Anybody that spent a lot of time promoting poker on revenue share over the last few years knows exactly what resulted from other affiliates stepping all over each other to offer rakeback. Their earnings went down drastically.
Money doesn’t disappear – it changes hands.
Here are some examples from my experience:
When I can stick Adsense on some little niche site and make more than what I get from significantly more targeted poker traffic – that is just wrong.
I made more monthly from my very first poker player at one program than what I could combined in the same time frame with all of my players there after two+ years of building a player base. That is insane. I’m assuming that first player ‘changed hands’ along with any other serious players I sent there since he just disappeared one day.
I made substantially more from one site (CPA – Poker Stars) than all of the other rev share/rakeback allowed sites even though I barely promoted the former after the first year and heavily promoted the latter. In fact, I haven’t promoted PS for almost two years and still make money from them. Given that is all based on old traffic and a CPA deal, I consider that a sign of a healthy program.
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I have a friend that runs a b&m company and when I would tell her my traffic numbers, source (search engine terms, etc) she would laugh at my commissions. She used to tell me that if I could get customers to her door under similar terms they could convert 70% of them. And they would be thrilled to hand someone a good sized % commission, especially when there are no up front marketing/sales costs to themselves. And when you consider what it costs just for a sales staff in a company it makes sense. In this one, their base salaries are probably about 10% of revenues and they get commission on top of that. This doesn’t factor any other marketing/advertising efforts into it either.
But really, I would have been happy just with even 5% commission from all of these programs if I knew what the playing field actually was. But it became a moving target. That was my biggest problem with this – it took a lot of my time, which then I thought was well worth it since the player would be mine for life and the biggest rewards would come later after building a good player base. This turned out not to be true. The more I worked and increased traffic the less I made.
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For the guy that said he was not going to promote poker – that’s probably the best choice. The only way I would even consider it now is with a big/established program with a CPA deal. It is also easy to tell if rev. share programs allow rakeback :wink-wink, regardless of what comes out of their mouth. Just watch their conversion and retention over 2-3 months and you’ll get your answer.