Yes, the affiliate business is on the decline IMO. It’s difficult to pinpoint why, but one thing that certainly isn’t helping is all the country by country segregation.
You’ve got all these individual markets. France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, USA, Australia, on and on and on and on. It never seems to stop. This is really damaging the poker scene. Unlike casinos where most players are playing individually and not socially (live dealer games notwithstanding), online poker needs warm bodies at the tables. When individual countries segregate themselves from the global player pools, we end up in a scenario where there are less people at the games. Removing 100 players from one country for example doesn’t just remove 100 players from the player pool. It removes 150. Reason being that all the games and seats that those 100 people filled are now empty. Those partially filled games never fill up because recreational players tend to dislike playing short handed tables that are out of their comfort zone. As such, some players from other countries leave the poker room due to less liquidity. It’s a crappy cycle and I wish these governments would realize that all this nanny state crap isn’t working.