France vs Spain Gambling affiliate rules compared, side by side

France and Spain have arrived at the two strictest gambling-affiliate regimes in Europe by completely different routes. The Spanish framework was always direct: from the 2011 opening of the online market, affiliates promoting gambling to Spanish residents have had to register with the regulator and have been subject to advertising obligations that flow directly to them as well as to the operators they promote. The French framework was indirect for over a decade. The original ARJEL era treated affiliate marketing as a sub-question of operator marketing, and the regulator supervised it through the operator. That changed in 2023 with the Loi Influence and then with the ANJ’s mandatory six-monthly marketing-strategy filings, both of which significantly tightened the perimeter without actually licensing affiliates.

The result is two regimes that produce a similar level of supervisory friction on the ground but distribute liability very differently. A Spanish-targeted affiliate that fails to register with the DGOJ faces fines from €100,000 to €1,000,000 in its own right. A French-targeted affiliate that breaches the Loi Influence faces personal criminal liability up to €300,000 and two years in prison, with extraterritorial application that captures non-French-resident influencers as long as the content reaches French audiences. Neither regime is the kind of light-touch environment that exists in Curaçao or some smaller jurisdictions. Both demand a serious dual-market compliance plan.

This profile sets out the architecture on both sides, the licensing or registration position for affiliates, who is liable for what, how the two regulators supervise the affiliate funnel in practice, the influencer-specific rules in each jurisdiction, the disclosure and creative obligations, and the recent enforcement record. For the underlying regulator cornerstones, see the ANJ France profile and the DGOJ Spain profile; the full Spanish standards library is in the DGOJ Standards Explorer.

Two consequences flow from the architectural difference. First, audit footprint. A Spanish-targeted affiliate keeps a regulator file with the DGOJ; a French-targeted affiliate does not, but the operator’s ANJ file reflects every affiliate relationship through the marketing-strategy filings. Second, enforcement counterparty. In Spain the DGOJ can act against the affiliate, the operator, or both for the same conduct; in France the ANJ acts against the operator and the DGCCRF acts against the influencer where the Loi Influence is in play, with limited overlap between the two enforcement bodies.

Under Law 13/2011 and Royal Decree 958/2020, an affiliate that promotes gambling services to Spanish residents must register with the DGOJ before any promotional activity. The registration requires documented business registration, evidence of financial stability, a compliance plan covering the planned promotional channels and target audiences, and undertakings on the standing affiliate obligations (registration of every operator promoted, mandatory publicidad disclosure, no minor targeting, responsible-gambling messaging). The registration is the gating step. An unregistered affiliate that nonetheless promotes Spanish-licensed operators to Spanish residents is sanctionable in its own right.

France does not require affiliates to obtain a licence or register with the ANJ. The licensed operator is the regulator’s counterparty, and the ANJ supervises affiliate activity through three mechanisms: the operator’s six-monthly marketing-strategy filing (which must describe affiliate channels, targets, budgets and the planned creative direction); the operator’s standing obligation to ensure that affiliates respect French gambling-advertising rules; and the Loi Influence regime for paid commercial influencers, which acts on the influencer personally rather than on the operator.

Since early 2024, every licensed French operator must submit its marketing strategy to the ANJ every six months for approval. The strategy covers planned creative, channels, target audiences, affiliate and influencer relationships, and budgets. The ANJ examines the submission against the public-health objectives of French gambling policy and can compel changes, can partially or wholly reject a strategy, and can compel operators to reduce promotional spend. In early 2025 the ANJ ordered France’s four largest operators to cut their marketing and sponsorship spending; in the 2024 review cycle the regulator partially rejected one operator’s strategy outright.

The practical effect on affiliates is that the operator’s ANJ-facing compliance team must surface the affiliate programme in detail twice a year. Affiliates that change creative direction, expand into new channels, or work with new influencer partners need to brief the operator early enough to be reflected in the next filing. Affiliates that operate on the assumption that the operator will absorb supervisory friction without changing the affiliate plan are setting up an ANJ-driven mid-year reset.

The Spanish supervisory model is continuous rather than cyclical. The DGOJ maintains the affiliate register, monitors licensed-operator advertising activity through routine and targeted inspection, and acts on specific complaints from consumers, competitor operators or other supervisors. The 2024 Codere Online sanction over the Facebook advert started with a 25 April DGOJ letter to the operator flagging the creative; the sanction followed. The €3.5 million coordinated round across 26 licensed operators in 2025 shows that the regulator will apply the same supervisory mechanism across the licensed base at once when a thematic compliance failing is identified.

Affiliates operating in Spain should expect that the DGOJ has visibility of every advertising placement involving a Spanish-licensed operator, that the regulator will act on complaints quickly, and that the affiliate’s registration file becomes part of the audit trail. The 2025 Draft Royal Decree on a standardised risk-detection mechanism, the cross-operator deposit cap, and the rebuild of the post-Supreme-Court advertising perimeter all indicate that the DGOJ’s supervisory toolkit is being extended rather than narrowed.

The practical result is that French gambling-influencer marketing is currently the tougher of the two perimeters. An influencer based outside France who runs a paid promotion for a sportsbook on Instagram faces personal exposure under French law if the content reaches French audiences; the same content reaching Spanish audiences from outside Spain currently sits inside the post-April-2024 freedom on influencer endorsements. That freedom is not permanent; operators and affiliates planning multi-year creator programmes in Spain should assume the perimeter will tighten back.

Two patterns are worth noting. First, the French operator-level enforcement tends to target self-exclusion and payout-ratio compliance rather than affiliate creative directly. The marketing-strategy filing model means most affiliate-direction friction is resolved before it becomes a sanction; the friction shows up as ANJ-compelled changes to the next strategy submission, not as a published fine. Second, the Spanish affiliate-creative enforcement is operator-routed in the most-cited example (Codere Online’s €162,500 fine landed on the operator, not on the agency that placed the Facebook advert), but the underlying RD 958/2020 framework permits the DGOJ to sanction the affiliate as well. Whether the DGOJ exercises that direct route more often in 2026 and beyond will be one of the markers of how the post-Supreme-Court regime evolves.

On 25 November 2025 the gambling regulators of Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal and Spain issued a joint statement warning of the increasing proliferation of online gambling advertisements by unauthorised overseas operators targeting consumers through digital channels: social media, video sharing platforms and affiliate networks. The statement was a signal of intent rather than a binding new rule, but it confirmed that cross-jurisdictional coordination on the affiliate funnel is now a priority for the European licensed-gambling regulators as a group.

Two practical consequences follow for affiliates and operators operating across France, Spain or both. First, regulatory information-sharing between the ANJ, the DGOJ and their European peers is increasing, which means that an affiliate or operator sanctioned by one regulator is more likely to come to the attention of the others. Second, the focus on affiliate networks as a route for unauthorised supply means that platform intermediaries (search, social, video, affiliate networks) are under joint pressure from multiple regulators at once. The 2026 enforcement direction on both sides points toward more coordinated action against unlicensed operators reaching consumers through affiliate funnels, not less.