Adam Small, CEO & Co-Founder of Third Planet Affiliates – iGaming Interviews

Adam Small, CEO & Co-Founder of Third Planet Affiliates, is a seasoned leader in the iGaming industry with over 20 years of experience, particularly in the affiliate space. His entrepreneurial journey began in 2005 when he co-founded PocketFives.com, a poker community and rankings website that quickly gained traction and became a go-to resource for online poker players.

After more than a decade in poker, Adam pivoted to the rapidly growing online casino and sports betting sector. He founded NJ Online Gambling, a dedicated news platform covering New Jersey’s online gaming landscape. This success led to the launch of several more industry-focused sites, including USBets.com, which, along with other properties, was eventually acquired by Better Collective in 2019.

Now, as the CEO of Third Planet Affiliates, Adam continues to expand his influence in gaming media. The company recently added Props.com, a leading player props-focused site, to its portfolio, which already includes the iGaming news platform CasinoReports.com and lottery resource LotteryGeeks.com. With a proven track record of building and scaling affiliate businesses, Adam remains at the forefront of the evolving iGaming landscape.

What inspired you to start PocketFives back in 2004? Did you anticipate how quickly it would take off?

My roommates and friends and I were all really into poker, and we found what we thought was something of a blind spot in that nobody was reporting in-depth on who the people were behind the majority of the famous online poker screen names. I’d just dropped out of grad school, and poured myself into this project, and very fortunately we got in at the exact right time to really take off.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in growing PocketFives into one of the most recognized poker communities?

The hardest part was building and maintaining credibility. Once enough people knew about us, growth was almost inevitable for some period of time. But in the early days, we really worked hard to gain friends and allies who could help get the word out and help seed the forums and blogs we were trying to build out.

What led you to transition from poker to casino and sports betting? Was there a specific moment or industry shift that influenced your decision?

I’d been focused almost entirely on poker for about 10 years when we just kind of ran into a wall. The business was in decline, and I felt like we’d lost a lot of ground to newer and fresher ideas. Meanwhile, DFS (the precursor to legalized sports betting) had taken off and the New Jersey online casinos were doing really well. I was at the point in my career and family life where I needed to focus on some amount of wealth accumulation, and staying solely in poker just wasn’t going to get us there anymore. So I poured myself into learning as much about these other verticals as possible. Once I knew what was going on and had done a fair amount of networking, it was relatively smooth sailing to transition over.

What were some of the biggest differences in player behavior and engagement between poker and casino or sports betting?

With poker, the most engaged members of the community were high-volume players, who were usually focused on their bottom line, whether professional or otherwise. In casino and sports betting, the content is more geared around having fun with the product.

NJ Online Gambling was launched as New Jersey became one of the first states to legalize online gambling. What was your strategy in entering this market early, and how did you position the site for success?

We didn’t get in as early as some others, unfortunately, but still well before sports betting came along and shortly before there was big affiliate competition from Europe. We had heard some affiliates were doing well in the NJ online casino market, and there just weren’t many companies competing there. Once I realized there was a likely path to profitability, even in the single state of NJ, with enormous upside once other states legalized, it was an easy choice to jump in. We spent a lot of time trying to learn about the best types of content for “money” pages on the site, and invested in strong reporting. And within a year of launch, we’d hired a highly experienced NJ-based journalist to head up our content. But mostly, it was a pretty standard affiliate site, and the most important strategic element to it was understanding there was value in New Jersey and investing in the state.

With the legalization of sports betting expanding across the U.S., how did you adapt your approach at USBets to capitalize on the shifting regulatory landscape?

Prior to the proliferation of sports betting, we were narrowly focused on NJ online casinos, as well as a couple of sites we were running in prospective online casino states – Michigan and Pennsylvania. We didn’t have a national approach at that point. When it looked like sports betting legalization was likely to happen in 2018, we bought the USBets.com domain and started working on a broader national content strategy to get ahead of sports betting. This included buying the website SportsHandle.com in late 2018, which ended up becoming our flagship site. Rather than focus on local news, our strategy came to primarily revolve around publishing stories of broader interest to the industry and media, regardless of where in the country (or even other parts of North America) they were happening.

You and your partners eventually sold USBets to Better Collective—what was that acquisition process like and how long did you stay with Better Collective?

When we sold, the sale was actually preceded by the merger of three separate companies. In 2018, PocketFives merged with the parent company of RotoGrinders.com, and then right before the Better Collective deal, US Bets was also merged into the same company for the purpose of completing the sale. Partly because of the complexity of having various ownership structures for these separate entities and partly just because acquisitions of this size usually take a fair bit of time, there was a period of several months between agreeing on the main points of the sale and actually closing the deal. I’d describe the process as long and painstaking, particularly given we were selling to a public company that needed to verify many details, sometimes repeatedly, in order to get to the finish line. But all the people involved were good to work with, and we got there. We had an earn-out period of about 30 months, and then I stayed on full-time for another year and a half or so beyond that. So overall, I was there just a bit over four years after we closed the initial sale agreement.

What motivated you to launch Third Planet Affiliates, and how does it differ from your previous ventures?

I think there’s still money to be made, and I saw how the big affiliate companies have largely folded on serious industry news coverage in favor of focusing on other areas of their business. So that’s part of it, just seeing the opportunity to come back in with a news-focused product. The other big thing for us is that we’ve built a substantial network in the industry and are able to leverage that into opportunities that weren’t there for us before. So with the last companies (both RotoGrinders and US Bets) we were very much bootstrapped operations, surviving on our own ability to generate something out of nothing. This time around, there are a lot of people who want to work with us on various projects, and we have a lot more opportunities with upside.

How did the acquisition of Props.com fit into your vision for Third Planet Affiliates?

It was never something we had envisioned, but it definitely fits into our more general ethos, which is to be open-minded about opportunities and willing to pull the trigger on things we think have upside for us. The site was up for sale, and the seller needed to move quickly. As it turned out, we were one of a small number of potential buyers that both had the cash to buy it and were able to make it happen in a very short time with very few contingencies. It’s been a really great acquisition for us so far, and it’s now a central part of where we’re headed as a business.

What role do CasinoReports.com and LotteryGeeks.com play in your broader affiliate strategy?

CasinoReports.com has always been at the center of our plans to build out a durable and versatile online casino affiliate site for the US market. As a practical matter, it may still be some time before it’s highly productive economically. But we expect it to be our top site in the long term. LotteryGeeks is an exciting project for us as well, in a space we didn’t know as well before diving in last year. We have some cool product ideas that should start to move the needle on that site’s traffic and notability once they’re released. It’s less clear how to monetize in that space right now, but once the site has more traffic we’ll start honing in more on what we can do there.

What’s your long-term vision for Third Planet Affiliates, and where do you see the industry heading in the next five years?

I think we’re likely to launch and/or acquire more sites when we find new verticals we want to get into, and long term this could include non-gambling verticals. We’d like to build out a diversified company and run it for many years to come. Setting aside the next 5 years, the gambling industry is already going to have a very interesting 2025. We’ve entered all the way now into a new era where a number of unregulated (or lightly regulated) verticals are challenging the regulated incumbents. FanDuel and DraftKings both have a pretty solid moat built up to protect them from the likes of Caesars, bet365 and BetMGM. All the while, PrizePicks, Underdog, Fliff, VGW and others have found their way into pretty compelling positions. I think 2025 is the year where some of these differences start getting sorted out, and maybe we’ll even see one of these unregulated brands get acquired by a large regulated player like DraftKings.

Thank you for the great interview, I look forward to following your progress in the industry.