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Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 31 total)
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  • #587255
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Supposedly, online gambling is a multibillion dollar industry that is growing at an alarming rate. According to the front page of CAP, $1 Billion dollars was wagered in 1999 at online casinos alone. By now, that figure is closer to $3 Billion dollars wagered a year.

    So where is all that money?? And who is making all this money?

    As stated by bb1webs in another thread, “…about 90% of the affiliates don’t make money. And out of the remaining 10% that only about 4% are big players.” I believe this number to be very accurate from what I know of the industry. But the “big players” is probably more like 1%. I define a big player as someone who makes $50,000 or more each month in commissions.

    Even if the best of the best affiliates were making on average of $100,000 per month, that is still not much money in a billion dollar industry. In fact, I doubt that there are more than 50 affiliates that make more than $100,000.00 per month in online casino revenue (it’s probably more like 20 affiliates). Even if there were 50 affiliates, that is still only $60,000,000 commissions over the course of 12 months. Even in the best days of casinoprophet and gamblehouse, they didn’t make more than $500,000.00 in a month (not to my knowledge anyhow.). If you factor how much the casinos make in thereown promotions, advertising, and smaller affiliates, it’s still a far cry from multibillions.

    So where is the multibillion dollars?

    I have been promoting online casinos now since 2000, and I have achieved every major search engine ranking there is to achieve. I have been at the top for general terms like “online gambling” and “online casino”, and ranked at the top for games like “video poker”, “roulette”:, and “blackjack”. With that being said, the money is never what I hoped or expected. My sites convert well, and over the course of 4 years I have figured out which casinos convert and which do not. I am simply stating that the amount of money to be made in the online casino business is far less grand than is projected by reports and numbers.

    For those of you who make $50,000+ per month, that is great, but don’t you find it odd that you only get about $5k – 10K in new business each month, and the other $40k comes from 2 or 3 players that have been with you for two years? Why don’t your supposedly great search engine rankings make you more money or do more search volume? I have been in denial for years… I have been thinking for years, “just one more #1 ranking”, “just need a few more keywords in Google”. But I have now realized, the market is not as big as I thought, it is much smaller.

    Please note, I still make a very good living being an affiliate, but when I started four years ago, I thought this was a much larger market. For those of you thinking about getting into the online casino business, I doubt this market will ever live up to your expectations.

    To get a bearing of what people think the market can deliver, in terms of players per month and volume of traffic for money keywords, I have made a poll. Once everyone has weighed in with their best guess, I will reveal the correct answer. The question is: Being ranked #1 in Yahoo & MSN for “online gambling” for 30days, generates how many unique visitors to your website?

    I’m not going to get into how many players, because conversions are up to the website. But the amount of traffic is based on rankings, titles and snippet.

    #659029
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    The problem: I think under 10% (i’m optimist) casino players come from SE. Why players need to go to google to find an online casino?

    #659032
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    no more than 2,000 for that term

    #659034
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    if you take out the webmasters who are checking your site (and there is an easy way to figure who are they if you have many sites which are ranked in other terms) and you take out the spiders and the automated tools for checking ranking and content the number is for this term less the 500 per month.
    I am not kidding, it was mesured just recently.
    /Janet

    #659041
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Well, one big chunk of money ends up going to the US congress every year to stave off the negative legislation. There are many casinos and sportsbooks who have grouped together under the umbrella of a small handful of different associations and they are heavily lobbying – been doing it for 3 years. Without that none of us would be here.

    But even that, substantial as it is, doesn’t near account for all the money. I think about this myself. I think we are way underpaid. We should all be paid for listing casinos plus the percentage – all of those affs who make little money are still doing branding for the casinos – for free. There should be some pay per real visitor who looks at the casino ad, a fee based on real traffic.

    Also, all these downloads you see that don’t ever convert – we should be paid for them. My bet is that a good percentage is people who already have played that casino – under another affiliate. The person who reminds them to go back after a year or two of inactivity should get something for that also. Even the ones who don’t fall into that category – each download is a valid, live email address for the casino to pursue. These are expensive because they are hard to come by.

    Looking at the numbers, and looking at the way we do business – yes something is way off and we are not being compensated for all the actual services we provide.

    #659059
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    BTW – this is an excellent poll. I have also been questioning the traffic and revenue for pure organic search listings. Yahoo / MSN in particular has been very disspointing. Top 10 for “slots” and “online slots” for instance is producing under 1000 uniques per month and will be considerably lower when you take into account factors mentioned by “Janet”…

    I am sure Google is another story, but Google and I dont exactly see eye to eye these days… :bigsmile:

    #659060
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Oddly enough Kevin, I think “slot machines” gets more traffic than “slots” these days.
    I made the poll gear towards Yahoo because most people are having more success with Yahoo recently.

    #659061
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    I would guess your keyword gets 300 real hits a month. Out of that you should experience 10 – 20 real depositing players with a good converting website.

    #659065
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    “I’m not going to get into how many players, because conversions are up to the website.”

    So is the clickability of the link.

    “I will reveal the correct answer”

    No, you have one answer. Right now Gambling phd has that slot. Compare its listing to Gambling Smart at #6, or some of the redirect puke mixed in there. Some would be similar, but others will have large differences in clickability.

    #659066
    Anonymous
    Guest

    I chose less than 5,000 visitors. I have a couple of #1’s on yahoo for what you would think are very popular searches, yet I net less than 5,000 visitors a month for those.

    The bulk of my traffic comes from 1,000’s of one hit and two hit keyphrases – that has to be everyone’s largest source: the hits you get for searches on phrases similar to your optimized phrases, and phrases that just happen to be in your content.

    If you are ranking high for popular searches – such as “online casinos”, then most likely you’re getting a ton of traffic from similar keyphrases as a side-effect (providing you have content!).

    #659067
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Hi,

    *good to see you OCW. Its been too long.

    ………..

    I think that with all stated, that it leaves a lot of room for the arguement that we get shaved nearly bald.

    There are certainly some programs which do obviously cheat us. And though this isn’t going to be too popular, WE are to blame for their existence, or at least to some degree we are to blame for their success.

    RTG is a prime example for at least the majority of their casinos.

    They use this manager credits and bonus deductions to the point that they literally make them not worth promoting for most of us and even those that do okay with an RTG property, you’ve got to admit the bonus/manager credit deductions are rediculous under the best of explanation.

    We should be more adamant towards taking down or moving back – programs that have any kind of fishy going ons or that don’t produce with a reasonable expectation.

    I know I am guilty of keeping some programs around way too long mostly because I’ve written reviews about the casinos. What should be done about these casinos IMHO is to follow Krystall’s lead as she will just redirect the links to casinos that DO make her money.

    Not a bad idea. At first I thought well you’re not gonna convert sending people to someplace they don’t expect to land, but when you consider that you don’t make money with these casinos anyway, what’s to lose?

    at least you’d know you weren’t sending players to some place that is likely cheating you.

    as to the SE numbers. All I can say is Wow! those are really low to what I’d expected.

    #659069
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    What should be done about these casinos IMHO is to follow Krystall’s lead as she will just redirect the links to casinos that DO make her money.

    Hmmmm, I also thought that it was kind of rude to send people to a place they were not looking for. But this is making more and more sense to me, too.

    #659071
    Anonymous
    Inactive
    vd752 wrote:
    The problem: I think under 10% (i’m optimist) casino players come from SE. Why players need to go to google to find an online casino?

    An optimistic 10% huh? So where does the other 90% of traffic come from?

    #659073
    Anonymous
    Guest
    Dominique wrote:
    But this is making more and more sense to me, too.

    I agree with that. After all, since certain casinos are not making us money, then it’s obvious the players don’t like them, so we’d be doing our visitors a favour by sending them to casinos players do like! (Assuming, of course, that the aforementioned unequitable casinos aren’t shaving us.) :1circling

    #659077
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Let assume that I know about on line gambling (from friends, TV, off-line and e-mail advertising) – usually this fact is associated with a casino brand. In this case, i can search for casino related information, but not for other on line casino (may be later after big losses when I’m looking for free money :) )

    I agree, traffic come from SEs (75% from google) – but I’m not so sure
    about players. My question (for affiliate managers) is what is the part(%) of players and casino profit that come from a WEBMASTER affiliate program? In special for brand names. (I think a few brand casino make 90% or more inn the industry).

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 31 total)