Do you get my point?
Many poker rooms (and affiliates) think they will loose their players if they don’t give them rakeback (through affiliate commissions). I think they are wrong. Let the affiliates keep the money, buy traffic, send new (and bad) players and everyone will be happy.
The players were never supposed to receive “monthly payments” from affiliates!
The truth of the matter is, that only the big guns can run a succesfull online pokerroom without rakeback. They already have the fish and of course the sharks will always come to a site with a lot of bad players. But this isn’t true for other poker rooms.
Can you imagine a Cryptologic room withour rakeback? Or what about a Boss room?
They would be dead within 6 months. MANSION is a great example of a pokerroom trying to duplicate the PartyPoker/PokerStars strategy and hammer down the market with offline marketing and extreme retention value for their players. They gave out more than $5.000.000 in a matter of months and still couldn’t get a strong hold of the players.
The fact is that you simply can’t start up a pokerroom now a days without offering the players direct and large comps (read: rakeback). Party is still doing good and we have quite a large affiliate account with Party Poker as well but I can’t get a single valuable player on Boss without offering him rakeback.
And I like it this way. I like that I can make a fair amount of money along with the poker site while the lions share of the cash flow towards the players. This just seems more fair.
And please don’t talk about revenue share affiliates as if they are the only guys bringing players into the game. We have created Denmarks largest poker affiliate through content. I don’t see how what we are doing is different from what 95% of the revenue share affiliates are doing.
I agree that a site only offering rakeback without content is a bad representative for the pokerworld. But you can’t blame this matter on rakeback in itself. Revenue share affiliates does the same thing with ridiculous link-farms and other low content sites. For instance I would argue any day that our poker portal (where we offer rakeback) has far more content and “player creating value” than our casino site which are plain revenue share.
I am with you 100% when it comes to the fact that some rakeback affiliates are scumbags. But you can’t blame this on the rakeback concept in itself.
/Mike