Web Publisher | Infected Blood Victim | Dad
Hi Affiliate Manager X,
Thanks for another email promoting your affiliate program. I actually replied to your last one a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t hear anything back. I am starting to wonder whether you are actually a robot programmed to send the same email numerous times without the programmed functionality to reply.
I can reply in binary code if that helps?
Thanks,
Tom
Hi Affiliate X,
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner, but I wanted to take the time in-house to discuss the option of offering CPA deals at Affiliate Program X. Up until now, at least on the sportsbook front, it is not an area that we have looked at solidly.
In principle and provided that we can get the mechanics right, I believe this is something the board at Affiliate Program X would entertain on a trial basis.
However, having looked at the activity of the 216 players you have sent to Affiliate Program X in the past 9-10 months, 93 of these players have clearly come to us in the hope of claiming and winning from their bonus. It is evident to me that players you have sent, on the whole, are very much hunting the bonus. Only 8 of the 216 players you have sent since October last year have deposited anything other than £50, and only 2 have deposited more than once. As you know, the bonus most bookmakers is set up to act as a starting point for a player’s association with the company, rather than an end point.
Unfortunately, given the ever increasing number of bookmakers out there offering welcome bonuses, it is easy for players (and indeed affiliates to send their players) to go to bookmakers with the sole intention of claiming the bonus, and reducing a player’s risk below the 100% margin mark that natural bookmaking tends to go 6 or 7% above to maintain a profit – hence why your account is in the red. Working with an affiliate on a revenue sharing basis is therefore the most beneficial form of commission structure from my point of view as you are also sharing in any losses – which you should expect if you vehemently promote the welcome bonus.
Had we be paying you on a £20 CPA basis for every player that has met a £50 deposit release, you’d be a pretty wealthy man and it would have left us in the red on both the player and affiliate front. If it were clear to me that a pattern of the players you have brought in was not in line with simple bonus abuse (I am not suggesting that this was ever your intention) and indeed that more than 8 of your players had deposited anything other than £50 on a one-off occasion, then I would look at a CPA. The fact is, only 2 of your players have ever redeposited and therefore it can make no sense to us to pay a CPA on this.
If you were to show me ways in which you do/could promote Affiliate Program X aside from pushing the welcome bonus rigourously and in ways that might allow for players, as is the norm, to ‘try’ the sportsbook with a £10-£20 deposit (90% of depositing players tend to join in this way), like what they see (that’s our job), come back in line with our expected redeposit rate from retention campaigns and remain loyal in line with our expected player lifetime and value, then we can look at a CPA payment. That being said, I’m sure a revenue share deal might suit you better when/if it came to this.
I do hope that the companies you do work with on a CPA basis are making a long term profit, or else you might find that the model you are working to will not last too long. If you would like to discuss ways in which you can compare bookmakers aside from a free bet comparison through your affiliate network, I would be more than happy to work alongside you to create a more sustainable business model which would see Affiliate Program X play a sizeable role on your site.
Kind regards,
Tom Galanis
Affiliate Program X Affiliate Manager
Discovering what Windows was all about in the early 90s to me meant playing SkiFree. I recall it being pretty much the most advanced PC game of its time back in the day and have just rediscovered the ‘joys’ of playing it. Sure it isn’t as hi-tech as it once was, but it’s still quite a good laugh. What’s more, unlike many online casinos, you can still download SkiFree to your desktop. Wahey!
I’m pretty certain that the thinking behind this promotion is purely PR-inspired. We haven’t seen a promotion quite as dastardly as this since the early Noughties, but those risque folks at Celtic Casino have implanted an astonishing silicon-enhanced promotion back into the online gaming world. Ladies (and gentleman), I give you the Boob Job Draw!
That’s right, the ultimate boobie prize has made a return and the depths that this cleavage-hungry casino has plummeted to are incredible. If you’re, and I quote, “medically ineligible” or would simply rather receive cash to watch other boobies in strip clubs, Celtic Casino is offering €1,000 in lieu of a trip to Costa Rica AND the surgery.
Obviously, Costa Rica probably only ranks as an A Cup on the Plastic Surgery hotspots of the world, but €1,000 to cover your trip and the augmentation hardly builds confidence for those lucky ladies or ladyboys keen enough to drop a load of cash into Celtic Casino to earn a raffle ticket for this titillating competition.
If you’re keen to enter this competition (how did you find my blog) or would simply like to find out more, have a peep by following this link.
This has to be the most outrageous attempt to create a USP/feast on industry PR sites like mine in years, bra none and if you fancy having a go, play at Celtic Casino Now!
So I’ve just shared a post from one of the connections on my LinkedIn Network. Someone he works with was against the idea that LinkedIn has any value whatsoever. As a result, the interestingly named gentleman, Mersudin Forbes, bet him that for every ‘Like’ or ‘Comment’ made to his LinkedIn post, his workmate had to give him £1. This was 2 hours ago.
Over 1,000 ‘Likes’ and 246 ‘Comments’ later and his mate is already looking in a spot of bother. Apparently I have over 7 million people in my LinkedIn network. We could see Mersudin making an appearance on the more famous Forbes list sooner rather than later.
As LinkedIn isn’t the best social networking site for sharing links for connections of connections (I guess this is what his workmate had in mind), you may need to add Mr Forbes to your network to earn him a quid. For those of you linked to me, you should be able to go through my profile and comment/like the post!
I think his as-yet-unidentified workmate might be about to learn the true value of viral. Woops!
Update: a day on and Mersudin is looking over £9,000 better off (assuming his mate honours the bet, which must be unlikely now!)
I’ve just had an email exchange with an affiliate who is unhappy at my refusal to pay her £253 in affiliate commission she believes is due to her for May.
Sadly for this affiliate, this particular affiliate program I represent has a negative carryover policy in place (if I had my way, this would be the case everywhere) and it works extremely well in this case.
In April, the single player attached to this affiliate’s account took away a 4 figure profit which put this affiliate’s account into the red to the tune of £342. They have subsequently dropped about 80% of their profits back to the house, but have seemingly walked away with the rest.
Now can anyone in their right mind please tell me why this affiliate believes she is owed money? The terms and conditions are quite clear and if she had a sizeable number of profitable players on her account and one took her to the cleaners, then by all means, I would look at helping her out. Dare I say it, it would not surprise me (as I’ve seen it countless times before) if she was acquainted with the account holder. Many affiliate programs have minimum new player thresholds in place, and this is precisely why. In fact, I may even consider adding this clause for new affiliates joining this program going forward.
But this purely demonstrates the ridiculous expectations some affiliates have of affiliate programs, their interpretations of common sense business practice, and the preposterous nature to which all-too-many affiliate programs have bent over backwards over the past 5 or 6 years to please their affiliates. I’m all for helping affiliates out in an effort to grow their business, but not when circumstances are as ludicrous as this.
She has threatened to pull her promotion of my client and “tell the affiliate world”. Boo, bloody, hoo. Maybe that world will tell her how ridiculous she is being. I doubt it though. I can expect a chorus of chastising communication clamouring for my common-sense to be curtailed and for my “carefree” clients to cast cash into the chasms of this community-concocted, confused commercial consensus. Crazy.
I’ve just had a Skype messenger conversation with an affiliate manager. He sold me the affiliate program pretty well and in fairness, without analysing every term and condition, it all seemed to be pretty nicely done as an offering. The notable downsides are that the software is Rival (clearly in a bit of a mess right now) and moreover, the casino really isn’t up to scratch. I mean, the screenshot from the bottom right corner of this casino’s homepage below goes some way to illustrate why I couldn’t possibly happily refer an affiliate to this guy.
I feel for good casino affiliate managers who just don’t have the right product to sell, and don’t have people in other departments pulling their weight making sure what they do is spot on too. In my opinion there are now far fewer respectable, top quality online gaming destinations than there are good, upstanding affiliate managers. How in God’s name is this poor guy going to get decent traffic to this casino and make ends meet? Surely whoever decided to launch this royalclubcasinoclubgamesvegascluborsomethinglikethat.com really should have made sure that the latest winners and progressive jackpot feeds were working and that his website manager knew HTML before putting the site live AND before he forced his affiliate manager out to get hold of traffic. #failing
Verse 5: So, I went to Calvin Ayre’s party last night. I hated the fact that I had to queue for half an hour, I immensely resented the fact ‘VIPS’ managed to queue jump (surely that was envy?), I found the creative interpretations of the seven deadly sins to be pretty damn bland, with the exception of the half naked fat guys gnoshing raw meet off each other’s torsos whilst a butcher provided them with fresh produce, I felt the whole thing was altogether a stage managed production than a party. I just didn’t get the vibe and I have to rank it as one of the worst parties I’ve had the privilege of attending in online gaming over the past 6 years.
But here’s the thing. First off, my shock levels are obviously disturbingly high. Secondly, I’m an ungrateful son of a bitch as Mr Ayre provided me with free alcohol for 3 hours or so and something to blog about. The very fact that I hated the party is what was brilliant about it and what is brilliant about Calvin Ayre and his Bodog brand.
After I’d made the decision to leave, rounded up a few of my nearest and dearest in iGaming and headed over to a more traditional party (Grey Goose and Moet on tap – thanks William Hill), I managed to share my thoughts to Calvin’s lawyer and Bodog’s Director of Products. I told them that the party wasn’t for me, that I didn’t get it and that I thought Calvin was an egotistical prick. That last bit was the Grey Goose squawking, but it made my point very nicely.
Now, these two fellas were good guys, typically gaming, typically defending their boss and the company that pays their wages. But that shouldn’t happen at Bodog. I spent the next hour or two telling them precisely why they shouldn’t be trying to make me see sense that it was a great party. What makes Calvin Ayre and Bodog so important to iGaming is not the fat naked guys, the pole-dancers, the bondage sessions, the wankers who get in the VIP area or queue jump, or even the deformed dwarves. It’s the fact that I hated it and some people loved it.
Imagine if all those mugs who had queued alongside me had been registered players and that party dictated whether they played at Bodog or not… Once we were finally let into the hype-filled freak show, most would have left straight away without spending a penny even with a no-deposit bonus of a free bar. 5 or 10 percent would have loved it and now believe that Calvin Ayre can walk on water. They would have dropped a grand in no time flat. Hell, they’d probably even be blogging about it with some affiliate links in there for good measure.
As a result, the party I’ve disliked most in online gambling is also the most important. I left it for another run of the mill booze fest courtesy of William Hill and a decent club. I’ve woken up wearing Eau de Grey Goose and it feels like just another conference day. Before reaching this all-too-familiar ignominy, I told the guys at Bodog what I thought of their attempts to sell the Calvin party to me. In a nutshell, I told them that they shouldn’t be working at Bodog if they took the viewpoint that everyone has to like something they do. That’s iGaming’s biggest problem – every operation tries to please everyone. They take what other companies do, copy it, take a small margin, cannibalise the industry, bore players and revel in it beyond belief as they down their Grey Goose.
So, hats off to Calvin Ayre and Bodog for differentiating on their brand. Your product is run of the mill along with 95% of the gambling operations, but every Tom, Dick and Harry has an opinion on your party, was prepared to queue in the rain for an hour and look like a tit, and write a blog post about it and this makes your brand special. It shows that extremes attract some people and that picks out Bodog’s well-deserved share of the market. Everyone else sits on their “evolutionary”, “state of the art” can’t-tell-the-difference-software-suites, let’s-all-go-for-the-same-players-and-pay-stupid-CPAs-to-acquire-them pedestals, all the while not sparing a moment to realise they are all drinking and smelling of the same brand of vodka. Good on you Calvin. For as long as you can stay out of jail, keep on carryin’ on.
(Please forgive any grammatical or spelling mistakes here. I am inebriated courtesy of Grey Goose. Maybe I should have shares there…)
I would like to meet the funny clever clogs over at Paddy Power who comes up with ideas like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFRSTRJezNU
It’s shit. Get a job hippy
Tom Galanis 