Possibly because CM is a bit more than just another SEO'd dumping ground for affiliate and casino links and has different objectives. Ask Gamblers promotes some absolute shite and just proves that despite dressing themselves up as a player watchdog, they are primarily concerned with raking money in. Maybe Bryan is they type of bloke who can earn say 2k a week without scruples and prefers to earn 1.5k a week with scruples. Ask him, but some people aren't as greedy as others, and no I don't confuse greed with ambition either.
Without wanting to digress from the main thread here i.e. advice on becoming an affiliate, if you assume the job of an affiliate is to act as a service provider to customers i.e. giving them information they can action, then there are two parts you can take:
- have a list of casinos with latest bonuses (benefit: it's a shortcut for users to see who is giving away the most money)
- have information which helps users make good decisions.
AskGamblers may not necessarily as tight on accurate information as casinomeister, but they rank and they are prominent and unless you're a serious casino player, it's fairly unlikely you will have come across casinomeister.
In my view the sad part about Casinomeister is that it doesn't have the search prominence I feel it deserves.
I have generated 2 SEMrush overview reports looking at aggregated rankings on Google:
These reports give you a pretty good idea of the comparative search visibility of each domain. Bearing in mind that for Google, it doesn't care which website ranks, it just cares that users are happy with the results from the keyword search. The harsh reality is that based on this metric the general user is happier with AskGamblers.
Personally I don't like it. I go to casinomeister for expert opinion and I go to AskGamblers for more 'mainstream' opinion. And it has to be said that AskGamblers has been massively important to our brand and they've always been very reasonable in how they conduct arbitrations and so on. For an end user AskGamblers is much more digestible.
The principal question the casinomeister is whether Bryan and the community are happy with where it's at, or whether they feel the casinomeister mission of truth giving is unfulfilled. If people aren't happy, I'm sure change will come along.
Back to setting up a new affiliate site, my best advice is think very carefully about how you are going to help customers. So for example real cash out times is a great metric. However bear in mind a huge proportion of end-users don't even know that this is an issue.
I think one of the biggest issues for end-users is how gambling actually works. A friend of mine is a game developer and she did some usability testing with 'noob' gamblers, where she got the most popular slots there is i.e. starburst and on average it took about a hundred spins before people began to understand how slots actually function. As a result of all of this, she is focusing on ease of play and intuitiveness.
When budget allows, within the next two months, I will probably find somebody to write up a proper help guide on how to play slots, explaining the whole thing in great detail using an interactive framework i.e. "you click on this and it tells you that"and from that it should help 'noob' users get their head around slots. The business reason for this is simple, every operator is chasing users who know what they're doing and they've implicitly assumed that any education is a waste of money...Despite CPAs of $250 plus.
If the framework gamifies learning in some way i.e. you go through an education process,you get extra rewards...it could work very well. Just a suggestion. Here are some examples:
As an affiliate, you would have a landing page, a learning journey and extra awards for users who get through the journey, per operator.
I think if an affiliate site beats me to it, I would love to work with them.
