Most amateurs these days can just put up a gaming site. And then rely on affiliate pyramiding to survive, which is a joke considering this doesn’t require any real marketing budgets. Hell no wonder many of these entities are the ones who don’t have the cash to pay their winners or webmasters when comes due times.
This paragraph starts out sounding like it is about affiliates, but it is really about operators. It took me for a loop when I first read it.
Given that these “gaming sites” are casinos or poker rooms or bingo halls, I have to agree with that statement.
So Wayne to address your concern if you have a high traffic portal and you want to be rewarded for the branding efforts accordingly then I would charge them a flat fee or impressions to place banners via your site. It’s exactly what I would do since I don’t really believe in the affiliate scheme myself. It’s a windfall for the casinos to avoid all risks and not paying anything upfront. Kinda like a car dealership where they tell their salesmen, “here, I’ll fetch you a bone if you bring me bait”.
I can see how the professor takes offense at this statement. This is an affiliate site. It is a bit insulting to affiliates.
It is even more insulting to affiliate porograms.
The flat fee business model is one of several that exist in this industry. As a matter of fact, many of us do charge flat fees at one time or another.
There are a lot of people making a good living by being an affiliate. There are a lot of people who do not make it. That is the same in any business.
Yes, the affiliate model is a windfall to casinos, and I have said so before myself. They get to have a great number of people busily building websites and giving them various degrees of branding for free.
What a coup – a free sales force, comission only, working their behinds off, many times without any reward.
We are all quite aware of this, as well as all the ways that programs can and do cheat affiliates, and/or make their work harder. They openly compete with us. And the ways of cheating – lets not get into that in public. Some may get some silly ideas.
As far as Wayne goes – he is fixing to launch a site. If he wants to eventually be able to subsist on media sales, he has a long road ahead of him, building up his site. He will likely need to earn his money as affiliate along the way. There is a lot to be learned about marketing.
You will see affiliates supporting each other and sharing a lot of information with each other – but there are some things we each have learned to do our own way as we gained experience, and those things are usually held tightly to our chests.