It’s been discussed before but I still believe offering rakeback and gifts is egoistic.
You can wrap it in a nice gift box, add nice colors and present it as you being competitive, offering players good deals etc.. but the bottomline is that you want to hog them away from other affiliates.
What does this result in? Higher consumer awareness, affiliate outbidding and a general degradation of affiliates monetary expectations.
Your members aren’t your friends, they’re your ressource to attain one goal : money. Everything an affiliate wraps around that is just to hide this fact.
The problem with these people is that they think they are original. The only reason it works is because others haven’t joined the bandwagon (yet). But believe me, the more people will steal members away from legitimate affiliates, the more affiliates will go for rakeback/gifts. And once most of us are rakeback/gift oriented, there will always be someone beating you at it, reducing your profit margin to 0.