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Adult traffic carries a reputation as a “dirty” source you’d be nervous to put next to your brand. For a casino or sportsbook operator, it’s the same man aged 25–45 with disposable income — just in another browser tab, and at a CPM that’s a fraction of what you’d pay Google or Meta for the same audience. The biggest operators are already buying this traffic; they just don’t advertise it. One thing separates a working buy from a burned budget: the ability to see what the traffic does after the click. The ad network owns volume and source quality; the analytics of that traffic belong to a platform like Alanbase. We sat down with Anna Blaivas VP of Sales TwinRed — an adult ad network and ad exchange on the market since 2007 — to talk it through.
Part 1. Who You Are and Why You Can Be Trusted
Alanbase: You’ve been on the market since 2007 and you still bet on adult, while half the industry runs toward “clean” verticals. Why is adult an asset, not a fading relic?
Adult is one of the cleanest verticals, which is exactly why we don’t leave it. Regulation has tightened in recent years, especially for tube sites and the networks that work with them. For business, that’s a plus: legitimacy is money. Sites are now obligated to bring real traffic, and networks have to bet on quality and fraud prevention.
The “wild west” era in adult is over. Tighter rules swept the weak players off the market. What’s left is quality: an active, live audience you can reach at prices noticeably lower than in mainstream verticals.
Alanbase: You call yourself both an ad network and an ad exchange. For an advertiser, are those two different things or a marketing wrapper?
They’re two different things. A regular advertiser or affiliate works inside the ad network: logs into the interface, uploads creatives, sets up campaigns, buys traffic. No technical integration. A DSP or SSP with its own platform and oRTB or XML support integrates with the ad exchange. An affiliate buying popunders is a network client. A DSP plugged in through oRTB is an exchange client.
The exchange isn’t just access to our direct inventory — it’s a marketplace where DSPs and SSPs work with each other. Even entering as a regular advertiser through the network, you get inventory from connected SSPs — more volume and variety than any standalone network. If you have your own platform and the resources for oRTB, you enter at the exchange level, optimize on your side, and get both our direct sources and every SSP in the marketplace. If you don’t have the infrastructure yet, the network is the right entry point.
Alanbase: Los Angeles, Barcelona, Luxembourg — is that about taxes, compliance, or access to markets?
Honestly — none of those. The company was founded in Los Angeles. After the Byborg group from Luxembourg acquired TwinRed, and the CEO and I happened to be in Barcelona at the time, we opened an office there. Does it help? Yes: different time zones, an international market, hiring and meeting clients all over the world. But it’s circumstance, not a strategy about taxes or regulation.
Part 2. Adult Traffic for iGaming
Alanbase: Let’s be blunt: why does a casino or sportsbook operator need adult traffic at all? For many it’s still a “dirty” source they’re scared to place next to the brand.
The fear is built on a misunderstanding of how adult advertising actually works. Let me break it down.
You control brand visibility yourself. Many operators prefer not to show the brand — the user sees the ad, clicks, lands on the site, no unwanted adjacency. A popunder opens in a separate tab, apart from the source site entirely, and it’s still one of the best formats for conversion. Want brand presence? That works too: over the past six years the biggest adult sites have become legitimate and recognizable in the mainstream, and placing your brand on them is no longer taboo.
The audience is the same person. A man aged 25–45 with disposable income, risk-inclined, used to paying by card online. You’re not reaching a different user — you’re reaching the same one, just in another tab.
Price. The CPM in adult is a fraction of what you’d pay Google or Meta for a comparable audience. The “brand-safety premium” in mainstream channels is real money, and for a performance advertiser — which every iGaming operator essentially is — ROI matters more than the source of the click.
The biggest operators already do this — they just don’t advertise it. The stigma is about PR, not performance. Once a player is in your CRM, they’re yours: at the retention stage, nobody tracks where the first-deposit attribution came from.
Alanbase: You mention an audience overlap of 80–90% men. Where does that number come from, and where does it break — are there iGaming verticals where adult doesn’t land at all?
The 80–90% figure is already outdated — today it’s around 75% male. That estimate comes from analytics tools, webmaster data, and the performance of male-oriented products inside our network.
I wouldn’t say any vertical “doesn’t work” — that’s an oversimplification. Some just need finer funnel optimization. Slots, live casino, and fast games do well: impulse products land squarely on the craving for instant gratification that an adult-site user already brings with them. Betting is strong too, especially around major sports events.
The trickier ones are poker and certain women-oriented slot themes. Poker is a product that takes skill and engagement — there’s little impulse in it. Women-focused themes are too niche for our audience. Both need much tighter targeting, and the best answer there is retargeting.
Alanbase: What do you run for which product? Popunder, push, pre-roll, interstitial — which format fits which job?
The popunder is the best format for FTDs and performance. It shows the product at full strength: live odds and events for betting, an interactive element like a wheel of fortune for casino. It’s easy for the user to act right there.
The pre-roll works for both branding and performance. FTDs are achievable with the right funnel: a hooking video tailored to the adult audience where the first 3–5 seconds grab attention, plus an interactive landing page. Even with an unpolished funnel, the user has to watch at least 5 seconds — if the brand reads well, you become recognizable fast. It’s cheaper than a popunder and, thanks to its memorability, great for reactivation paired with retargeting.
Banners are for branding and performance, but not reactivation — they’re not precise enough for that. Still, a high frequency on specific sites builds recognition, and as the cheapest format they pull positive ROI through volume.
Interstitials are a harder format — few verticals have learned to monetize them properly yet. The format interrupts navigation mid-flow, so the content has to be very engaging and interactive. The potential is large and almost untapped — someone from iGaming could well be the first to crack the right creative.
But the main thing for me is retargeting. With it you can reach your relevant users in almost any format. Set up retargeting on “abandoned deposit” — users who reached the payment step and didn’t finish — and chase them with any combination of formats. The volume is small and the cost is low, but the ad is guaranteed to reach your user.
Alanbase: How does an adult network make money on sports betting? Give a live example: GEO, format, event, result.
The freshest case is the FIFA World Cup. A tournament that’s compelling to follow and perfectly built for betting.
The Brazil + popunders + World Cup combination is already delivering strong results. The best advertisers were the ones who launched at least a week before the national team’s first match, ideally before the tournament even started. We watched conversions in Brazil triple between the 17th and the 22nd — right when the team won 3:0, fans grew confident, and betting picked up.
The working strategy is to keep a live tracker of results and the match schedule and have campaigns ready to react in real time.
Alanbase: Which adult→iGaming GEOs are genuinely alive right now, and where is there a slowdown?
I wouldn’t use the word “burned out” — it doesn’t really reflect reality. Conversion dynamics in a GEO usually depend on local law and available payment solutions.
Growing right now: Chile, Romania, Brazil, Azerbaijan, the Philippines. Sliding: Indonesia, Vietnam, and a number of smaller Asian markets. But these are often temporary fluctuations, not structural shifts. The strategy is to watch local regulation and payment infrastructure and adapt quickly.
Part 3. Quality, Fraud, and Control
The part that stings owners most. We hit adult’s bot reputation head-on and ask them to prove transparency, not repeat the slogan.
Alanbase: Adult networks have been accused of bots and inflated numbers for years. What’s under the hood against fraud — specifically?
The bot reputation is largely outdated — over the past years the industry has changed in both quality and reputation. I won’t disclose the details of our anti-fraud: a thorough rundown would just make life easier for fraudsters. I’ll say we use two well-known external tools and one in-house.
But the strongest argument is structural, not technical. We’re a transparent network with strong relationships with webmasters. With many publishers we’ve worked 8+ years — we know their traffic and we’ve tested it. As an advertiser, you can go to the site you’re targeting at any moment and find your own ad there. Nothing hidden.
And last: if you do catch bot traffic in your tracker, send us the data and we’ll refund the money. That’s how confident we are in the quality, and how rarely this happens at all.
Alanbase: You claim you show exact source domains. How do you prove that to an advertiser in practice?
I’ve partly answered this already. In order: any advertiser can visit the site they’re targeting and find their ad there — fully verifiable. In our platform you see not the “registered site” but the real domain the traffic comes from. And we pass referrers on impressions — your tracker will show real referrers. No black boxes.
Alanbase: RTB and the retargeting pixel — what do they actually give an operator in terms of control over buying?
RTB is a powerful tool for operators with their own oRTB technology. They collect data on their side and bid only on the impressions that are genuinely valuable to them: retargeting impressions or ones machine learning has flagged as promising.
Retargeting pixels are one of the best conversion tools in marketing overall, not just in adult. What they give you isn’t data for its own sake, but the ability to work with the most valuable segments: users who left without logging in, who haven’t visited in over a week, who reached the deposit and didn’t finish. Instead of casting nets in the open ocean, you catch exactly the fish you want — with the right bait.
Part 4. The TwinRed + Alanbase Pairing
Here the speaker draws the line herself between the network’s zone and the tracker’s — and shows where an operator loses money without analytics on top of the traffic.
Alanbase: Where does the network’s responsibility end and the tracker’s begin? What do you deliberately not cover?
The network is responsible for quality placements, for helping the advertiser figure out what to do, and for the technology that connects them to traffic: algorithms, targeting, reporting.
But the network was and remains an intermediary. On product performance, the most we see is CTR, impressions, views, and up to three conversions with their cost. An iGaming product — like cams, for instance — has a huge number of touchpoints and metrics a network can’t and shouldn’t cover. If we tried, we’d turn into a different product. A tracker.
Alanbase: An operator looks at the stats in the network’s interface. What do they not see — and where does that start costing money at scale?
The network shows you performance by placement and domain, but not how that traffic interacts with other sources. A user could see your ad on TwinRed, leave, and convert through Google — the network won’t get the attribution and won’t tell you it was part of that path. At scale, that means you switch off sources that actually work.
The second blind spot is player quality after conversion. The network sees the FTD but not what came next: did this player deposit €10 and vanish, or become a VIP turning over €50,000 a month? Without a tracker you can’t feed LTV data back into your bids, and you end up optimizing for conversions instead of value.
The third is the funnel. The network sees the click and the conversion. Everything in between — bounce rate on the landing, drop-offs at registration, abandoned deposit pages — is invisible. At scale, improving funnel conversion by 5% is worth more than finding a cheaper CPM.
Alanbase: What changes when the tracker’s analytics and the network’s data work in one funnel rather than two separate windows?
When the tracker and the network’s data live in two windows, the operator has to reconcile everything by hand. By the time you’ve found the correlation, the budget is already spent.
In one funnel the picture is different. You see at once: this domain brings high-LTV players — raise the bid; this format brings low-engagement users — reallocate. Changes go straight into the TwinRed platform or through the API, but the decision is made on the full picture, not on scraps from different sources.
On their own, TwinRed gives volume and traffic quality, Alanbase gives depth of analysis and speed of reaction. Together they close the funnel from first impression to VIP player.
Alanbase: Final question: what would you say to operators still on the fence?
Modern marketing is data. Whatever you’ve heard about adult traffic before, you won’t go wrong if you have the right tracking and a network that cares about your result. A good source plus a tracker, and you’re ready to work with a huge market there’s no reason to cut from your strategy.
To those still hesitating, I’ll say it plainly: set up tracking and start testing now. The longer you wait, the more you miss while others are already monetizing this traffic. With TwinRed and Alanbase the risks are minimal, and there are no barriers left to starting.
Conclusion
Adult traffic for iGaming has stopped being a risky bet. It’s a cheap, high-intent audience the biggest operators are already buying, and one thing separates a working buy from a burned budget — the ability to see what the traffic does after the click. LTV per domain, the full funnel from impression to deposit, attribution across several sources — that’s the tracker’s zone. TwinRed closes the source, Alanbase closes the data. Together that’s the full funnel.
Sign up for a demo call with an Alanbase manager. On the call we’ll gather your requirements for the affiliate program and prepare a ready preset of dashboards and stats for 14 days of free access — no card required.
All newly created accounts on TwinRed’s platform, as well as those without any deposits in 2026, are eligible for a promo. Top up your account for the first time this year with $500 or more to get an extra $150.
To claim it, reach out to your manager or to our support team at advertising@twinred.com. Remember to use the code word Alanbase.
Please note that $150 is non-refundable, non-transferable, and for one account only.
