When its legal, so will be advertising. Vegas will easily be able to afford the top spots for ads. While I know there are a few who don’t; I ask you: how often when you do a search trying to find Joes red wagon website; and you see Joesredwagons.com advertised at the top of the page … do you choose to visit one of the natural search results from say .. aboutredwagons.com ?
even the times I have chosen the natural return results when the site I’m seeking is at the top ad spot .. I generally click open the site I am seeking .. and any natural returned results which I think may be beneficial to my cause. In that case: whether the aff site has a link or not: and even if I click it: they aren’t going to get credit because once I opened Joesredwagons.com .. the cookie was set and it’s going to appear I was already there first … thus not giving the aff credit. (correct me if I’m wrong on that).
How is this different from the current use of the internet? If I know I want to go to pokerstars.com, then I just type in pokerstars.com and away I go. These people already exist, and it hasn’t killed the affiliate industry. The people who affiliates are targeting have just heard about online poker and want to try it out, they search for things like ‘best online poker’, ‘poker strategy’, and so on. These are the people that end up at affiliate sites and use the information there to help make a decision. Of course there will be people who type in the address directly, but to think that people searching for information will completely stop simply because Harrah’s or some other large consortium gets into the game is ludicrus.