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Matan Offer of GammonEmpire talks about the pro’s and con’s of promoting backgammon online.
Skill Games are considered by many to be the next evolution of online gaming after poker was introduced some four years ago. Although very profitable, the gambling products suffer from several major drawbacks, mainly restrictions and sanctions superposed by various entities from the legal and financial sectors. For example, credit card companies who employ severe limitations on gambling-related transactions hence are reducing the conversion and player value by up to 60%. Skill games do not have this problem as they are not considered gambling.
Of all skill games, Backgammon is one of the most ancient games in the world. It combines luck and skill, much like poker does and is popular in almost every country in the world.
Until the end of 2004 backgammon had little exposure online. The biggest backgammon server had roughly 60,000 members with an average of 400-600 players online. Players would play matches for money and charged a rake for each money game.
Launched at the end of 2004, GammonEmpire is now the biggest server in the world with more than 5000 players online on average.
Q: How did GammonEmpire grow so fast?
A: Player acquisition was easy for several reasons:
1. No competition: There are approximately 3-4 major backgammon servers and most of them are underexposed. Therefore, new players had little or no alternative to play elsewhere.
2. No processing problems: Since transactions are not coded as gambling, there are no credit card rejections and 95% of the transactions are accepted.
3. Best product: GammonEmpire was the first to introduce live Sit & go Tournaments, Event tournaments and monthly big-prize tournaments (>$30k) online. Top that with an excellent user interface (graphics, ergonomics, 13 languages and more).Q: What do you offer affiliates?
A: These are the payment methods available to our affiliates:
1. 20%-30% of the rake.
2. $30-$50 CPA (per depositing player).
3. $1 – $2 CPL (per fun player, i.e. free registration: only username/password is required).Q: Why is your CPA and CPL so low so compared to Poker and Casino products?
A: CPA and CPL are both derived from player value which is lower for backgammon than poker or casino, mainly because the online market is still smaller. However, it is a known fact that player value increases in proportion to the amount of online players (more matches in a given time period). 7 months ago, GammonEmpire had 500 players online on average. Today we have 5,000 and rising. Therefore, player value is expected to be doubled in the next 6 months, and CPA accordingly. Today we offer 50% higher CPA than 6 months ago.
Q: Considering the low CPA and CPL, why should I market backgammon?
A: It’s all about conversion. Backgammon converts MUCH better than any other gambling product because of reasons mentioned above (mainly no competition, no cc rejections). We added a few more reasons below:
1. Non Gambling: Channels that are closed to gambling products are more accessible for backgammon, i.e. Google AdWords or Overture.
2. SEO is easier because there is less competition.
3. There’s a tight correlation between Poker and Backgammon.Therefore it can be used as a complimentary product to your poker promotions.
For more information about GammonEmpire affiliate program, please refer to our affiliate-program website: http://www.GammonAffiliates.com or feel free to contact me directly at matan@GammonEmpire.com
I think Backgammon has a place for sure, but i also expect Baccarat to be the next “fad”. And bingo. If i’ve learned nothing from my time in the music industry its that things come and go and cycle round like a big roundabout.
Poker today, Backgammon tomorrow, Roulette, Baccarat, Bingo…they’ll probably all get their turn in the spotlight before doing a “dot com”. Then we’ll go round again revisiting Poker etc in a 10/20/30-year cycle. People will invest, make loads, go under, resurface, reinvest. Its how industries like this work…its how they have to work. You’ll be lucky to see one Poker TV channel running in 2 years time, yet alone the 4 or 5 we have now on Sky. But there will probably be the “Bingo Channel” to watch or “Baccarat TV”
Unlike the music industry in which Radio is what decides the next fad, I believe online gambling will be driven by the marketeer with the most money and the most clout at any one given time. That might be a Partygaming or a Virgin. It depends who can reach and manipulate the public mindset the best.
Cheers
Simmo!
Some pretty big statements there buddy. Yeah you seem to be talking about things that are in and out of fashion… however I think that poker/casino’s/bingo and all the rest have got a lot more staying power. I mean look at how many people want it poker as a “sport”. I think it will be more on that level where it gets bigger and bigger.
Yes poker may become unfashionable but I think there will always be people that get excited by playing, be it online or offline.
Just my 2 cents
Bart
Ah i dont dispute all the above will retain a level of popularity. But regarding affiliate promotions, as “fads” come and go, competition builds and wanes. So my point is that talking about the “next big thing” is really talking short-term in terms of capitalising on revenue making ventures.
It will pay affiliates to keep ahead of the game, but while affiliates are required, there will always be market share available in all these fields, just at varying levels of profitability. A safe bet IMHO is to concentrate on a specific area of interest and ride the down periods waiting for the next wave, unless you have so much traffic that can be cross-fertilised you can afford to change direction on a regular basis.
Cheers
Simmo!
Matan thanks for the article outling Backgammon. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
I think there is a lot of potential for Skill Games as a complimentary product offering for casino and poker affiliates. It should also prove to be a decent stand alone offering for those that choose to promote it that way.
Thank you all for the elequent replies.
Although my opinion is obviously biased, I think that, put aside poker, backgammon of all other “skilled games” or gambling products, has the biggest potential.After all, both poker and backgammon share a very similar ratio of skill and luck. Unfortunately, poker is “outcasted” as gambling by Google, the credit card companies and other vital entities. Backgammon isn’t. The peer to peer element and the combination of skill and luck in one game create a very attractive opportunity for people to have fun on one hand, but to become professional players and make money on theo ther, unlike bingo, bejeweled and other arcades.
If you’re good on one specific skill game in the big skill-game sites (GameAccount.com, MidasPlayer.com), you won’t be good in other games or on other sites. But you’re good in real-life backgammon, you’ll also make a lot of money with it on GammonEmpire.Regarding affiliates, I think that bg, like other skill games, is a lucrative market because of the conversion and cost effectiveness of the marketing. SEO is easier than poker / casino, and at the same time our non-gambling advantage enables us to produce much more business per traffic. Just have a look at GameAccount.com’s successful partnership with CJ.com (very good EPC, very good payouts) and you’ll see that many affiliates make money from skill games.
The big difference between bg and other skill games is that it’s easier for backgammon to grow – many people know the game, consider it sports, there’s a world championship in Backgammon with hundreds of thousands of $$$ prizes.
-Matan.
Hello Matan,
So we meet again.
I have been waiting to sign up for Gammon pending some changes to the T&Cs.
I am very keen on Backgammon.
How is all that coming along?
You mean the CPA levels?
If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know.
-Matan.
Ok, here goes.
I was in correspondence with someone from Gammon regarding these, and was assured they would be changed and ecouraged to join. But with the experiences we have had here of late, I figured I’d wait.
2.1 Each Affiliate shall chose whether to sign up for the Revenue Sharing Plan of the Referral Fees Plan and such decision shall be final. Under no circumstances may an Affiliate change the Plan for which Such Affiliate have signed up.
I personally have no problem with this – but as a heads up, this will come back to bite you when you encounter fraudulent CPA deals.
2.2 According to the Plan the Affiliate have chose, Affiliate shall be paid on a quarterly basis the amounts to which Affiliate shall be entitled in accordance with the provisions of the sign up form which will be confirmed to Affiliate by e-mail.
I don’t like quarterly payments, and I doubt anyone else does.
3.4 Time of Payment. Affiliate Fees will be payable within fifteen (15) days after the end of each calendar quarter, except that, in no event will the Company pay to an Affiliate an amount lower than $150, and in the event such Affiliate balance at the end of a calendar quarter is below $150 such balance shall be carried over and added to the next quarter’s Affiliate Fees. In the event, the balance amount carried over does not total $150 within a three consecutive calendar quarters, then the amount due will be voided and cancelled, and the Company may terminate this Agreement.
I don’t like that either. People will get discouraged waiting for 6 months or longer and drop you, and you get to never pay anyone who doesn’t have a big volume.
5. No Competitive Marketing
It is hereby clarified that you shall not be entitled to market to potential Players (i) on any Internet site on which we promote the Site; (ii) on any Internet search engine on which we promote the Website; and (iii) in any other manner which results in your competing with us in relation to the promotion of the Website. In the event that you are in breach of the foregoing provisions, we reserve the right to render the Tracking URLs assigned to you inoperative and you shall have no claims against #siteurl#, its owner or their directors, officers, shareholders or employees in respect of such action taken by usThis one is downright silly. We can’t promote on any search engine where you promote? That about means no one can ever promote you.
All Players shall be considered as customers of Company only and an Affiliate may not contact a Player without receiving the Company written approval for such contact. If in the Companys opinion you either try to or do make contact with a Player without the Company’s written approval, the Company shall be entitled to immediately terminate this Agreement and to withhold all commissions owed to you at such time. Further, if following your receipt of Company ‘s written approval for your contacting or corresponding with a Player, Company deems that such contact or correspondence is against the best interests of Company, Company shall have the right both to revoke the approval previously granted and to terminate this Agreement and to withhold all commissions owing to you at such time.
Affiliate further agrees that Company will access information from or about visitors to Affiliates website, and may use such information for any purposeI have contact with many of my players and intend to continue to do so. They write to me and I write to them, often.
And accessing info about visitors to my site? Over my dead body. I have a privacy policy. I have email addresses for many of my visitors, they trust me with them. No one but me will see these, ever. And no one sees my stats either unless I voluntarily and for my own reasons make them available.
These are just the points that jumped out at me. Gammon had agreed to change these but I haven’t seen the changes and it’s been a long time. With this very strong statement in the beginning:
IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO ACCEPT ALL THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT, THEN DO NOT PROMOTE THE SITE.
That means we better get all these things straightened out first.
I’m currently in the process of putting together a backgammon site and am pleased to see a couple of affilate sites on here. I was a bit wary of signing up to gammonaffiliates when i noticed the advertising clause Dominique has highlighted above, would we have to actively make sure our sites don’t get on to a search engine?!
Thanks to Dominique too for pointing out a few clauses that i missed, hopefully they’ll be ironed out by the time i’m ready to sign up.
Also i did a quick bit of research with google adwords and it does seem to pick backgammon up as a gambling term, do you have to ask for special exception to use it as a keyword?
Arn
Thanks Dom for catching the number 5 non compete, I got sloppy and did not do an enough research on the T&C’s. I have already opened an Aff account and was scheduling where and when to place my promos for this but it is now on indefinate hold till changes are made to their T& C’s.
Matan you will find very few Affiiates will accept non compete clauses and the ones that sign up either don’t read the T & C’s or are brand new. Either way keeping this in your agreement is a plan to fail in the Aff program.
Please let us know when or if you will be making changes. Thanks again Dom.
Brian
Hello!
It’s really good to see that our white label have joined CAP! I have read all your comments and it’s great to so much interest in backgammon.
I agree with Matan, backgammon of all the “skilled games” really does have the biggest potential. With poker becoming such a saturated market, it is hardly surprising that many affiliates are opting to add backgammon sections to their sites. Why not? After all, the conversion rates are great and with many poker players also being keen backgammon players it is predicted that in the near future most poker affiliates will introduce a backgammon section. I have received great support and enthusiasm from many affiliates!
Already major backgammon servers such as play65 have a larger online playing community than its counterparts in the poker field at this time in its timeline. Furthermore, even at this early stage of its development backgammon has already captured the attention of the media. TV and film Production Company 8mm productions was commissioned by the digital channel Pokerzone to produce four 60 minute series to capture the action at this year’s World Championship. High Stakes Backgammon, a 4 hour series of this year’s World Backgammon Championships in Monte Carlo has been produced and was aired last month and also this month. So, Simmo there already is backgammon to watch! And you are right, I am sure that soon there will also be bingo and baccarat to watch.
With home PC usage on the increase, and the popularity of skill gaming growing rapidly, there really has never been a better time for online backgammon. Moreover, not classified as gambling in a time when gambling regulators are placing more and more restrictions on cash transactions, backgammon also offers players far more choice in terms of money payments and withdrawal methods.
Online backgammon took a huge leap forward in the online gaming race a few week s ago with the announcement that the game is to break a new threshold, holding the first $1,000,000 championship. Organized by Play65, (P65) the grand event is scheduled for summer 2006 at an as yet undisclosed location. Participants will win their seats in the event through a series of online satellite competitions held on the P65 site that will start later in the autumn and run into the New Year.
Dominique also gave us some very good feedback regarding our terms and conditions for our affiliate program 6 months ago. You see so many postings regarding affiliate programs that have unfair terms and conditions so I am glad that we made some changes when we did!
With reference to the affiliate CPA rates for backgammon being much lower in comparison with poker – I believe that those of you that attended the CAC and are now adding a backgammon section now realize that we recognize the high conversion rates and therefore offered a special bonus for all those that attended and increased the CPA quite significantly!
Thanks,
________________________Julia Wild
Affiliate Assistant Manager
TCADS.NET Ltd.
Email: julia@tcads.netDominique,
The T & C contract is a standard affiliate agreement with no surprises. I’ll share a secret with you, most of the clauses were derived from leading poker sites, with content alterations of course to avoid copyright violations.2.1:
Each Affiliate shall chose whether to sign up for the Revenue Sharing Plan of the Referral Fees Plan and such decision shall be final. Under no circumstances may an Affiliate change the Plan for which Such Affiliate have signed up.The purpose of this clause is to avoid situations where affiliates start to alternate between the two models and create a “higher of which” effect, where they start with high cpa, then change to %%, or change back to cpa if they’re not happy with the %% reward for specific players. It does NOT mean that we will not open ANOTHER account for the affiliate, or change the account model for NEW players upon the affiliate’s request. In other words, we want to avoid a situation where an affiliate changes the model on which he is rewarded for a certain player, but we have NO problem changing the model as many times as affiliates want so that they can study our product better. As long as we don’t pay for one player twice.
3.4 Time of Payment. Affiliate Fees will be payable within fifteen (15) days after the end of each calendar quarter, except that, in no event will the Company pay to an Affiliate an amount lower than $150, and in the event such Affiliate balance at the end of a calendar quarter is below $150 such balance shall be carried over and added to the next quarter’s Affiliate Fees. In the event, the balance amount carried over does not total $150 within a three consecutive calendar quarters, then the amount due will be voided and cancelled, and the Company may terminate this Agreement.
The purpose of this section is to protect GammonAffiliates from facing legal charges in a case of several weeks delay in payment. Delay are usually related to CPA fraud inspections and other verification process (rake back deals, etc). (note: in the 12 months that we operate we did not have a single delayed payment incident, these are usually very extreme circumstances as CPA frauds harder to do in GammonAffiliates.
Our payment policy is as follows: Affiliates are paid on the 15th of each month to the previous month. We do NOT pay quarterly; Payments are released automatically unless the affiliates choose to accumulate them and cash out upon request.
5. No Competitive Marketing
It is hereby clarified that you shall not be entitled to market to potential Players (i) on any Internet site on which we promote the Site; (ii) on any Internet search engine on which we promote the Website; and (iii) in any other manner which results in your competing with us in relation to the promotion of the Website. In the event that you are in breach of the foregoing provisions, we reserve the right to render the Tracking URLs assigned to you inoperative and you shall have no claims against #siteurl#, its owner or their directors, officers, shareholders or employees in respect of such action taken by usSearch engine issue is related mostly to PPC activities (e.g. AdWords) which compromise the company’s positioning and/or listing due to Google’s policy. Check out PartyPoker’s 3.4 clause. Very similar indeed.
6. … All Players shall be considered as customers of Company only and an Affiliate may not contact a Player without receiving the Company written approval for such contact. If in the Companys opinion you either try to or do make contact with a Player without the Company’s written approval, the Company shall be entitled to immediately terminate this Agreement and to withhold all commissions owed to you at such time. Further, if following your receipt of Company ‘s written approval for your contacting or corresponding with a Player, Company deems that such contact or correspondence is against the best interests of Company, Company shall have the right both to revoke the approval previously granted and to terminate this Agreement and to withhold all commissions owing to you at such time
Dominique, this is a standard clause which protects merchants from facing abusive behaviors by affiliates who try to steal their players. It also suggests that players’ contact info is the merchant’s property and will not be disclosed to any third party, including affiliates who acquired them.
Obviously, if these people are a part of your community and you have their contact information before they registered with us, this clause does not take effect in your case.I hope I answered all your questions.
Regarding Arnold’s question about Google’s classification of the word “backgammon”, it is harsher than it was in the past but as you can see there’s a decent amount of competition for it, although you cannot direct an Ad directly to GammonEmpire.com; But I’m sure that you all know much better than me, the different tricks and treat to make it work.
Dear Julia,
Thank you for helping me deliver the message we both believe in.I’d like to take this opportunity and pinpoint the differences between TC.Ads and Barosh Internet. While Barosh is the owner of GammonEmpire brand, Julia represents the Master Affiliate company which Play65’s owner, InterLogic, have chosen to handle all the incoming affiliates.
Play65’s official affiliate site is actually https://www.AtlanticAgents.com and their affiliate agreement matches GammonEmpire’s. Here’s the link:
https://www.atlanticagents.com/Agreement.html
My arguments can be validated by checking the /whois information for both domains, play65.com and atlanticagents.com – they belong to InterLogic, the technology company.
Well, this doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder.
If you pay monyhly, then say so. I can’t sign a contract that says quarterly and expect monthly payments, especially after being told that I better not promote the place if I don’t like the contract.
None of what you said makes the contract any better, you contradicted it in places, but recent experiences here have taught us to take contracts literally and to be wary.
I am also not so sure I like your reply to Julia, she was trying to be helpful to you.
