Well, this was sort of part of the chat discussion we had.
Some of us were convinced that money problems were at the root of this, some insisted they knew that was not so.
Whether that is so or not, in order to prevent losing our income with programs that have decided to lump casinos, like Fortune and Vegas Partner, we are forced to only promote one casino from each group.
That way we cut down on the possible damage. Losing your income from one casino is a lot easier to swallow than losing it for a bunch of them.
I have dropped groups of Playtech casinos for this, now Micro is doing the same thing. I think one casino each of bundling programs is really plenty – so many decent casinos out there.
Maybe this is a good thing for us affiliates – I have always believed that it is best to distribute income among many programs. It keeps it nice and steady and it never hurts to drop someone. Unfortunately it makes some of the programs unhappy with you – they of course want all your players. But it also evens the playing field for the casinos and I think players are much more likely to develop loyalty to your site if they have a varied selection.
The days of a small, crisp site with only a few casinos “so not to confuse the player” are over because the times of purchased traffic are over. You want to offer a good selection of different casinos and softwares and a lot of content to your visitors now.
I have never seen it as wise to send all one’s players to one or two programs, even though they do raise your percentage as incentive.
Promoting a variety gives you freedom and security. Just taking one casino from each of the programs that bundle, and that includes playtech groups that do this, and including more RTGs that are decent and just spreading ourselves thin, will assure that we can survive any changes in T&C without much damage to our income.
All of us who have been putting too many eggs in one basket – maybe it’s time to put up some additional baskets and fill them with different eggs to make the move away from bundling and towards independence smoother.
It seems to be the logical move, and it is a move to the better overall for us.