Promoting to Italy

[TheShortStack]

Over the last few months I've noticed Italian traffic to one of my casino sites growing steadily, so I'm thinking about translating a few pages and seeing if I can convert some of those hits into RMPs.

I'm slightly concerned about the Italian market though and was wondering whether anyone here might be able to clarify exactly what's going on there.

I thought that Playtech had a license to operate there but it looks like only a few of their casinos are actually licensed to accept IT players.

With that in mind, can anyone tell me whether I need to have some kind of Italian license to promote to Italian players or have my site hosted in Italy? Or is it just a case of needing to send players to a fully licensed Italian casino.

Any thoughts/links anyone might have about this would be really useful as I don't want to risk the whole site just for a couple of hundred hits a month.

Cheers,

[Sebastian]

Why would you need a license as an affiliate ? Did you really mean that ??

Obviously to be safe you need to promote casinos that have a license to operate in Italy.

There are still a bunch of non-licensed rooms that accept Italians (like bet365) without doing any advertising which is considered illegal.

The location of your web server is unrelated. What matters more is you TLD.

If you have a *.it and promote to non-licensed rooms you are asking for trouble.

If you have a generic tld and promote non-licensed rooms to the Italian Speaking market, you will likely get away with it.

However you always risk getting placed in an ISP Ban List, and getting all Italian traffic severed from your site.

The AAMS legal governing body has been doing recently. So worst case is that you'll loose all your Italian traffic to try to get a little more.

I recommend promoting licensed rooms and playing it safe.

[TheShortStack]

Thanks Seb - appreciate the clear response.

It seems from your post that the only thing I need to worry about directly is promoting those casinos which are directly licensed as Italian casinos. That's pretty much what I'd assumed initially but was then given all sorts of conflicting information - including the suggestion that I'd need a license myself to promote to Italy so I figured I'd just post everything I'd heard up here and hope to get a clear picture of the situation.

Thanks for your help!

[pokerprop]

If you start targeting Italy directly and anywhere else on the same website you're promoting sites not licensed there is a decent chance of being blocked. Your best bet to avoid this is geo content. Either block IPs + Browsers set to Italy as the location from access to any content not suitable for them (and include no links or mentions of it) or or just direct all Italian Traffic to a new website preferably on a .it domain. If not doing this weight the options because once it is clear you're targeting Italy the chance of being blocked is higher (I know at least 6 affiliates who were targeting there and got blocked).

Edit to add: my recent experience with them is sports betting related, perhaps they're not as strict about casino but I wouldn't know.

[Kasinas]

Try to promote only licensed Italian casinos to avoid the risk... It is sometimes better to play safe for lower money