Poker Affiliate Programs - What is the future for poker affiliate rograms? Jeremy examines the past and present of the poker affiliate industry.

People often ask me what I believe the future for Poker Affiliate Programs are.  That is a very good question, and there is no concrete answer.  However I can give my opinion of what I think is going to transpire throughout the next few years.  For starters though I think it is only fair to look at the past of poker affiliate programs and how the "old days" used to be.  I remember when I first started promoting online poker, it was literally a cake walk.  I did a great deal of PPC advertising at that time, and the beauty was that google readily accepted advertising from poker affiliate's for the poker websites.  At that point also, the wheels were just starting to get turning in online poker so market saturation was no where near what it is today.  You could literally spend a few thousand dollars in PPC advertising and watch your RMP counts go up by the day.  You almost had to pinch yourself, especially if you had promoted affiliate programs in other industries prior to getting involved in poker.  Even better, and many people forget about this.........all of the online poker sites still accepted paypal and credit cards!  I brought in so many new players from using Ebay to creatively market  that it was comical.  Believe me, for the casual player just looking to test the waters, having a paypal account made it easy.......and pretty much all Ebayers have paypal accounts.  Now these casual players don't want to hassle with payment processors like Neteller.

In the current landscape of being a poker affiliate there are several more factors facing us than there were a few years ago.  No credit cards, no paypal, no ppc in the major search engines., and the list goes on.  And this is no surprise but the market is also much more saturated than it used to be.  Good Luck finding new higher limit players that don't have already have accounts at the the Big 3 rooms.  To even further complicate matters is rakeback.  Very few poker affiliates did rakeback in the "old days".  With all that said, it goes back to what you have all heard me say a million times, Think Outside The Box.  Don't be the same type of affiliate as the rest of the pack.  Do something to differentiate yourself.

Now to the topic of this article.  What is the future of poker affiliate programs?  It is my feeling that we will see some changes over the next couple of years.  For starters I think many of these programs are going to make it more difficult to become an affiliate with them.  If you look at Bodog.com or even some programs in other industries, these affiliate programs limit who they allow to promote them.  This would help the companies manage a smaller affiliate base and ensures that the majority of their partners are producing.  With that said I think many programs will start to institute performance requirements similar to what Party is doing.  For example, you have to send X amount of players in X amount of time if you want to remain partners.  Many affiliates balk at this and are appalled by the idea.  But I challenge you to go into the real work force and be an independent distributor for a company.  If your not performing or even worse your selling the competitors products and ignoring that individual program......more than likely you will be dropped.  Why is this practice not unreasonable in corporate America, but to poker affiliates it seems unfair.  If I owned ABCPokerroom.com and you sign up for my affiliate program I would be happy as can be.  But 6 month later when I look at all your sites and I am no where to be found.......I'd probably let you go.

And why are there all these issue?  That's very simple, because of revenue share, or more commonly known to poker affiliates as mgr%.  In retrospect I think if the founders of online poker affiliate programs could go back in time, they probably would  have only had a CPA structure with some sort of bonus plan.  Don't get me wrong, I love mgr% as it has been very good to me over the years.  But looking at the big picture it seems to cause many of the issues we face as poker affiliates.  This is why people have delusional thoughts of "players for life".  No one knows who is going to own who or what mergers and acquisitions are going to take place in the coming years.  Regardless of what the card rooms T&C's state, there is no such thing as  "player for life".  In fact I would encourage all poker affiliate programs to take this language out of their existing terms and conditions.  Also imagine if you're Ruth Parasol or Anurag Dikshit looking over some affiliate reports and you see one affiliate making $20K a year every year from one player they signed up back in 2000.  Then you have to answer to the shareholders why one affiliate is being paid $20K a year for a referral that was made 5 years ago.  Of course I feel that this affiliate should be paid every month, but I imagine when your a shareholder looking at the bottom line from the outside it would be easy to ask, "what is this affiliate doing for our program every year to earn that kind of cash?"

With all that said..........I think we will start to see a shift away from revenue share programs to a cost per acquisition model that offers additional bonuses for the number or quality of player you send.

I also think that the larger poker affiliate programs will continue to take even better care of their large producing affiliates than the small fish.  Many new people get the impression that no one is home in the affiliate department when their email hasn't been answered for a few days.  But once you get to a certain level and have proved yourself as a producer things do change a bit.  With the increasing competition in this industry I think you will see poker affiliate programs giving more weight and attention to retain their Super Affiliates.

I also think over the next few years that the poker affiliate program who can offer the best stats will win a great deal more business.  Every where you look on the internet you see the famous quote "online poker is rigged".  I'm surprised it hasn't overflowed to include affiliate programs as well considering how sketchy our data is with mgr% players.  But with that said I would love to see someone set "The Gold Standard" for poker affiliate reporting. We as poker affiliates put way too much blind faith in these programs that show us absolutely NO details regarding our revenue share.  I'll be honest, this does make me question some things.

Overall however I believe this is still a great market to be involved in.  As a poker affiliate over the next few years however it will be imperative to not only expect change, but embrace it.  There are going to be highs and lows just like there are for our players.  If you take a bad beat somewhere along the way you're going to have to just regroup and continue growing your business.  This industry is far from perfect and in fact it needs to undergo a few changes.  But at the end of the day it sure beats asking people "would you like fries that?" As always feel free to comment on this article or any others in our poker affiliate forums.