Where the money comes from
There is no paywall on Aussino, no locked-off newsletter and no premium tier hiding behind an email harvester. Nearly every page we publish is bankrolled by affiliate commissions. When an Aussie reader opens an account at a casino by following one of our outbound links and starts playing, the operator may pay us a referral fee in return. That fee comes out of the casino's own marketing budget — not your deposit, not your wagers and not the amount you eventually withdraw — and where an operator advertises more than one welcome offer, the bonus you pick up through our link is never worse than the version you would get by heading straight to the casino.
Every page here that carries affiliate links wears a short notice up top that points back to this document for the full story. On top of that, the outbound buttons carry the machine-readable tags most modern browsers understand, in step with search-engine transparency guidance and the sort of consumer-protection expectations the ACCC has been building out for the online space over the last few years.
A ranking is not for sale
We will put it plainly, since this is the heart of the disclosure: commissions have no bearing on where an operator sits in our rankings, and there is no plumbing by which they could. The commercial rate for each operator is settled once at the start and stays put — whether the brand tops a leaderboard, sits in tenth, or gets pulled from the list altogether. If a casino falls short in our six-point retests, it slides down. If a casino has never sent us so much as a cent yet the testing supports a listing, it earns the listing anyway.
You can watch that principle land in a few concrete outcomes. We have walked away from the biggest commission offers on the table in more than one Aussie sub-vertical because the on-the-ground testing did not back a listing. We drop operators the moment payouts, terms or customer support start sliding, and we spell out the reason on the page in plain English. And a spot won through real, hands-on Australian testing cannot be bought back by an operator waving a bigger cut in front of us.
Some listed operators send us zero
Not every casino you spot on Aussino.org has an affiliate arrangement with us. Our tables cover three separate categories of operator, and it is worth knowing which is which:
- Affiliate partners. A standard commercial arrangement, a fixed referral fee and zero influence on scoring at all. These make up the bulk of the tables.
- In-house programmes we have not joined. Some operators run their own affiliate schemes rather than sit inside a wider network. Even when we have not signed up to their programme, we still list the operator whenever it earns the spot on merit.
- Networks we deliberately steer clear of. A handful of networks come with terms we will not accept; operators connected only to those networks pay us nothing at all and still make our shortlists on the strength of the test data alone.
The upshot is straightforward: "pays us the most" and "ranks at the top" sit in two entirely separate columns of our internal spreadsheet, and neither column ever reaches across and rewrites the other.
What a payment does and does not get you
- We will accept a fixed, clearly disclosed affiliate commission on outbound signups.
- We will not trade a ranking slot, an inflated score or a softer conclusion for cash, crypto or gift vouchers.
- We will not publish undisclosed sponsored articles or advertorial dressed up as an editorial review.
- We will not bury critical reporting on a brand in exchange for a better rate.
Spotted something on the site that looks like it cuts against any of these commitments? Drop a note to hello@aussino.org with "Editorial concern" in the subject line, and a real human being will open it. We would far rather hear about a slip from a reader than let it sit there quietly under a star rating.