What is Incentivised Traffic?

Incentivised traffic is signups obtained by giving the user something in return for registering — cash back on their deposit, a payment for completing the sign-up, points in an unrelated rewards scheme, entry to a giveaway conditional on opening an account. Nearly every affiliate agreement bans it outright. The ban is commercial rather than moral. A player who registered to collect a reward has no interest in the operator, deposits the minimum, claims the welcome bonus and leaves; the operator pays a full acquisition fee for an account with no lifetime value. Because the harm only becomes visible weeks later, the clause is almost always enforced retrospectively — the affiliate is paid, the cohort is reviewed, and the commission is clawed back or the account is closed. Detection does not require catching anyone in the act. Incentivised cohorts have a distinctive signature: deposits clustered at the exact minimum, bonus claim rates near one hundred per cent, almost no second deposits, and signups arriving in bursts rather than spread across a day. Operators run these checks routinely, which is why the practice tends to end in a clawback rather than in an argument about definitions. The boundary is narrower than people assume. Paying a reader is obviously incentivised; so, in most agreements, is offering a private bonus of your own on top of the operator's, running a giveaway that requires registration, or promising anything of value conditional on the deposit. Publishing an exclusive bonus the operator itself granted is not — that offer is the operator's, and it is the one legitimate version of the same shape.