When choosing an affiliate program to promote on your online poker site, it’s hard not to simply choose the program offering the highest revenue share. And, of course, a poker affiliate program’s revenue share should be a major factor in your choice. But it shouldn’t be the only factor. Hard as it may be to believe, bigger doesn’t always mean better here.
In fact, it may be wise to look twice at some online poker affiliate programs that offer a higher-than-usual revenue share — let’s say, over 40 percent. Why is their revshare so high? Most of the bigger brands, like Full Tilt or the Cereus online poker rooms (Absolute Poker and UltimateBet) offer revenue shares in the 20 to 40 percent range.
And that seems fair, right? Think of it from a business perspective: 25 percent is giving about a quarter of the profit to the affiliate. What is it saying when a poker website will offer almost half the profit it gets from each player to affiliates? It may be up to something; there may be loopholes that ensure you’re not actually going to get the high revshare you’re promised. Or it may be that the brand is weak, and so it has difficulty attracting players — in which case, it isn’t really going to help you bring in traffic. Now, that could make for an interesting challenge, if you’re the kind of affiliate who likes a challenge. But if you’re looking for a solid brand that’s going to bring in reliable traffic, you may want to keep on looking.
These are just basic guidelines, and I’m certainly not implying that a high revenue share automatically equals a weak or untrustworthy brand name. I’m just saying, the best brands usually offer a reasonable revenue share — and a lot more on top of that, like a solid reputation, reliable customer service (trust me, this is something you don’t always get from the smaller brands), and pockets deep enough to offer frequent promotions and bonuses. (More on this in an upcoming entry.)
And on the other hand — and it’s a big other hand — there’s CPA, or cost per acquisition. This is a big enough topic for its own entry, but briefly, it’s better for beginning Internet poker affiliates to factor in all the items listed above, including revenue share, than to put all their eggs in the CPA basket. Over at the Poker Affiliate Bible, Dealer Dan does a great job of explaining why. And we’ll explore this topic in more detail next week.
What do you guys think? Have you been burned by too-good-to-be-true promises of sky-high revshare in the past? Or do you totally disagree — is it, indeed, all about the revenue share?
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Bigger, so-called reputable companies such as Full Tilt and Chipleader aren’t necessarily the answer either. I’ve been having nothing but problems lately with the both of them. I’ve been promoting these (and other) brands for over three years now, and I’ve been noticing a very disturbing trend where my commissions keep getting smaller and smaller every month, even though I continue to send them targeted traffic more now than ever before. Customer service is virtually gone. Trying to get answers to important questions go ignored.
It might actually be a better option to go with some of the smaller companies, who are more eager to succeed and need the support of excellent affiliates, like I and others on this forum are.
I fear that now that Full Tilt and to a lessor extent Chipleader, are big and successful, they don’t like to pay the fine people who helped make them hugely successful, by adding excessive so-called “processing fees”, and finding allegedly fraudulent player activity many years after the player actually signed up.
Due to these unfortunate situations, I’m scaling way back on my promotions of these brands, and seeking out more partner-oriented companies. We helped make the big guys big. We can help make the currently small guys big too. Give these big ones a run for their money.
Thanks for listening.
M. A. David
Thanks for commenting, those are all very important factors to consider, too.
Anybody else having these problems?
[...] on how to figure out what poker affiliate marketing program to promote on your site. My advice — to give the reputation and brand recognition of poker rooms as much or more consideration as their r… — didn’t meet with complete agreement with some of the more veteran poker affiliates at [...]
Hey thanks for the link, appreciate it
I’ll chime in too – the revenue share an affiliate receives should partly depend on what negatives impact their portion of the revenue share. If deposit fees, bonuses etc all come off the revenue share then I’d expect more. However as the poker rooms employee payments as just one example don’t come off revenue share, I’d never expect anything above 50%.
Really – Revenue Share models are not well thought out at all in many places. The whole 50% first month, 40% second month and 30% third month promo a few groups do – during that first month I’m not going to get many conversions because I’m going to be taking time to understand the properties, play around with the banners, see what works etc. It should always be the other way(or at least optional) – 30-40-50.
A lot of it is to do with the fact that anyone can buy a skin these days too, and also how much poker room and affiliate managers rely on affiliates. There’s one room on a skin where I get 65% revenue share(a % of that is rakeback), and the poker room manager gets 10%. Yet he gets hit with all the transaction costs and chargebacks etc which I don’t.
I’m rambling here as tired so just want to again say thanks for the link
Hello,
I’m a newcommer to this business and find M.A. Davids comment a bit disturbing.
You’d expect companies to give affiliates great attention, and not try to suck them dry by BS processing costs. The whole point of affiliates is, of course, that the recruiting cost via the affiliates is endlessly lower compared to setting up a campaign them self. Taking this in account, there should be no reason for processing costs, especially since it’s all automated.
Now the following questions arise to me:
To what extend are (the big) companies dependent on affiliates for their growth?
What can the affiliate do when he’s being screwed by the company, other than just changing the poker rooms advertised? Anyone tried demanding more compensation (which I can imagine if you send more and more traffic but are making less money) and succeeded?
Thank You!
Dennis
The truth is affiliates on their own can run into some difficulty when dealing with large programs. That is why communities like PAP are so useful. There is strength in numbers and at this point in the development of affiliate marketing, (which is still farily new believe it or not) groups are the best way to ensure fair treatment and proper resolution of issues.
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