Affiliate Disclosure
The money behind Mystake comes from affiliate partnerships with online casino operators. What follows on this page is the full mechanic — how the model actually works under the hood, what (if anything) it costs the reader, and the rules that stop the funding side leaking into the editorial side. For the bigger-picture context covering who runs the site, see the About page; the flagship operator write-up itself sits at the Mystake Casino homepage. Already familiar with this kind of disclosure on other review sites and only want the bits we do differently? Skip straight to the closing summary at the bottom of the page.
1. How Mystake gets paid
Here's the mechanic. A reader clicks an affiliate link on Mystake, lands on an operator's site, opens an account there — and a commission may flow back to Mystake. That commission comes out of the operator's marketing budget; it never comes out of the reader's pocket and never inflates anything on the operator's platform. Two payment structures dominate the industry, and Mystake operates under both, partnership by partnership: a one-off CPA (cost-per-acquisition) paid once when the new account qualifies, and a revenue-share deal under which a small share of that account's net gaming revenue trickles back to Mystake over time. From the reader's seat none of this is visible; the only practical effect on the operator end is a record that the registration came from this site.
2. What it costs you
The short answer is: nothing. Going through an affiliate link costs the reader exactly the same as opening a direct link. Bonus offers are identical. Stakes are identical. Withdrawal timings are identical. The price of playing on the operator's site stays the same whether the visitor arrives through a Mystake link, off a Google ad, or by typing the URL into the address bar by hand. If anything, partnership-routed pages occasionally surface an exclusive welcome offer that's marginally better than the standard one — and where that's the case, the relevant review states so out in the open rather than burying it.
3. Why this is allowed to be neutral
The honest answer comes down to reputation arithmetic. A casino review site survives only by being correct about which operators are actually worth registering at. Pad scores upward to flatter the partner brands, and within a couple of months the readership driving the traffic — and therefore driving the commissions — has migrated to a competing site. So the long-term commercial interest of an affiliate operation lines up neatly with the editorial interest: tell the truth about which operators perform and which don't. The same rating framework gets applied identically to every operator that comes through for review, partnership in place or not. On Mystake, partner brands have been rated at six and below; operators with no commercial tie have been rated at eight and above.
4. What "not influencing the review" means in practice
Three rules anchor everything else. One — whether or not an operator is a commercial partner has zero input into its score; the eight criteria are scored against what we actually observe, end of story. Two — partnership status doesn't unlock softer framing either; where a partner brand has a genuine problem (sluggish withdrawals, fuzzy bonus terms, a thin live-dealer offering), that problem appears in the review under the criterion it touches. Three — operators get no pre-publication preview. We don't send drafts over for sign-off, ever. The first time an operator sees Mystake copy is when the rest of the internet sees it: at the moment of publication.
There are two further rules covering factual updates. One — when an operator writes in pointing out a factual error in a Mystake review, we verify the claim, fix the entry if it really is wrong, and append a dated correction note at the bottom of the review describing the change. That happens regardless of whether the operator is currently a partner. Two — when an operator writes in complaining that a low score is "unfair" but cannot point to a specific factual error, the score stays put, and we reply that the same rating methodology is applied to every brand on the site without exception.
5. Recognising affiliate links
Outbound links to operators are tagged rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" in the markup — the conventional signal to search engines that a link is part of a commercial relationship. Most of the time, the actual link routes through an internal redirect at /go on this domain; that hop is where we count the click in our own analytics, before the visitor's browser carries on to the operator's site. From the user's perspective the destination is identical to a direct link; nothing extra appears on the operator URL they end up on. Links going elsewhere — regulators, helplines, news outlets, game studios — are not affiliate links, and those simply carry rel="noreferrer noopener" without the nofollow tag.
6. Compliance with disclosure rules
The applicable UK rules sit across three places. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 bans misleading commercial practices outright; on top of that, CMA and ASA guidance on undisclosed affiliate marketing both require commercial links to be flagged plainly enough that a reasonable reader understands what they are. This page acts as the site-wide disclosure; on top of that, every operator review carries an inline disclosure block above the first affiliate CTA, so the commercial relationship is visible without anyone needing to scroll to the footer. For non-UK readers: the FTC in the US and the CMA in the UK impose substantially similar disclosure obligations on advertising directed at their own residents.
7. Commitments to readers
Summed up, the obligations Mystake takes on from this funding model are tight. Disclosure stays upfront and visible rather than tucked away in a footer. Reviews stick to a fixed methodology that doesn't bend around partner status. Errors get corrected against a published timeline. Operators don't see the content in advance of it going live. Affiliate links are signalled directly in the page markup, so any technically literate reader can verify them. A full walk-through of the editorial process itself — fact-checking, source standards, correction handling — is set out on the Editorial Policy page. Anything that looks like a breach of these rules can be flagged through the Contact page, and substantive complaints are logged against the relevant review on file.
8. Wider context for readers
A trio of related pointers belongs alongside this disclosure. First — the player-protection commitments embedded inside every operator score are unpacked on the Responsible Gambling page. Second — anything you'd want to know about how data is handled while you read the site is documented on the Privacy Policy page, with the technical detail covering cookies and similar storage held on the Cookie Policy page. Third — the full editorial menu (every review, every guide, every comparative piece) opens out from the Mystake Casino homepage and its onward links.