Blask and CasinoRank partner to put market data behind iGaming journalism

Blask and CasinoRank have formed an editorial partnership built on live demand data, starting with an interview with Blask CEO Max Tesla and a joint report on the UK market under 40% Remote Gaming Duty.

Most partnership announcements describe plans. This one ships with results: a CEO interview laying out the case for external market intelligence, and a joint report that delivered the first clean read on UK iGaming after the country doubled its gaming tax. The Blask CasinoRank partnership turns those one-offs into a program.

What the Blask CasinoRank partnership covers

CasinoRank is a global iGaming news platform covering operator news, regulation, and industry interviews. Blask measures player demand for iGaming brands across regulated and unregulated markets. The partnership connects the two: executive interviews, expert commentary, and a series of joint market intelligence reports, grounded in demand data rather than press releases. The first report, covering the UK in Q2 2026, is live.

💡 Want to see the report? Download it fir free: After the tax cliff: UK iGaming under 40% Remote Gaming Duty

Max Tesla on external intelligence

In April 2026, CasinoRank published an interview with Blask co-founder and CEO Max Tesla. The core argument: operators have spent years optimizing internal KPIs while flying blind on everything outside their own walls.

Max Tesla

“AI does not replace strategic thinking,” Tesla said. “It provides the missing context that allows strategy to be grounded in reality.”

Brazil illustrates the blind spot: “426 out of 583 brands operating in Brazil function without a local license and yet they compete for the same audience as the ‘locals.'” Tesla’s framework comes down to three questions: where is demand emerging, who is capturing it, and what realistic share is achievable. Media working from earnings calls and press releases inherits the same blind spots.

The partnership gives CasinoRank’s editors demand data to work from instead.

The first proof: the UK under a 40% tax

On April 1, 2026, the UK doubled its Remote Gaming Duty from 21% to 40%. The first joint report, “After the Tax Cliff”, delivered the first read of a full month under the new regime. The market did not stall: the Blask Index, an AI-enhanced demand signal built from search activity across iGaming brands, reached 49.1 million in May, above the Q1 monthly average of 48.6 million. Estimated monthly revenue held at $1.07B, measured through Competitive Earning Baseline (CEB), Blask’s benchmark modeled from brand strength and competitive positioning rather than operator reports.

The story sits underneath the flat surface:

• Online Casino, the directly taxed vertical, grew 6.6% year-on-year, trailing the overall market’s pace
• Live Dealer is contracting 10.3% annually; the duty squeezes its high-value player economics hardest
• Online Betting, exempt from the new duty, grew 1.2% as operators shifted promotional spend toward gaming products
• Offshore revenue grew 18% year-on-year against 5.3% demand growth, at roughly 3.87 times the revenue per unit of demand of licensed operators

As the follow-up coverage on CasinoRank put it: flatness is not the absence of a story. It is the story.

The bar this sets for market coverage

For CasinoRank readers, the partnership means market coverage with a measurable evidence base. For the industry, a standard worth copying: check market claims against demand data before publishing them.

Q2 2026 is the first full quarter under the 40% regime without a major racing festival to flatter the numbers, and the next reports will show whether May’s signals compound or settle into a new baseline. Those chapters will run on CasinoRank, with Blask data underneath.