts, hospitality, paid travel, event access or equipment from any company in the sector, at any value. There is no de-minimis threshold, because a threshold is a negotiation.
- No paid speaking, advisory or consulting work for a covered company, its trade body or its agencies, during engagement with GambleLABS and for twelve months afterwards.
- No use of unpublished information for personal financial benefit, including trading on a company we are about to write about.
Recusal
Where a conflict arises mid-record, the person recuses themselves from that record and hands over their working file. Where a recusal materially shaped the work — a change of author, a change of editor — the record says so. A conflict that cannot be managed by recusal is a conflict that stops the record.
Contributors and freelancers
External contributors sign the same declaration and are subject to the same prohibitions for the duration of the commission. Anyone simultaneously producing marketing, SEO or affiliate content for the gambling industry is not commissioned — that is not a conflict that can be managed by disclosure.
Where we are exposed
The hardest conflicts in this field are not financial. They are access-shaped: a regulator that talks to us, an insider who keeps talking, a company that answers our questions promptly. Being easier on a cooperative subject is the failure mode, and it is the one we ask editors to look for specifically at sign-off.
04Inducements
When a company offers to pay
It happens to every publisher in this sector. Our response is procedural rather than improvised, so nobody has to decide what to do under pressure.
- 01
Refused
The offer is declined in writing, on the spot, by whoever received it. No one at GambleLABS has authority to accept, negotiate or defer such an approach.
- 02
Logged
It is recorded in the internal audit trail: who approached us, through which channel, what was offered, what was asked for, and which record it concerned. The log is not editable after the fact.
- 03
Escalated
An editor who is not working on the affected record reviews the approach and confirms that the record itself proceeds unchanged — approaches do not accelerate, delay or soften anything.
- 04
Published where relevant
An attempt to pay for a record to change is itself a fact about the company. Where it is material — a subject of an open investigation, a company whose licence is in question, a pattern of approaches — we publish it, to the same evidence standard as anything else.
The same procedure covers approaches that are not straightforwardly financial: an offer of exclusive access conditional on framing, a threat of litigation timed to a publication date, an offer to ‘correct’ a record in exchange for a commercial relationship, or a request routed through an agency, an affiliate or a law firm rather than the company itself. Routing does not change the nature of the approach.
None of this restricts a subject’s legitimate rights. Disputing a fact, supplying evidence, demanding a correction and answering a claim are all free, always available and set out in full on the right of reply page. The distinction is simple: evidence changes records, and money does not.
05Identity
Institutional boundaries
The full platform identity statement is maintained on About; product-specific limitations are maintained on their product pages.
One maintained statement
GambleLABS Network publishes intelligence about the gambling industry and does not sell influence over that record. The About page holds the complete institutional boundary statement so it can be reviewed and corrected in one place.
Read the institutional boundaries