Club Wager has been a loyal and productive affiliate of Party Poker since 2002. We undertook promotion based on the understanding that any players referred by us were our players for life (not just for their “active” life, whatever that means). We have spent many thousands of dollars maintaining our web site and thousands of hours of time on it and on promoting Party. We were willing to do all of this because we felt we had a good and honest deal with Party and were being treated right and it was worth the effort and financial risk to get players, since once they signed up we would have residual income from them for life.
Under your new rule 4.7 if our sign up either fails to fund his or her account within 60 days or takes off 60 days, we lose them. Why? What possible legitimate justification does Party have for this change? This makes no sense to me at all. It appears to be a pretext for Party to attempt to legitimize taking players away from affiliates to deprive them of their commissions and increase Party’s bottom line. One can not help but wonder if this is being done as part of a pre-public offering strategy?
You say Party is committed to its affiliate program, but Party’s actions belie that. Actions are what counts – not lip service. If Party is truly interested in its affiliate program it must show it by providing adequate compensation and incentives. If Party is to maintain credibility with its affiliates then it must keep its word and abide by its promise that referred player are tracked to the affiliate for life.
What possible difference does it make if the player deposits in 60 days or much later? Party’s affiliate ad says “When a poker player opens an Account using a sign up bonus code or a tracking URL assigned to you, we know the player was referred by you and we permanently mark his/her Account in our database.” So, I don’t care if a player takes off years or waits years before they actually make a deposit – if they signed up through my efforts they are marked as my player and whenever they play at Party I should get my commission – period. That is the deal Party made.
Perhaps Party has forgotten how valuable and important their affiliate program is. It is a very significant way to advertise, especially with the current advertising prohibitions for online gaming. Does Party realize that if it loses the trust of its affiliates the entire system could crumble – like a house of cards. Affiliates would not only stop promoting Party, they will start aggressively pushing other sites. Eventually one of those other sites will become the place to go for the most games, variety, fish, etc. Don’t forget Paradise was #1 for a while and now it is only 6th in terms of real money ring players per pokerpulse.com. It would be incredibly short sighted for Party to destroy its affiliates. Please stop chipping away at affiliate benefits.
I hope this dunderheaded rule change was a mistake that Party quickly changes.