Better Collective cuts jobs and loses senior staff after Brazil’s betting ban

Better Collective, the biggest affiliate group on our stock board, laid off between 75 and 85 people at the end of October, NEXT.io reported on 11 November. Its chief operating officer left in October, two senior business development directors have gone, and the head of technology leaves at the end of this month.

The company is in its silent period before the third-quarter report on 18 November and did not comment. So this is NEXT.io’s reporting, not a company announcement, and I’m treating it that way.

What NEXT.io reported

• Between 75 and 85 jobs cut worldwide at the end of October, including staff at the London office in Farringdon.
• COO Sofie Ejlersen left in October. She joined in 2024 as a strategic adviser and became COO in March 2025. NEXT.io says the circumstances are unconfirmed and the stock market had not been told at the time of writing.
• Guy Harding and Gloria Cereda, both senior directors of business development, left in recent weeks.
• Riley Bryant, SVP technology, leaves at the end of November after almost eight years. He came in with the RotoGrinders acquisition in 2019.
• An unnamed source at the company told NEXT.io that “Brazil was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

That puts Better Collective on the same 2026 redundancies list as Flutter, bet365 and Catena Media.

What Brazil did to the numbers

On 25 September, Brazil’s government issued a provisional measure banning fixed-odds betting, sports and online casino alike. Licensed sites went dark on 6 October, licenses ended 30 days after publication, and operators get no fee refund. Congress has not voted on it. On 11 November it extended the measure by 60 days, which pushes the deadline into early March 2027, and 99 amendments are on the table.

Better Collective answered two days later, on 27 September. Brazil was trending toward about €45 million of revenue in 2026, about 12% of what analysts expected for the group, with about €15 million of that still to come in the rest of the year. Most of it ran on revenue share with licensed operators, so the ban stopped it at once. The company cut its 2026 guidance from 7 to 12% organic growth to 3 to 8%, and EBITDA before special items from +8 to +18% to -7 to +3%. It suspended the 2027 to 2028 targets and the share buyback. Co-CEO Jesper Søgaard said the ban would not remove the demand for betting and warned it could push players to offshore operators.

The share did what shares do. It closed at SEK 106.2 on 25 September, the day of the measure, and at SEK 71.0 on 28 September, the next trading day. It touched SEK 63.0 on 30 October and closed at SEK 65.3 on 12 November, down 39% since the ban. Three weeks before all this, the second-quarter report had shown revenue up 9% to €89.1 million and EBITDA before special items up 20%.

Who ranks in Brazil now

Here is the part the earnings reports won’t show you. Our volatility score runs 25 generic casino and betting searches in Brazil every day, in Portuguese, from “cassino online” to “melhores casas de apostas”. I pulled the top 10 lists from 12 November, two runs per search, 50 lists in all.

The demand Søgaard talked about is right there in the results. Operators’ international sites hold the top 10 for the money terms: NetBet’s casino domain, Betsson, Betway, Stake and PokerStars show up across the casino and betting searches, with Stake and Betsson both in the top 10 for “cassino online”. None of them can take a Brazilian customer under the measure, and they rank anyway.

Affiliates have not been wiped out either. Casino.org, OddsScanner, Oddspedia, SportyTrader, GameChampions and Casino Guru’s Portuguese site all hold places. Sports media fill much of the rest: Lance, Metrópoles, Estado de Minas, OneFootball, 365Scores and LiveScore. YouTube appears in 20 of the 50 lists, Google Play in 12, and the government’s own Brasil Sem Bets site ranks for “apostas online”.

And then there are the pages that should not be there. For “odds” and “melhores casas de apostas”, the top 10 includes a university thesis repository, a city ombudsman’s site and municipal webmail hosts, none of which has anything to do with betting. Pages like that on public-sector domains usually mean someone put them there without the owner’s knowledge. I’ve left the domains out on purpose.

Better Collective’s own Bolavip is still in the results, too. It holds first place for “poker online” and third for “palpites” in both runs. That’s the problem in one line: the rankings didn’t leave Brazil, the licensed operators did. A revenue-share affiliate with a top position and no licensed operator to send the player to earns nothing from it, while the offshore sites in the same top 10 take the click.

Ahrefs says the same thing at site level. Its estimate of Bolavip’s Brazilian organic traffic was 319,089 visits a month on 20 September, five days before the measure, and 307,088 on 10 November, with the number of top-three rankings up from 495 to 1,076. A 4% dip, for a brand whose licensed operators are gone.

One caveat. This is 25 searches on one day, Ahrefs is an estimate, and Google now serves most gambling results through its own redirect links, so our lists read the site from the breadcrumb. It’s a sample, not a market study.

What to watch on 18 November

• How much of the quarter Brazil still delivered. The ban landed in the last week of Q3, so the full hit shows up in Q4.
• Whether the 3 to 8% guidance holds, and what the company says about the cuts and any restructuring charge.
• North America, which carried the first two quarters.
• Whether the company confirms the COO change. NEXT.io says the market had not been informed.

My take

Brazil did not lose its bettors in September. It lost its licensed operators, and the rankings show where the demand went. For an affiliate running on revenue share, a market’s license regime is now a search risk of its own: a top-three position can go to zero in ten days with no algorithm update involved.

That is the brutal part of the affiliate business right now, and it isn’t the AI fight everyone talks about. You pick a market, get in early, build the sites, build the links, win the positions, and one regulatory decision takes the whole campaign with it. Better Collective holds the top spot for “poker online” in Brazil this week, and there is no licensed operator to send the player to.

The job cuts came before the report, which tells you the Q3 call will be about costs and the United States, not Brazil. I’ll update this post on 18 November.

Share prices are closing prices on Nasdaq Stockholm and are for information only.