Two of the most-visited names in online casino "reviews" — Gambling.com Group and AskGamblers — sit at the center of a quieter story than the one they tell about themselves. Both present as independent, player-first guides. Both make their money from the same operators they're supposed to be grading. And both have ownership trails that lead straight back to the gambling industry itself, not to arm's-length media investors.
This piece maps out who actually owns each site, how they got there, and why it matters for anyone reading a "top 10 casinos" list and assuming it was written by someone with no stake in the outcome.
Gambling.com Group: an operator founder as the largest shareholder
Gambling.com Group (Nasdaq: GAMB) is one of the largest publicly traded gambling affiliate businesses in the world. It runs Gambling.com itself along with a portfolio of comparison and review sites, and in January 2025 it closed a deal worth up to $180 million to acquire Odds Holdings, parent of the sports-odds platform OddsJam.
The company was founded in 2006 by Charles Gillespie and Kevin McCrystle, and it went public on Nasdaq in 2021. On paper, that's a clean corporate structure: a listed company, disclosed shareholders, audited financials. Look at the shareholder register, though, and the largest single holder isn't an index fund or an institutional investor. It's Mark Blandford, who owns roughly 26% of the company — more than the company's own CEO. Blandford is the founder of Sportingbet, one of the earlier and larger names in online sports betting, a company he built and eventually sold.
AskGamblers: the complaint site owned by a casino software supplier
AskGamblers built its reputation on something genuinely useful: a public complaints service where players could report unpaid winnings or bad-faith casinos, claiming to have helped recover more than $70 million for players since 2009. That reputation — as a place that holds operators accountable — is precisely why its ownership history is worth laying out in full.
2005–2016: AskGamblers is founded by Igor Šalindrija in Belgrade and run independently for over a decade. 2016: Catena Media, a Malta-based, Nasdaq Stockholm-listed affiliate marketing group, acquires AskGamblers for €15 million. 2022–2023: Catena Media sells AskGamblers and its associated brands for €45 million to Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) — a B2B gambling platform and sportsbook technology supplier, not a media company. For roughly two years, the site players used to file complaints against casinos was owned by a company that also sells the infrastructure those casinos operate on.
September 2024: GiG spins its media arm out as a separate public company, Gentoo Media (Nasdaq Stockholm: G2M). AskGamblers moves into Gentoo, along with other acquired affiliate brands — Casinomeister, Time2Play, KaFe Rocks, Titan Inc. Gentoo is nominally independent of GiG now, but it was built entirely from GiG's affiliate acquisitions and shares GiG's shareholder DNA and corporate lineage.
Why the ownership chain matters more than the disclaimer
Both sites carry the standard affiliate disclosure: "we may earn a commission when you sign up." That's the disclosed conflict — the one regulators and readers have gotten used to discounting for. The ownership layer is a second, less-discussed conflict sitting underneath it. Gambling.com Group's largest shareholder built and sold an actual sportsbook operator; his financial interest in the affiliate industry's continued growth is direct and personal, not just a line on a cap table. AskGamblers, for two years, was a subsidiary of a company that sold software to the exact casinos it was supposedly holding accountable — and even post-spinoff, the business was built inside GiG and carries that lineage forward.
Neither of these facts proves any specific review was manipulated or any specific complaint mishandled. What they do establish is that the "independent" framing both platforms use is doing more work than the ownership structure actually supports. A reader comparing casino payout speeds, or filing a complaint through AskGamblers, has no easy way to know the company adjudicating that complaint was, until quite recently, owned by a supplier to the gambling industry — or that the largest shareholder of the site ranking "best casinos" is a former casino operator himself.
The pattern
This isn't unique to these two sites — it's close to the norm across the affiliate/review layer of iGaming. Bonus.com is owned outright by Catena Media. Casino.org appears to be one of the few genuinely independent, founder-owned holdouts, though even there the funding picture is thin on public record. The B2B trade press sits in a parallel structure: EGR Global's flagship affiliate rankings are sponsored by bet365 itself; iGB sits inside a Blackstone-owned events conglomerate. The throughline across nearly all of it: the sites presenting themselves as the neutral referees of the gambling industry are, almost without exception, financed by, built inside, or majority-owned by people and companies with a direct stake in that industry's growth.