Interview with Pierric Blanchet: Bet365 in France, the Affiliate Reckoning, and the Art of Selling at the Right Time

Pierric Blanchet spent years as a Chief of Staff in the iGaming industry, working with CEOs and C-level executives across both the affiliate and operator sides, at businesses turning over more than €1.5 billion combined. Today he works as an independent Strategy and Operations consultant, advising on M&A, Agile transformations, and AI process reviews. We sat down with him to get his read on two of the biggest conversations in the industry right now: Bet365’s entry into the French market, and what the future actually looks like for gambling affiliates.

Bet365 in France: just another country, or a long game?

Bet365 just launched in France. Is this simply covering a new market, or are they laying the groundwork for a potential online casino legalisation?

They don’t have the brand recognition in France to walk in and sweep the market the day online casino opens up. Among industry people, everyone knows exactly who Bet365 is. It’s the icebreaker, the unstoppable force. But the French public? That’s a very different story. So choosing to enter France is a genuinely bold move.

What’s interesting is how they did it. Rather than picking up a licence from one of the struggling operators that have been kept alive more by inertia than performance, they came in as a fresh entrant. That says something about their confidence in their own product.

And they’re arriving with real weight behind them. Right now it’s sports only, but horse racing is coming, poker is coming this summer. They’re rolling out their full historic offering into a market that isn’t used to this kind of product, the classic British-style bookmaker. We’ll see how French bettors respond, because that style of product has had its share of critics in French-speaking markets.

The brand awareness play is already running. Bet365 is already bigger than Betclic and Winamax globally. They’ve been a major Champions League partner, advertising their FollowScores app in France for the past year. Now that they’re officially present, they can advertise Bet365 directly. That’s serious firepower.

If online casino gets legalised in France in five years, they may have timed this perfectly. They’ll have had time to build real brand recognition and a solid customer base. But the timing has to work. If legalisation came next year, it would probably be too soon. They’d need to be far more aggressive than their current strategy allows. The probability of that is low, but worth flagging.

Today, when French consumers think online betting, they think Betclic and Winamax. Lottery is FDJ, horse racing is PMU, though even PMU is losing ground to newer alternatives. If casino opens up in a few years and the regulatory environment stays broadly stable, Bet365 could build genuine top-of-mind recognition in France. But the window is what matters.

For me, poker will carry their profitability in France. On sports, their odds strategy is very aggressive, and we’ll see how they navigate the 85% RTP requirements. But poker is what can drive the business. And online casino, if and when it arrives, is the only path to them becoming truly dominant. I’m genuinely mixed on whether the short-term maths add up.

When the rumours came out last year, my honest reaction was scepticism. They already operate in one of the most regulated markets in the world, the UK, which just absorbed a very significant tax increase. And now they’re entering France where tax rates sit at 58% to 63% depending on the vertical. You have to ask yourself what the real play is.

There’s also a product angle worth discussing. Bet365 has historically been built around a very specific player profile. They surface high odds on niche markets prominently. To put it simply, the kind of thing where a 10-euro bet returns 90 euros because the odds are at 9. That approach tends to attract and retain high-frequency, high-risk players, which is somewhat different from what the French market is used to seeing. From a commercial standpoint, it can be a powerful model: according to ANJ data, problem gamblers represent around 10% of players but generate roughly 60% of industry revenue. Whether that dynamic translates cleanly into a heavily regulated French market is another question.

The future of affiliation: reckoning or reinvention?

How do you see the future of gambling affiliation playing out, with the Google updates and new AI tools? Is the golden age behind us, or is it just a matter of adapting?

It depends entirely on the size of the business. If you’re a mid-sized affiliate, think TraficLab, NorthStar, MoveUp-type scale, my honest view is that now is the time to sell. In a year or two, that window may be closed. These businesses are right in the danger zone: big enough to feel stable, but not big enough to be truly resilient. The irony is that this tier often gets squeezed hardest, precisely because it feels like they can hold on.

Meanwhile you have players like Better Collective sitting on assets that are genuinely SEO-proof because they’ve built real media products. People visit their sites the way they’d visit an actual publication, not just to grab a bonus code.

With LLMs entering the picture, what we’re really talking about is an amplified version of SEO. If you’re already good at SEO, the LLM will surface you. But the stakes are higher now: there will be four bullet points in an AI Overview telling someone why they should sign up with Betclic, and the first link will go to whoever ranks first. The premium on top SEO positions is going up, not down. Tier 2 affiliates will be too small to compete at that level. Tier 1 will take a hit but has the scale to diversify and recover. And tier 3, the genuinely small players, may actually have the best odds of surviving because they’re flying under the radar. A lot of smaller affiliates didn’t take the same beating from Google’s recent updates that the mid-tier players did.

Overall, I think we’re heading into a real consolidation wave. A lot of transactions, valuations coming down, sales happening that nobody was planning for. Give it a year or two.

So what are the smart ones doing?

The smart ones are building actual products. That was the direction at GameLounge: trying to create destinations people come back to, communities rather than funnels, exploring different monetisation levers beyond pure SEO traffic. Two or three side projects, products with real retention. That model will hold up. The problem is it immediately narrows your scope. Where you could once operate across 194 markets, black, grey or white, with a product that worked in Pakistan as well as Canada, a genuine product almost always needs a specific focus. That trade-off is real.

That said, there are unexplored niches. Betting on the Kings League, for instance, not permitted in France but very much alive in other jurisdictions. There are influencer-led teams, engaged communities, and not many affiliates targeting that intersection intelligently. Whether enough people get there before the opportunity closes is a separate question. My broader view is that there are simply too many affiliates relative to the structure of the current market. Something has to give.

If you’re launching in affiliation today, I’m not sure you’re building something your children will take over in 20 years.

We’ve talked for years about content quality and domain authority, link building and converting content. Now the conversation has shifted to brand building. But that’s a completely different skill set, isn’t it?

It is. And search engines are getting better and better at making that distinction. Even in a tight niche, if you’re tier 3, you can still generate some revenue. The real question is who’s comfortable letting their asset slowly wind down while still pulling decent returns over three years, versus who’s willing to make genuine investments to become a brand and change their whole development strategy.

I recently spoke with an independent francophone affiliate who’d been doing a lot of PPC work. Over about a year, his revenue went from 3 million euros down to 1.3 million because the competitive landscape shifted so fast. I’d originally reached out to help him sell. He didn’t want to. Now it’s too late. He’ll never get what he could have asked for twelve months ago. But he’s a one-man operation, he’s made his money, he could have retired ten years ago if he’d wanted to. So good for him. But the person who thinks they can survive this and build something durable with the same old playbook? I think that’s a disconnect from where things actually are.

I sold a site in January. The owners had originally been approached to sell to one of their competitors at around $3 million, a US sports betting site. They came back to me last summer saying they needed help getting a deal done. We sold it for under $500,000. And this was a site that had 15 million unique visitors in a single month back in 2022-2023. The $3 million ask back then was completely reasonable. By the time they were plateauing at 500,000 uniques a month, which is still a decent number for a sports site, they were tired and ready to exit. We found a buyer. But the gap is sobering.

The choice is structurally simple but hard to execute: sell at roughly the right moment, which for many is more or less now, or take the risk of waiting too long. The people who are confident they’ll ride it out either genuinely don’t plan to sell, or they’ll end up trying to sell at a moment when the market has moved past them.

Is there a backlog building up on the M&A side?

Three years ago, every seller thought they could hold out for more. That attitude shifted fast. Now everyone wants to sell, often because they’ve taken real hits. And on the other side, buyers are increasingly selective. I have mandates on some genuinely solid assets, sites that have navigated every major Google update since 2023 without serious damage, and even then there’s hesitation from buyers.

Better Collective, when you talk M&A with them in 2026, they’re looking at very few acquisitions, possibly none this year. They still have a lot of previous deals to close and integrate. And beyond that, the market structure is working against deals: what you buy today might be available cheaper in six months. Or it might have declined significantly in eighteen months anyway, with or without your help.

Pierric Blanchet is a Strategy and Operations consultant based in Paris. He works with iGaming operators, affiliate businesses, and investors on growth strategy, M&A advisory, and organisational transformation.