Party – JHChrist. I’ve just got done spending a lot of time building pages for different sites with them to be the feature room. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose players to their new sinkhole because these players make a large deposit that lasts them a while, or are good players and do not need to have frequent deposits. I’ve seen players that make one deposit for multiple thousands and I’ve seen players that deposit $100 and make it last for months.
But the main problem I have with it is that it is one thing to make new terms or amend the terms for brand new afilliates. Quite another to bug the heck out of people to sign with you and then change them. I’ve been in this for about a year now, seriously about 10 months. And I’ll bet at least half of the programs I had started with I will not work with again. They either have stats that border on unbelievable when comparing to my own or do something silly like ask us to take less money (usually calling it something different or denying it altogether) when they are making it hand over fist.
Completely agree about Poker Stars. They’ve got a good thing going and probably don’t see the need for more help on the affiliate side but it would not take much to put them over the top. Lack of revenue share and their stats are the biggest drawback as far as getting affiliates. Maybe they don’t want to pay rev. share for lifetime but they could start a similar program that paid that for say a year for each player and I’ll bet some affiliates would give them a shot.
Another problem with poker is in a lot of cases you don’t get paid for tournaments, which are a huge part of an online poker room. I’ve started looking for programs that pay on this aspect and also do not go along with the rake back deals. I will probably not make as much right now, because it is harder to get poker players to play a lot or stay with a room that doesn’t have a lot of people/games. But in the long run, if they stick to the terms you signed up under, have good software, and decent promotion, eventually they will pay off. Also, Imo they are less likely to go bust one day because they’ve made it their habit of screwing people. I figure if they do it to some of their marketing people they’ll do it to the players too eventually.
I understand where you’re at as far as maybe going into another line of items to sell. I’ve already started that and the only time I’ve seen someone change their terms was one program increasing the pay for their affiliates across the board. And another thing, it is always much better to deal with a program like Commission Junction, who is truly independent and has thousands of companies you can apply to, running your tracking/stats, than so called affiliate companies that are basically part of the company you are trying to sell. That’s the way they appear to me anyway, the gambling related affiliate programs.