It (rake back) is something I looked into quite a bit at the time it was happening and is why I came to the conclusion that it was a net loss in the long run. I found it almost worthless to the casual players – they were better off with the intermittent bonus. Your 10% hardcore players would benefit greatly from it though.
I viewed any program that changed & allowed affiliates to start offering this as changing their terms and conditions, because in essence that 30% was immediately no longer for anyone that felt they had to join in on the ploy to stay competitive. It’s that simple to me.
I am sure there will always be some people that think it is a good idea – people whose sites/marketing are completely themed towards rake back or the hardcore player/huge traffic forums – more power to them. So in that respect it will be always be around in some form. I also understand why some of the rooms wanted to try it, as poker has been a very competitive thing and they were trying to make inroads on the bigger rooms’ markets.
My bottom line shows that the rooms that ended up sticking with a no rake back policy showed a very consistent income & grew, depending on the quantity & quality of traffic that was sent. The others, that at times I sent huge traffic to, somehow ended up going backwards income wise. This is over a two year period so I think that is enough data to start drawing some conclusions.
I stopped promoting the rooms that offered this after I starting seeing the negative effect on my bottom line. I think UB still might get some miniscule traffic on an advertisement I can’t get the site operators to take down (yep really lol).
The only times I usually post in their threads now is when I am trying to extract money they still owe me on past players or when I see a thread like this, where yet again, they are finding new ways to cut your pay. It’s funny (or not if it’s you) how the same themes keep getting repeated – just in different form over time.
Also, UB/AP merging is almost hilarious in a way, in that you are combining the worst stats problem program and mixing it with the slowest payer. I wouldn’t touch that combo with a ten foot pole. But good luck to you if you choose to continue with them.