Definition
An active player is one who has met a defined activity threshold in a period — commonly at least one real-money bet, or at least one deposit, within a calendar month. The count of these, monthly active players (MAP) or daily active players (DAU), is the base denominator for most other operator metrics: revenue per active, bets per active, deposit per active, bonus cost per active.
Because so much depends on it, the exact definition (bet versus login versus deposit; calendar month versus rolling 30 days) has to be stated and held constant.
Actives is the metric that shows whether an operator is really growing. Revenue can rise because a few high-value players got bigger while the base shrank — fragile growth — or because the active base is expanding — durable growth.
Splitting actives into new, retained and reactivated each period shows which of the three is driving the total and whether acquisition is outpacing churn.
In context
For affiliate and channel analysis, actives is how an operator sees the ongoing contribution of a source rather than its one-time delivery. An affiliate might send 500 FTDs in a month but contribute only 180 monthly actives three months later; another sends 300 FTDs but still shows 210 actives at month three.
The second source is building the base; the first is filling a leaky bucket. Revenue-share deals are effectively priced on this — the affiliate is paid on the net revenue of the actives its traffic keeps producing.
Actives also frames operational and responsible-gambling monitoring. A sudden spike in new actives from one source warrants a quality check (bonus abusers and fraudulent signups inflate actives briefly).
Trends in actives by value tier show whether growth is broad or concentrated. And because "active" includes players staking heavily, operator dashboards typically overlay responsible-gambling indicators on the active base — proportion of actives hitting deposit limits, playing at high frequency, or showing harm markers — so that growth in actives is read alongside the health of that activity, not just its volume.
Worked example
An operator reports 12% revenue growth for the quarter. Splitting the active base shows monthly actives actually fell 3%, with revenue up because the top value tier grew.
Management treats this as a warning, not a win, and shifts budget back to acquisition. Separately, one affiliate's month-three actives-to-FTD ratio of 70% earns it a revenue-share rate increase.
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