The Netherlands moved from grey to regulated on 1 October 2021 with one of Europe’s most restrictive marketing frameworks built into the launch. Three years and one tax hike later, channelisation by GGR has fallen to roughly 50%, and the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) is responding by tightening rules further rather than easing them. The 37.8% GGR rate from 1 January 2026, combined with the deposit caps introduced in October 2024 and the untargeted-advertising ban that has been live since July 2023, has compressed every margin lever simultaneously. Marketing in the Netherlands is now a precision exercise.
On this page
- The headline rules
- The untargeted-advertising ban
- Sponsorship phase-out
- The 18-24 segment rules
- Bonus advertising restrictions
- Affiliate accountability
- Cruks and customer suppression
- Behavioural triggers and 2026 KSA Beleidsregels
- What this means for your Dutch marketing plan
The headline rules
The Dutch framework rests on the Wet kansspelen op afstand (KOA, Remote Gambling Act) and a series of tightening Besluiten (Royal Decrees) issued from 2022 onward. Five rules anchor the marketing regime. First, untargeted advertising is prohibited (since 1 July 2023): no broadcast TV, radio, or out-of-home advertising for online gambling outside narrow exceptions. Second, sports sponsorship is being phased out completely, with shirt and on-field sponsorship ending from 2025 season onward. Third, the 18-24 demographic cannot be specifically targeted by any marketing channel. Fourth, no celebrities, role models, or influencers of any kind. Fifth, the operator carries strict liability for affiliates and any third-party that markets on its behalf.
The KSA enforces these rules actively. Settlements in 2024 and 2025 included multiple seven-figure penalties for breaches that operators describe privately as “edge cases” but that the regulator treats as straightforward violations.
The untargeted-advertising ban
The Decree of 7 March 2023 (Besluit ongerichte reclame kansspelen op afstand) prohibits all “untargeted” advertising for online games of chance, with effect from 1 July 2023. “Untargeted” means broadcast TV, radio, print press, outdoor advertising, and any digital advertising that cannot be reliably restricted to an identifiable adult audience that has not opted out.
What this means in practice: you can still run paid social and paid search if you can demonstrate adult-only targeting and active suppression of self-excluded customers. You can still run direct email and SMS to consented customers who are not on Cruks. You cannot run any form of broadcast television advertising. You cannot run radio advertising that reaches a general audience. You cannot run billboard or out-of-home advertising. You cannot run pre-roll on streaming services that do not provide age-verified targeting.
The carve-outs are narrow and have been tested. Stadium LED advertising during sports broadcasts is treated as untargeted by default. Sports-bar in-venue signage faces the same problem. The KSA has issued guidance and warnings throughout 2024 and 2025 to operators experimenting with edge-case interpretations.
For operators, the practical effect is that paid digital with strict adult-targeting has become almost the entire viable acquisition channel mix, alongside owned-channel CRM. Acquisition costs have risen accordingly.
Sponsorship phase-out
The 2023 Decree also phased out sports sponsorship in two stages. From 1 July 2023, on-shirt and uniform sponsorship for top-tier (Eredivisie, professional) sports were prohibited. From 1 July 2025, all forms of sports sponsorship including stadium naming rights, secondary sponsorships, and event title sponsorships are off the table. Cultural and event sponsorship has not been singled out but remains subject to the broader untargeted-advertising rules.
The phase-out has changed the economics of Dutch football. Several Eredivisie clubs lost meaningful revenue in 2025. Operators who had built brand awareness through sports association now have to rebuild it through performance channels. Long-tail brand search demand has declined for operators most reliant on sponsorship-led brand building.
If you are entering the Netherlands now, brand-building has to come from product reputation and earned media, not paid association.
The 18-24 segment rules
The 18-24 demographic is the most-protected segment in the Dutch framework. Three rules apply. First, marketing communications cannot specifically target this age band; segmentation that includes this age range as a primary cohort is non-compliant. Second, the net deposit cap for 18-24 customers is €300/month, against €700/month for adults 25+ (introduced October 2024). Third, behavioural-monitoring obligations are stricter for this segment, with the KSA expecting more frequent and more proactive interventions.
For marketing, this means: paid social audience definitions must explicitly exclude 18-24 unless the operator can defend why the campaign is not “targeting” that group; lookalike audiences must be checked for demographic skew; influencer choices (already restricted) must avoid creators whose audiences skew young.
Bonus advertising restrictions
Bonus and welcome offers are still legal in the Netherlands but the messaging restrictions are heavier than most operators expect. Bonus value cannot be the dominant element of an ad. Wagering requirements must be presented prominently. Time-limited deposit pressure is restricted. Cross-product and cross-channel bonus targeting must respect the customer’s stated product preferences and self-imposed limits.
The Dutch bonus economics post-2024 deposit caps mean that the headline welcome offer matters less than it used to. A €100 deposit-match welcome bonus on an account that can deposit no more than €700/month (or €300/month if 18-24) loses much of its acquisition leverage. Operators are increasingly reframing welcome offers around free spins and risk-free first bets rather than deposit matches.
Reload bonuses, milestone rewards, and VIP-tier bonuses remain available but must be structured around RG behavioural triggers, not loss recovery. The KSA’s Beleidsregels effective 1 January 2026 (see section 8) explicitly require that no bonus mechanic encourage chasing losses.
Affiliate accountability
The operator is strictly liable for affiliate behaviour. The KSA’s affiliate guidance, reissued in updated form during 2024, requires operators to maintain affiliate registers, audit affiliate creative quarterly, suppress unlicensed-territory traffic, and treat affiliate misconduct as the operator’s own.
The April 2024 KSA enforcement of a Tier-1 operator over affiliate behaviour included finding the operator responsible for content the affiliate had produced without operator review. The settlement language emphasised that “the operator is responsible regardless of contractual delegation.” Affiliate-network onboarding processes need to reflect this; commission structures should reward retained-customer quality rather than acquisition volume.
Brand-bidding restrictions, anti-spam discipline, and SEO content quality are all now within scope of affiliate compliance audits.
Cruks and customer suppression
Cruks (Centraal Register Uitsluiting Kansspelen) is the national self-exclusion register. Suppression is strict: any customer or prospect who is on Cruks must be excluded from all marketing, all paid acquisition, and all retention activity. The mechanism is API-based with real-time matching obligations.
For paid social and customer-list audiences, operators must scrub their seed lists before each campaign refresh. For email and SMS, suppression must run before each send. For programmatic display (where it remains usable), the audience definitions must include Cruks-aware exclusion logic. Any breach generates a compliance event regardless of intent.
The 2025 KSA enforcement focus on suppression failures produced multiple settlements where the operator’s own systems were technically suppressing, but a third-party data-management platform was reintroducing suppressed users into custom audiences via lookalike modelling. The lesson: strict liability extends to your DMP and your media-buying platform.
Behavioural triggers and 2026 KSA Beleidsregels
The KSA Beleidsregels Vergunningverlening 2026 (Remote Gambling Policy Rules) effective 1 January 2026 codify and expand the regulator’s expectations on behavioural monitoring. Three-year audited financials, beneficial-owner background checks at the 10% threshold, mandatory exit plan, and real-time behavioural-monitoring expectations are now formal licence conditions.
For marketing, the practical effect is that retention campaigns now have to be defensive against behavioural-trigger overlap. A reactivation campaign aimed at customers who have been dormant for 30 days must check whether those customers’ last sessions showed any of the published RG indicators (rapid deposit increase, late-night session pattern, loss-chasing markers). If they did, the customer should be in a behavioural-intervention flow, not a marketing flow. Tooling that integrates RG behavioural data with CRM segmentation is now table stakes; operators relying on traditional RFM segmentation alone are creating enforcement exposure.
What this means for your Dutch marketing plan
Three operator-side conclusions follow.
First, this is a CRM market, not an acquisition market. The combination of the untargeted-advertising ban, the sponsorship phase-out, the 18-24 protections, and the deposit caps means that paid acquisition is narrow and expensive. The operators winning in the Netherlands in 2026 are the ones whose retention economics deliver 18-24 month payback on a smaller, harder-won acquisition cohort. Acquisition models built on bonus-led broadcast are unviable.
Second, the channelisation conversation is not yours to fix. The 50% channelisation by GGR is a structural problem the regulator is treating as a player-protection priority, not a market-attractiveness one. The KSA is unlikely to relax marketing rules to chase channelisation; the trajectory is toward more behavioural-monitoring obligations, not fewer marketing constraints. Operators planning around an eventual easing should plan around the opposite.
Third, brand reputation built before the rules tightened is your strongest asset. Operators with pre-2023 Dutch brand recall (TOTO, Holland Casino, Unibet, Bet365, Jacks) have an acquisition advantage that new entrants cannot replicate through paid digital alone. If you are not in that cohort, you need a clear product or service differentiator and patience for a slower customer-base build.
The Netherlands rewards operators with disciplined CRM, mature compliance integration, and a long horizon. It punishes operators dependent on bonus-led acquisition or sponsorship-led brand-building. Plan accordingly.
Related: Netherlands licence guide (KSA) · Channelisation across regulated markets · Brand over bonus