But until the cardrooms start doing it and doing it to a meaningful level for high volume players, the affiliates will have to.
Anyone who signs up for rakeback through chat (or any other sort of) spam is a moron.
There are reputable rakeback affiliates out there – silence in the cheap seats, there are – who pay on time every time. They are providing a valuable service and are (in some ways) more honest than vanilla affiliates because they say “this is what the room is paying us for you” rather than promoting rooms based on what they pay and then pretending there’s some higher reason.
I’m not saying that all affiliates, or even any here do that, just that rakeback affiliates are not bad people, most of them aren’t rip off artists (and the ones that are would rip people off no matter what industry they are in – should we ban stockbrokers because some stockbrokers rip people off?