It will perform for you only when you do large numbers.
It really depends. There’s a poker room out there who I am affiliated with, who I had one player signed up on, making about $20 in MGR a month. I’d promoted the poker room strongly via various means but there wasn’t a lot of interest.
The manager of the poker room then contacted me about doing rakeback. He had never tried it before, but was interested in it as his site just wasn’t bringing in anyone, despite various attempts. The poker room was a skin on a network BTW.
Anyhoo, 6 months down the road, we’ve got over 300 players there, generating over 100k in MGR a month. And in the first few months with only a few players, we were still making more than we were without the rakeback.
There’s a time and a place for it. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t realize that and just think rakeback is the be all and end all of being a successful affiliate in this industry. Yet only being around 4 months, if you visit my site the word rakeback is almost considered a forbidden word, yet I’m doing extremely well in regard to monthly revenue, a lot better than I projected at this stage, and a lot of that is from poker rooms….poker rooms where players could get rakeback via another site at. So this is just some evidence that you don’t need to offer rakeback to become successful.