New Terms at Fulltilt - your players have only 60 days to deposit

[Jeremy]

I know everyone wants Ellen or Jessica to jump in here. In their defense I will say that Jessica just left for vacation and the rest of the FT team in Ireland is off for the weekend, so that is why there is no response from them.

I am trying to be politically correct here, and I really am hoping that FT will come to their senses on this. I think I speak for every affiliate when I say this feels like a big fucking slap in the face to us non rakeback guys.

And in reality this actually sucks for the rakeback guys as well as they will lose their players after 60 days also.....although their conversions tend to be much quicker.

Let's put 2+2 together here. Fulltilt is opening up their own rakeback portal and can now re-market the millions of play money players in the database (whom all of the sudden will not be connected to an affiliate). Then they can take advantage of our marketing to bring in fresh sign-ups and have them all to themselves in 60 days.

This is so blatantly obvious that I am actually somewhat offended. FT has a major dilemma on their hands about rakeback, and this dilemma has been brewing and waiting to come to a head for a couple years. I mean, if I signed up back in 2005 and now rake $6k a month, there is no reason I shouldn't be able to get rakeback, regardless if I signed up through an affiliate or not (from a players perspective)

Maybe my entire basis that there is no reason for third parties like affiliates to manage rakeback is starting to make more sense now. From day 1 rooms should have been running their own rewards schemes.

But anyways, we affiliates did not create this mess. And surely there has to be a better way to handle this with affiliates than just bending us over and saying knock knock........ in 60 days we are taking back millions of "play money" players for ourselves.

The FACT is that thousands of players DO convert each month. Nobody believes the 60 day thing as we can all look at our stats and disprove it.

If this doesn't have to do with rakeback, it has to do with greed. I challenge anyone including Jessica, Warren, Ellen, or anybody at FullTilt to explain to us (your customers) how we are NOT getting royally fucked on this deal. I'm not certain you can, if indeed this new 60 day policy is going to be enforced.

If Fulltilt wants to increase their liquidity, conversions, and retention by making rakeback more readily available, then I propose they launch an internal rakeback method for ALL affiliates to promote and re-market to our play money players.

Again I am trying to be politically correct here, and I very much enjoy working with the team at FT. But as the leader of this community, I am also not going to just watch my friends and fellow affiliates get treated with so much disrespect after we have all busted our asses and made Fulltilt #1 on our sites for the last few years.

[KrisR]

Bit early for an April fools joke isn't it?!

Surely the clown that thought this was a good idea will get fired and they won't enforce it.

But if they don't come to their senses, every single one of us needs to remove FTP from our sites. The rest of their program isn't too bad, and I like Nell, so I'm giving them until the end of February to change their mind.

However, if they insist on going through with this lunacy, they'll be permanently removed from every site I control on March 1.

[corpfan1]

Nice post big J!

This will truly be a GOLDMINE for rakeback affiliates...as the news spreads, thousands of PMPs will find a way to open a new account with Rakeback under their sister's, brother's, aunt's, uncle's and dead family member's names. And with easy account transfers, etc...this won't be hard.

Looks like RAKEBACK is truly a BAD BAD thing for any poker room to offer or tolerate.

[PPP]

Originally Posted by Prenut

That is almost correct Alot of the CPA is tiered as well, so if you stop sending players you will still see some future conversions- but at a lower tier. But yeah all in all, it has a bigger impact on MGR affiliates.

Good point... although the degree is still bound to be less.

[TonyS]

Originally Posted by Jeremy

In their defense I will say that Jessica just left for vacation and the rest of the FT team in Ireland is off for the weekend, so that is why there is no response from them.

Straight out of Office Space - "We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week."

And for the head of the affiliate team to go on vacation just after sending out this "fuck you" newsletter really pisses me off.

I hope that everyone sends as many emails on Monday to their rep as they do today.

[Jeremy]

Rakeback is not terrible. But it just goes to show what a mess it creates when you have third parties managing it. Vegas poker rooms offer comps and it has been a proven method for years.

Imagine if the bellagio relied on thousands of marketers or random other people to give comps and rakeback to their big players. Can you imagine what a mess this would be.

Rakeback by affiliates sounded like a great business model and acquisition tool in 2004. However once rakeback became it's own industry inside of an industry, all the problems started.

There is no level playing field for affiliates or players with the current system.

[Ridge]

Good post J..

[addaminsane]

heres what I think....may not be true, but i think its close to accurate...

I don't think it really matters if all the lower end affiliates quit promoting fulltilt as long as the sites which this doesn't really affect, like pokerlistings and pokernews, or rakeback sites,...still promote fulltilt. The high quality sites get most of the se traffic and are the ones players migrate to anyways once they settle in to enjoying online poker. This simply kills the ability of low end affiliates who don't get many return visits to their sites...to maintain rmp sign ups.

Anyways, to revamp my main point, If the only poker portals online were a few bigones like pl pn and cardplayer or whatever, it really wouldn't effect FT's ability to bring in new players. And those are the rooms that wont be effected anyways because people daily revisit those sites... Therefore, FT doesn't really care if this hurts the lower end affiliate sites, cuz they don't actually need them... (for anything other than building there pr cuz few affiliates edit their banners to include "nofollow" tags)

[Prenut]

Well that is one of the biggest affiliates prepared to make a move.

Originally Posted by Kris@Poker.com

Bit early for an April fools joke isn't it?!

Surely the clown that thought this was a good idea will get fired and they won't enforce it.

But if they don't come to their senses, every single one of us needs to remove FTP from our sites. The rest of their program isn't too bad, and I like Nell, so I'm giving them until the end of February to change their mind.

However, if they insist on going through with this lunacy, they'll be permanently removed from every site I control on March 1.

[PPP]

I suspect the announcement about the in house rake back program is very very very very bad news for rakeback affiliates.

Overall, Full Tilt might be doing something partly backwardlys positive (with part of this) here... opening their own rakeback program eventually taking affiliates out of a business they should never have been in. However, it appears that in 60 days from now they will open up that rakeback program at which point they will sweep in hundreds of thousands of old play money players, and presumably all their non-rakeback current real money players (which might mean all you MGR guys will take a 27% "fee" cut, while also having players play more).

Despite that other thread, this has always been an affiliate program in chaos. It was a bunch of haphazardly attached pieces that didn't fit together well, and now we have more of that... unless they really are trying to reivent themselves, as in, "we don't want to be 40% the size of Pokerstars anymore so we are going to cut our rake by 27% and see what happens."