AffPapa Conference Madrid 2026 has wrapped, and on the evidence of this edition the move to Madrid paid off.
The organiser ran its biggest event to date across 18 to 20 May, drawing more than 1,500 attendees split roughly evenly between affiliates and operators, with B2B providers making up the remainder. Two of those days belonged to the substance: panels, workshops, and the kind of side conversations that move deals forward.
The Event in Brief
The conference opened on 18 May with pre-event activities built around networking rather than the show floor, a morning Running Club, a padel tournament, and a guided tour of the Santiago Bernabéu and Real Madrid Museum, before the official Opening Networking Event at Teatro Magno Club.
The two main days, 19 and 20 May, carried the agenda that mattered to the industry: business strategy, operator and affiliate partnerships, regulation, market trends, blockchain and crypto, and a close read on the Spanish iGaming market that the host city put front and centre. Speed-dating networking sessions and an AI workshop by createIT rounded out the programme, and the week closed with the AffPapa iGaming Awards 2026 under its “The Test of Time” theme.
Filippo Anzalone, Beyond 2030
On Day 2, Filippo Anzalone, GTM Strategy & Growth Lead at InteractiveAI, joined the panel “Beyond 2030: The Technologies, Markets, and Models That Will Define iGaming’s Next Decade” from 15:40 to 16:20 CET. The session looked past the current cycle to the technologies, emerging markets, and business models likely to reshape the industry over the coming decade.
Anzalone’s contribution focused on the role of AI in shaping the industry’s next chapter, and how it will factor into the products, operations, and growth strategies operators and suppliers build toward 2030.
Aleksandar Dašić, The Real Price of Partnership
Later that afternoon, Aleksandar Dašić, Head of Affiliate Marketing at Bragg, took on “The Real Price of Partnership: Transparency, Fees, and ROI in Affiliate-Operator-Provider Deals” from 16:20 to 17:00 CET. It was a candid look at how these deals are actually priced and measured, fee structures, attribution, and where the return really lands once the line items are on the table.
Dašić’s central point cut at the structure of these deals: too many parties get pulled into a single partnership, and a large share of them aren’t doing work that’s actually relevant to it. That bloat muddies tracking and makes it harder to see where value is genuinely created, and who is genuinely earning it.
Why It Mattered
Both panels sat on the same fault line: an industry deciding what to build next, and how to share the value fairly when it does. That is the conversation Gamblers Connect exists to document, independent of the companies driving it. Filippo and Aleksandar are part of our hand-picked contributor network, selected for verified experience and published work, and their participation at AffPapa was independent of Gamblers Connect.
See you in Madrid next year.
