Thanks again for the feedback. The main feeling I am getting is that some of you are offended that you should make any commitment to any poker room. It is mainly a business decision that you have to make as affiliates. As an affiliate I would look at the following things before I decided to promote any poker room:
First, do I believe that the poker room is going to be successful, either as a result of the unique nature of the poker room, and/or the promotional effort behind the product. If the answer here is that you don’t think the poker room will be successful then you can immediately rule it out.
Second, if you believe the room will be successful then you can evaluate the affiliate program. What is the upside potential for growth? What is the total compensation package? Here it is fairly obvious you pick the room with what you perceive as the best combination of growth and compensation package.
That is really all there is to it. Some people have almost an emotional reaction to our affiliate program because we require some commitment from our affiliates. Let’s look at an example: Let’s suppose that you decided JacksNQueens.com met the first test and you were evaluating our affiliate program with another new poker room that you also thought passed the first test. Let’s say that the other poker room offered a traditional program of 30%MGR and was free with no commitments. Let’s say you expected to produce $10,000 in rake at either of the poker rooms. So the choice is between poker room 1 where you would earn $3,000 that year or JacksNQueens.com where you would earn $,6,500 (our MGR IS 65%) with the difference that you had to bring at least 250 registered users to JacksNQueens.com. Aren’t your own internal goals for any poker room you promote to at least send 250 registered users to the site? Would you really give up $3,500 because you had to make a small upfront commitment of players? Even if you had to pay $1,000 to join you would still be better off.
Some of you are under the impression that ours is the only poker room that has commitment requirements. Bodog, Pokerstars new affiliate program, and a variety of other programs have either maintenance requirements or internal unpublished requirements to become an affiliate. This trend will continue to grow as it makes sense for poker rooms to concentrate on affiliates that are willing to actively promote their brand.
Specifically to Dominique’s point, I think this is often the perception of some affiliates, that the poker rooms are providing nothing of value to the affiliate and it is like an act of charity for the affiliate to support the poker room. If you take the perspective that we have at JacksNQueens.com that we are business partners with our affiliates then both sides get the best of each other’s efforts. There are real costs with maintaining and acquiring affiliates and real costs with promoting a poker room. By limiting our program to 250 primary affiliates we force ourselves to be dedicated to their success. We can’t simply just go out and find someone else, we have to have our affiliates succeed. That kind of dedication is what as affiliates I think you should be looking for.
Best regards,
VP Marketing
JacksNQueens.com