More white labels

[vinylweatherman]

Vinyl,

I have no idea why we are on a "partners" page of Intercasino. It may well be a reciprocal link thing that was set up a long time ago, probably for Google or the like. We certainly have no connection to them, and we do not to my knowledge have any link back to them now. In fact, I will email them to let them know.

lojo - I was not ignoring you, I just didn't realise your question was directed at me personally. I do agree with ugaboga in that white labels allow to market our software to places that we may otherwise not not reach by marketing it ourselves. There are many other benefits such as being able to harness the various talents of the marketers, who also have the advantage of being able to market their own brand.

Most of the online casinos on the net could be viewed almost as "white label", as they are forms of MG, PT casinos etc.

Vinyl - As we spoke about at length some time ago, the ownacasino site allows people to have their own basic template to promote the software - a kind of "mini-site". That is what those sites are. Of course they are not as good as a fully branded White Label but we do try to keep them updated and relevant. Again, you compare us to this mintlasvegas thing that was spammed around - but I do ask you this, in the whole time the ownacasino program has been running, have you ever received any kind of spam about the Casino Lobby? I doubt it, and this would seem to show that we are not like this other program. I'm very disappointed that you still think that we are connected to Intercasino in some way, or harbouring some kind of "scandal", and it looks like no matter what I say to reassure you, that you will continue to question us.

I'm not sure of the benefit in me trying to continue to contribute to this discussion, as every posting I make seems to generate a new "scandal" and alleged connections with other sites. It concentrates the glare of the bad side of the whole "White Label" issue on our company and encourages people to speculate. There ARE companies who are running white label programs with far less transparency and with impunity. I would much prefer the focus to be on companies who DO treat their players badly, who DON'T pay players and affiliates and who are getting away with it - rather than a company who are trying to do the right thing.

I have no idea why we are on a "partners" page of Intercasino.

This contradicts the earlier impression you gave about your clients who use these basic marketing sites being carefully vetted and monitored, yet you didn't even know about the "dayandnite" basic marketing site at all!!!

but I do ask you this, in the whole time the ownacasino program has been running, have you ever received any kind of spam about the Casino Lobby?

No, not for Casino Lobby, but these skins/white labels were not intended for spamming players, they were intended for saturation spamming of the search engines, which is why Intercasino have used them, and clearly what you initially intended them for:-

but I do ask you this, in the whole time the ownacasino program has been running, have you ever received any kind of spam about the Casino Lobby?

Oddly enough, despite these countless skins, I have seen absolutely NO marketing for Casino Lobby (other than a very brief appearance at GoneGambling), so whatever your clients are up to, it isn't marketing Casino Lobby to potential players.

I have thought about it, and I believe that the sole purpose of the Casino Lobby white label program has been to enable clients who run "proper" casinos to spam search engines with multiple links to what to Google looks like many other different casino sites, complete with GENUINE link to a downloadable application. This design circumvents the anti spamming protocols Google have designed to weed out fatuous fake pages leading to undeserved ranking boosting. Were there no link to an actual download, Google would probably work out that the pages were fake single page sites and not count them for ranking purposes.
In addition to this, there ARE some genuine sub licenced casinos, such as casinomillionaire.
It seems that Intercasino have more than one link to Casino Lobby, under various skins. This will confuse the hell out of most players, and they will quickly assume that Casino Lobby is dodgy, just as the persistent spam for the Microgaming casinos through skins such as Mint Las Vegas has discredited those MG casinos that are found to be downloaded under false pretences.
The ONLY difference between the two is who the spam is directed at, with the MG casinos, it is E-mail spam, but with Casino Lobby, it is search engine spam.
The partners page at Intercasino is clearly NOT a genuine attempt to market Casino Lobby, and this is against the terms of your deals with "confidential" clients, yet your systems lost track of this one and allowed this kind of usage of your white label skins. There may well be other sites that use buried links to casino lobby in a similar way, and if any are found, it would show that the Intercasino one is not just a one-off cock-up, but a systematic method of usage of the scheme. I can certainly see this as a perfectly valid reason for the rather odd decision of clients who are supposedly marketing the casino to attract players to have their business identities kept under wraps.

If it is Intercasino doing this all on it's own, without permission, this is equally bizzarre, since Intercasino is one of the most respected brands, and has been accredited here for ages.
All this gives the impression this whole industry has a huge "sleazy" underbelly that tarnishes not just the known rogue casinos, where we would expect this kind of behaviour, but the well respected brands too.

This would not be the first time, as last year Jackpot Factory was caught out running the most unacceptable scheme imaginable in order to boost ranking in Google, and when they were found out it cost them more than it was worth. This is pretty tame compared to that, but that doesn't make it right. When we use Google, we want clear and honest results, we don't need hundreds of irrelevant hits, and incorrect indications as to result relevance, that could mislead us - in this case, Google shows an entirely unwarranted connection between Intercasino and Casino Lobby, and boosts Intercasino up in the rankings, especially when general search terms are used, such as, perhaps, "Casino Lobby"

[totalesoft]

I was just about to say that I wasn't going to continue to contribute to this thread. In fact, I typed it out and deleted it - unfortunately some people have their teeth into us for one reason or another, despite the fact that we haven't done anything wrong. However, after this posting I will simply ignore those posts if I can. I was under the impression that this was a debate about white labels, not a TES-bashing thread. The former I will be delighted to take part in; the latter I don't.

Vinyl - those links at Intercasino are simply from a reciprocal link program we had in the past, according to one of our website guys. Just the same kind of reciprocal links everyone and his dog has on their sites these days - yes, to boost popularity in search engines. However, we do not have the links from our side now and so I emailed Intercasino to tell them they can take them down. The individual sites are ownacasino "mini-sites" that are owned by members who wanted their own site to promote, and who we helped to get some reciprocal links. There's nothing sinister, no spam. The members were allowed to change the website, to make them different and individual to them, but some obviously didn't bother.

I don't think you are being entirely fair isolating and concentrating your efforts on us. I personally receive Spam email for almost every casino software provider every day. I see mini-sites to these same casinos everywhere. I see hundreds of references to mini-sites in Google rankings all the time. I see reciprocal links to them too. Look at the casino listings in dmoz.org and you will see most of those sites are doorway or mini-sites for all kinds of casinos. I have bent over backwards to incorporate suggestions from this forum, to answer every question put to me and to be as helpful and transparent as I possibly can. Unfortunately, every post you make contains some reference that puts us personally in a bad light - using phrases such as "sleazy", "ulterior motives", "spot the rogue" without any backing is unhelpful to both this discussion, and TES as a company. I think you create salient points on many things, but the continuous undercurrent of suspicion about us in each post contributes to the old "throw enough s**t and some will stick" maxim.

By all means have a go at us if we don't pay our players or affiliates, or something of that nature. I will be on top of something like that in a jiffy. I just want to be able to join the discussion on a level playing-field and not have to post a "defence" every time I want to answer a question.

Sorry. Rant over. Hope we're all still friends!

Lojo - I thought I had answered your question. Apologies for that. The white label and sub-license concepts have been around for years; as ugaboga stated, I believe it probably was Starnet who had the most publicity around their sites - unfortunately, most of it wasn't positive. So there may well be a "stigma" attached to the phrase "White Label" from companies such as this.

Don't forget, the White Label/Sub-license concept is used by well over 90% of the online casinos around these days - from respected bookmakers, to TV stations, to newspapers, to football teams; indeed just about every Premiership team has a White Label/sub-licensed casino. If this concept did not exist, there would probably be only around a score or so casinos on the web today. This is part of the reason why TotalESoft.com actually decided to make our own software, rather than just promoting someone else's brand. Let's say you are an affiliate with a casino portal and you are advertising casinos. You may have banners for 20 casinos on your site, but the software choice offered on the site could just be MG. We wanted to offer something else to the industry - another choice. Something for those players who wanted something else to play other than MG or PT.

A player may well prefer the MG or PT software - of course, that is down to personal choice. By offering our software as a White Label, it does mean we can reach players that we may not be able to reach ourselves with our own marketing. This is also why casinos have affiliate programs.

Look at Manchester United for example, they have a casino with BetFred. This is good for Man U. as they have an extra revenue stream, and good for BetFred as they know loyal Man U. fans will use their casino games, and thus earn revenue from them that they otherwise would never have seen.

It's not only casinos that use the White Label model - look at a store like Tesco or Sainsbury. Everything they sell under their own "Value" or "Finest" brands are white label products brought in from outside suppliers and branded to their own name. Tesco don't make these products, they merely get them in, label them up, and sell them alongside other brands. I'm sure it is the same in the US, with stores like Publix and Walmart.

My goodness, this was a long posting - you can all wake up now!

[ugaboga]

Very good points totalesoft. White labels are involved in many other industries apart from online casinos.

There are some very respected players in the online gaming industry who specialize in offering white label services. Take a look at St Minver - http://www.stminverltd.com/whitelabelgaming/index.htm. You can see that they have a very reputable clientele.

The example of Manchester United is perfect. Manchester United doesn't have the expertise in the online gaming field, nor would they want to use their resources to setup their online gaming operation from scratch.. so what do they do? Utilize a white label gaming deal.

It's simple, they have the membership base and would like to use their renown brand name to generate additional revenue by offering a value added service to their members. The white label provider will simply provide them a branded solution, which they can market to their members.

I don't see what is so criminal about white label operations.... It's almost a bogey word on this forum!

[vinylweatherman]

Total ESoft says that without white labels there would be fewer casinos on the net, and says this as though this was a bad thing

Most player complaints are related to bonuses, and, more specifically, when they play at more than one individual casino that is backed by a group, be this a white label scheme of a group with many casinos.
Players are faced with confiscated winnings, bans etc because they played at what was marketed to them as a different casino, but turned out to be just another "skin" related to a big gaming group. Rogue casinos deliberately engage in this in order to lead players into breaching rules about sister sites, and then use this as an excuse to deny payment.
The other white-label scheme from playshare has also been discussed, and the first issue that arose was with regard to players having accounts at more than one of the white label sites and/or the main casino. This necessitated the introduction of some complex rules that differ between the main Grand Mondial casino and "those operated by Naden". Playshare have refused to enlighten us to who, or what, "Naden" is. It could be a company, a trading name, or just a person who has gone one better than affiliate.

Total ESoft defends their use of the white label scheme with the old line of "well, everyone else is doing it". Well, you could also argue that robbery is something that it seems "everybody else is doing", as is spamming as a marketing tool. The fact that "everybody else is doing it" does not make it right, and these critisisms are not just directed at Total ESoft, other casinos indulging in this practice have been critisized, and one, Fortune Lounge, was dropped from the accredited list for failing to get a grip on the problem.
With the white label "skin" model, it is even easier for rogue "affiliates" to bend the rules because steps have been taken by Total ESoft to hide their identity.

Well, we haven't seen any real marketing for Total ESoft, and mayne this is a good thing, but with this white label scheme running, the obvious question is WHY has there been no real effort made by these white label owners to market their skins to the playing public. This makes the scheme look like a failure, it has failed to generate a flow of new players.

The "reciprical link" statement is an explanation of how these links exist, however, why are they from a page of completely meaningless and uninformative drivel, how on earth would that encourage a player to go have a look or even try Casino Lobby.

The "sleaze" I mentioned is demonstrated by the stream of half-truths, unwillingness to directly answer questions, allowing marketing by entities who are not prepared to publically be identified so that they can be held to account IF they overstep the marketing mark.
If players WERE to receive spam for Casino Lobby, to whom would they complain? The marketer could be one of these confidential clients, and will complaints directly to Total ESoft be dealt with in the same way that the other casinos have dealt with issues related to spam (usually, WE didn't send it, it must be from an affiliate or marketing company, and you have to take it up with them to get unsubscribed).

It is not so much white labels that irritate players, it is the nest of unnecessary confusions that result with who owns what, and what constitutes "an account at one or more of our sister sites" when it comes to the rationing of bonuses to players.

If I see some genuine attempt to market Casino Lobby through these white label sites, I will be prepared to believe that they are indeed being used to get players from niche markets, but so far I have seen dozens of "Casino Lobby" skins, none of which appear anywhere other than in the nests of "reciprical links" that festoon many casino sites.

Perhaps some of the owners of the white label skins could be encouraged to come here and tell us why they joined the scheme, and why it is going to get players into viewing and trying Casino Lobby that would not otherwise have been tempted had only the original Casino Lobby website been there.
We would be particularly interested in hearing how this improves things for PLAYERS, so far, much of the white label schemes only benefit the casino operators, while at best being neutral for players, and in many cases detrimental as it restricts their ability to decide NOT to play at a specific casino group, and be certain that any "new" casino they find is genuinely a "different casino".
If casinos want to convince us that white labels will work, they must first get some law and order into the CURRENT system of using affiliates to market their brands, some of whom resort to spam and misdirection. I simply do not believe it when a rep says they cannot do anything about the rogues, it's BS, these affiliates are PAID by the casinos, and non-payment and confiscation of THEIR affiliate "winnings" (naturally, on the grounds of "marketing abuse")will soon make spam a good deal less attractive an option for them.

[aka23]

The "reciprical link" statement is an explanation of how these links exist, however, why are they from a page of completely meaningless and uninformative drivel, how on earth would that encourage a player to go have a look or even try Casino Lobby.

...

If I see some genuine attempt to market Casino Lobby through these white label sites, I will be prepared to believe that they are indeed being used to get players from niche markets, but so far I have seen dozens of "Casino Lobby" skins, none of which appear anywhere other than in the nests of "reciprical links" that festoon many casino sites.

Regarding the reciprocal links, it's primarily for search engine rankings, rather than to get traffic from people clicking on the links. Some search engines, in particular Google, increase rankings based on the number or relevant sites that link to the page. The idea is if lots of links point to a page, it must be a quality site, worthy of high ranking. If Intercasino links to Casino Lobby, Casino Lobby may get a higher ranking in Google. The converse would be true as well, so it is common for webmasters to exchange links. I get emails every day about this kind of link exchange, often from sites that have nothing to do with casinos, so I dismiss most of them as spam.

[lojo]

Just a quick note that Playshare did contact me inre invitation to participate in this thread, and I respect his decision and reasons not to.

My passion for the whitelabel issue is ebbed out, until or unless we see it actually being abused. And though I still don't see how they serve the player at large or the industry in the long run, TES's example of the Manchester 'skin' and later explainations were well reasoned. As for Playshare, they seem to be excercising proper vigilence over theirs and there's no reason to assume they won't in the future.

Of course as more and more platforms and management teams begin using the concept, the murkier it will all become. Personally, I'd prefer about three casinos in each platform competing with each other and other platforms; and if someone wanted to break into the market, they'd have to do it the old fashioned way, like 3Dice, with an innovative and evolving product, true customer service, and the ability to back up their operations.

Kudos to VWM for always asking the hard questions and pointing out things that often go over my head before he does.

Where are the others that were concerned about this? I wonder... were they satisfied, or found it a hopeless fight?

[vinylweatherman]

Regarding the reciprocal links, it's primarily for search engine rankings, rather than to get traffic from people clicking on the links. Some search engines, in particular Google, increase rankings based on the number or relevant sites that link to the page. The idea is if lots of links point to a page, it must be a quality site, worthy of high ranking. If Intercasino links to Casino Lobby, Casino Lobby may get a higher ranking in Google. The converse would be true as well, so it is common for webmasters to exchange links. I get emails every day about this kind of link exchange, often from sites that have nothing to do with casinos, so I dismiss most of them as spam.

This just means that search results are "rigged", and do not reflect how good a site is in relation to your query, but in how clever they are. What is REALLY insulting, is that most often they are too damn lazy to even made a half-arsed attempt to put out some kind of relevant information, they just have a bout of verbal diarrhoea on the page. In the case of Casino Lobby, although there are so many "white label" sites, they seem to be engaged in absolutely NO marketing whatsoever. Playshare white label sites are at least being marketed to niche players, particularly in those instances where they are attached to a niche site that does not have the membership levels to justify running a casino themselves.
Perhaps it is Google that need to act on this, they have a system that is widely abused, yet choose to leave it in place.

As for the potential for spam, there just seems to be no control whatsoever over it by the casinos who are being marketed, yet again today I got ANOTHER one for "Spin Palace", from "Jenny" and deliberately made to look like a personal E-mail from a friend through an over familiar subject line.
It seems the very simple remedy of cutting the income stream going to these spammy "affiliates" is utterly beyond the casinos, yet they have amazing technology at their fingertips when it comes to dealing with PLAYERS who do not seem to want to respect the rules.
They seem to thing it OK to make it an end recipient problem, and that if they blocked these spam mails they would not see them, and it would no longer be an issue. Sadly, this is not so, this avalanche of spam has crippled the integrity of the E-mail system, and many organisations are simply ditching it in favour of something else. By attempting to block spam from my end, I find literally dozens of E-mails I want also get blocked, and I then have to trawl through the spam anyway to find them.

Casinos themselves are now reaping the consequences of their lax action, as many service providers have decided to block ALL casino related E-mails, leaving it hard for casinos to communicate with their loyal players. This started with AOL, but has now spread through many providers, and many anti-virus programs keep wanting to kill anything remotely casino related, and some do this by default as it is considered a choice not worth giving the user.