Harsh post kkiely, I agree with some of what you have to say, especially the mass marketing portion. The biggest poker rooms online are would have never gotten as big as they are without taking a mass market approach.
But you are way off base on the mass marketer not needing an affiliate program. That just doesn’t make business sense. An affiliate program supplies new customers at very little expense to a company. The cost of running an affiliate program is a minor expense when you consider the number of customers that a company would not have had. Take Amazon for instance. They were the 800 pound gorilla for selling everything online. They spent money mass-marketing like it was going out of style. Then, they instituted an affiliate program. Why? Because it makes perfect business sense for them. Hire an army of marketers to send you business, pay them nothing to provide exposure to their brand, then share the profits if a new customer is sent from the marketing partner.
Regardless of the current actions of some casino affiliate programs, affiliate marketing is here to stay. It makes a ton of sense for an online casino. Their cost of scaling is much lower than a company like Amazon that has to physically ship products, deal with returns, manage their product mix on a daily basis, etc. If an online casino has more business, they hire a few more customer service people, and maybe another bookkeeper or two, maybe even add another server. Scalability is easy, which is why the online casinos can offer 25-35% of the profits back to an affiliate. 65% of the profit from a gambler they would have never had is way better than 0 with such low overhead.