Dominique, I agree 100% with your recommendation that webmasters should NOT offer cash prizes to their contest winners. If you are in the U.S., and I assume that most of you are, you will find yourself in violation of all kinds of gambling and sweepstakes laws unless you have an attorney draft a long list of rules and exceptions. It’s just not worth the hassle.
When you have a casino sponsor your contests, you are just giving away “free credits” at the casino, so you don’t get into the cash prize problem. And since all of the online casinos are located outside the U.S., the federal government doesn’t have authority over them anyway.
Getting to Dominique’s point about INSTANT prizes, I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I have run a gambling portal site with a free prize contest casino and now I’m on the casino side of the fence. From the webmaster’s perspective you want INSTANT response to your prize winners, and that is totally understandable. I did too when I ran casino contests. However, from the casino’s standpoint you have to understand that their first priority is always going to be to their real money players. The customer support staff is going to deal with the questions and problems that their paying customers have before they take the time to give free money to a casino contest winner. And that’s actually a GOOD thing, because if a casino is not taking good care of their real money players, they won’t come back. And you don’t want to deal with a casino that has poor customer retention because we all know that the real money is made in landing a whale who keeps coming back month after month.
Now, I’d like to promise that every casino contest winner will get INSTANT credit at our casino, but I also know that “stuff happens.”
I think that as a webmaster, you might want to anticipate this in advance and tell your prize winners that they will receive their free credit “within 24 hours, or less” or something to that effect. That way you cover yourself in case the casino’s staff is too busy to act immediately to give your customer the free credit they have won and the customer is not disappointed.
In reality, we can probably take care of a contest winner within an hour, but it’s an old saying in sales that it is best to “under promise and over deliver” to keep your customers happy.