” soon to benefit affiliates who can assist players who have difficulties with their first deposit.”
This is very puzzling. A player has an account (play money) with Party Poker. Isn’t it Party Poker’s job to convert that fun player into a real player?? Why would they want other affiliates doing that, or even communicating with the players?
It’s like if Wal-Mart has an affiliate program that pays 1% of sales. Would they allow affiliates to be strolling through the aisles of the store??? No, they’d want those affiliates to only be advertising outside the store to bring in new leads, not take credit for existing ones.
Can the stats be improved somewhat, so that we can know for certain we are no worse off?
For instance, let us know each month a) how many total players (fun + real) we have under our account, b) how many real players we have, i.e. who have played for real money anytime since joining, c) how many real players played for money in the current month, and d) how many fun players played for fun in the current month. Even better would be daily stats for the above 4 items.
Those kinds of stats would help us know how we’re doing. I keep sending more and more real-money players to Party Poker, but I don’t see my income rising — it has hit a plateau. If other affiliates are stealing my income-generating players, that’s unacceptable. It’s a zero-sum game for Party Poker, that could turn into a negative-sum game if affiliates who are bringing in real players don’t see their incomes rise in proportion to the number of players they’re introducing to Party Poker.
Most of my poker income is still pay-per-click on my best domains, and it’s the uncertainty of the affiliate programs that causes it to be this way. If I’m unable to predict what the rev-share will be down the road, when affiliates are stealing players from other affiliates to share the rake, or to get a bounty, it undermines the entire program and makes we want to seek out alternatives. iGlobalMedia knows all my best domains too, and that I don’t scam (I rely only on type-in domains, nice passive income). I would think that’s the kind of affiliate that iGlobalMedia would like to have for the long term.
If Party Poker really wanted to do something, they should go after all the people who are typo-squatting on Party Poker domain names. Here’s just a sampler:
wwwpartypoker.com (i.e. “www” with no dot in front of “partypoker.com”)
There are hundreds of others (email me and I can show you how to find them all). If Party Poker (which has registered TMs for its brand) cracked down on all those typos (filing the appropriate UDRPs), they’d have more money for legit affiliates.