Better Collective’s 2025 Annual Report: Record EBITDA Masks a More Complicated Reality
Better Collective has dropped its 2025 Annual Report, and the headline number is impossible to ignore: record EBITDA. The Danish sports media and affiliate giant is waving the banner of financial achievement, and frankly, on the surface, it deserves a moment of credit. But if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you know that record EBITDA in an affiliate business during a period of aggressive market expansion and cost restructuring requires a closer look — not a standing ovation.
The Headline Numbers: What Better Collective Wants You to See
Better Collective reported record EBITDA figures for fiscal year 2025, a milestone that the company’s leadership has framed as validation of its long-term strategy. Revenue growth, disciplined cost management, and continued dominance in sports media affiliates across regulated markets have all been cited as contributing factors.
And yes, those things are real. Better Collective has built a genuinely impressive media empire, aggregating sports content, betting tips, and affiliate traffic across dozens of markets. The EBITDA record isn’t fictional. But EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — is also the metric that conveniently strips out some of the most important financial realities a business faces.
What EBITDA Doesn’t Tell You
Let’s be direct: EBITDA is a useful operational metric, but it’s also the favorite vanity stat of companies carrying significant debt loads or undergoing heavy capital expenditure cycles. Better Collective has made no secret of its acquisition-heavy growth strategy over the past several years, snapping up sports media assets across the US, Europe, and beyond.
Those acquisitions cost money. Real money. And the interest payments, amortization of acquired intangibles, and depreciation charges that EBITDA so elegantly sidesteps don’t disappear — they just get moved to a different part of the income statement where fewer press releases tend to point.
The question serious analysts should be asking isn’t whether EBITDA is at a record high. It’s whether free cash flow, net debt trajectory, and return on invested capital are moving in the right direction. If they are, Better Collective has a genuinely compelling story. If they aren’t, then the record EBITDA is a marketing number dressed up as a financial result.
The US Market: Still the Bet That Has to Pay Off
Better Collective’s aggressive push into the United States sports betting and media market has been the defining strategic narrative of the past three years. The company invested heavily in US-facing assets — most notably through its acquisition of Action Network and other stateside sports media properties — betting that the continued rollout of legal sports wagering across American states would create an affiliate gold rush.
That bet is still playing out. The US market remains structurally attractive — enormous addressable audience, growing regulatory acceptance of sports betting, and a media landscape that is still figuring out how to monetize sports gambling content effectively. Better Collective has positioned itself well on paper.
But the US is also a market where customer acquisition costs are brutal, operator marketing budgets fluctuate wildly with each state launch cycle, and the CPA-versus-revenue-share debate never fully resolves itself. The profitability of US affiliate operations is not a given. It requires sustained operator relationships, traffic quality, and conversion rates that can erode quickly when the novelty of a new state launch fades.
Systems Thinking: What’s Actually Driving the Performance?
Strip away the press release language and what you have is a business that has done several things systematically well. Better Collective has built genuine media brands — not just SEO spam farms, but actual editorial products with audiences. That’s harder than it looks, and it creates more durable traffic than pure search-dependency.
The company has also been reasonably disciplined about geographic diversification, ensuring that no single regulatory shock — say, a market restriction in Germany or a licensing upheaval in the Nordics — can crater the entire revenue base in a single quarter. That’s sound systems design for an affiliate business operating in a regulatory minefield.
Where the system gets more fragile is in the debt structure and the integration complexity of a business assembled largely through acquisitions. Each acquired asset brings its own technology stack, editorial culture, commercial relationships, and audience expectations. Integrating those coherently while maintaining EBITDA margins is genuinely difficult, and the cracks in acquisition-driven growth models tend to appear slowly, then suddenly.
The Regulatory Overhang Nobody Wants to Discuss
Any honest assessment of Better Collective’s business has to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the European regulatory environment is tightening, and it is not finished tightening. Markets across Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK are all in various stages of restricting gambling advertising, affiliate marketing, and bonus promotion — the exact mechanisms through which sports media affiliates generate their revenue.
The UK’s ongoing review of gambling advertising rules, Sweden’s persistent debate about marketing restrictions, and the Netherlands’ rocky regulated market launch are not isolated incidents. They are signals of a systemic shift in how European governments view the commercial infrastructure of online gambling.
Better Collective’s record EBITDA was generated in a regulatory environment that, by 2026 and 2027, may look materially different. The strategic question isn’t whether the company had a great 2025 — it did. The question is whether the business model is structurally resilient enough to maintain that performance as the regulatory screws tighten across its core European markets.
What Leadership Is Saying (and What They’re Not)
Better Collective’s executive team has consistently projected confidence in the company’s strategic direction, and to their credit, they’ve largely delivered on the promises made during the acquisition phase. Revenue has grown, the brand portfolio has expanded, and EBITDA has — as advertised — hit a record.
What leadership tends to be less forthcoming about, as is entirely customary in annual report season, is the granular breakdown of which assets are genuinely performing versus which are being carried by the stronger parts of the portfolio. In a business assembled through acquisitions, asset-level transparency is always the first casualty of consolidated reporting.
Investors and analysts who want a real picture of Better Collective’s health should be pushing hard on segment-level profitability, the amortization schedule for acquired intangibles, and the US market’s contribution margin on a standalone basis. Those are the numbers that will tell you whether the record EBITDA is the beginning of a durable performance era or the peak before a more challenging cycle.
The Verdict: Genuinely Impressive, But Eyes Open
Better Collective has earned its moment. Building a scaled, diversified sports media and affiliate business is not trivial, and delivering record EBITDA in a year when macroeconomic conditions were uncertain and the regulatory environment was actively hostile deserves acknowledgment.
But the iGaming affiliate sector has a long and entertaining history of companies that peaked on EBITDA metrics right before the business model encountered its structural limits. Better Collective is better-positioned than most to navigate what comes next. It has real brands, real audiences, and real geographic diversity.
The record EBITDA is a real achievement. Whether it’s a foundation or a ceiling depends entirely on decisions being made right now about debt management, US market execution, and regulatory adaptation. Watch those variables. They’ll tell you far more than any annual report headline ever will.
Disclaimer: This article and its accompanying images may have been enhanced using AI tools to ensure smoother content delivery and visual appeal.
