Outing Rogue Affiliates

Admin Note

It's Friday night my time, and I know there is some volatile subject matter here. Please no flaming, no obnoxious behaviour, no portal wars, or anything else that could be a breach in the posting rules.

Had to say this before taking off :D

Be cool.
 
No problem, I totally respect your position and we will keep it cool, and the 'outing' will be done in accord of the rules.

Have a great weekend:thumbsup:
 
Giving credit where credit is due... I mentioned in another post in this thread that at least one Rival affiliate manager screens their new affiliates to be sure they aren't promoting casinos that steal, at the very least.

I wanted to mention the forward thinking excellence of 3Dice. When alerted to an affiliate site that was promoting them on the same site as thieving casinos - they made the decision; 'they can choose us or the rogues' we will not support that affiliate if they don't remove them.

Kudos!!! 3Dice understands that in the long run it really does matter who their 'bedfellows' are.
 
By the way, 888.com lost their stripes here:
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But I think they regained them. Just like they were rogued here for a while - they cleared up the blog crap and promised to be more responsive/responsible.

That's another thing. There are some rogue behaviours that pass with time. Sometimes a casino or casino group screw up something royal (Jackpot Factory's "I cured cancer with slots" debacle comes to mind), but once the problem is addressed and fixed, what then? JP was in the rogue pit for six months or so, but brought back on board about a year ago and things have been fine since.

And then there are absolute evil rogue entities...

So at times "rogue" can be a bit tricky...
 
Yup I guess 888 was removed from CAP for a few months.

Suspended in May - Re instated in October.

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I think most of us understand that the term ROGUE is subjective when applied to online casinos.

I guess all it boils down to personal "Ethics" and what each of us finds offensive or "wrong".
 
Suspended in May - Re instated in October.

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Just in time for 888 to be a main exhibitor at CAP Euro 2006.
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Just to clear something up there: CAP and CAC are two totally seperate organisations running seperate conferences. The Amsterdam event above is CAC, not CAP :thumbsup:
 
I would like some feedback on some of the casinos below.
The good/bad/ugly about them.
Thanks
B-T

Crazy Vegas
Sun Vegas Casino
Cinema Casino
777Dragon
Arthurian Casino
Vegas Poker
CasinoUS
Maple Casino
Pokerroomla
Aspinalls
Aspinalls Poker

Out of them all I heard Casino US is ok.
 
Crazy Vegas
Sun Vegas Casino
Cinema Casino
777Dragon
Arthurian Casino
Vegas Poker
CasinoUS
Maple Casino
Pokerroomla
Aspinalls
Aspinalls Poker

Not sure about "Pokerroomia" and "Vegas Poker", but the rest are all Microgaming and in the Vegas Lounge group and generally pretty good. CasinoUS and CasinoUK used to have the best loyalty points on slots - 0.05% - of any casino, but that may have changed.
 
Some facts about working as an affiliate:

You work for free, spending countless hours building a site, and you only make money if one of the casinos on your site makes money because someone found your site, clicked on a link, went to the casino, signed up and actually deposited. The ratio of clicks to deposits varies depending on the casino and the promo, but I see maybe 1 deposit for 100 clicks. Show me a sales force in the brick and mortar world that has such working conditions. There is no insurance, no base salary, no retirement, no nothing.

The casinos show you stats, some more so than others. As a rule (not always) these stats show # of clicks, downloads, signups, free players, deposits and profit to the casino. You have to believe the stats are accurate, but there is no way to tell. As a player you can see your history and you know if it's right, you were there. As affiliate, you just can't tell.

By the way, in most programs bonuses are treated as actual money and get deducted from the affiliates income, as are chargebacks and contributions to the jackpot pools.

Some programs are suspected of "shaving" the stats, showing you what they want to and removing stats that go above what they are prepared to pay out that month. This can never be proven. There are no verification procedures in place.

Probably the majority of affiliates never makes any money. Many make a couple hundred a month, which they use to play with. Most affiliates are players. Building a site that makes a living takes years of hard work. Most affiliates go out of business within a year.

The greatest number of posts on cap with the same topic are about not being paid. In this case, the casino may show income in the stats but just doesn't pay. Sometimes there are legit reasons, like UIGEA blocking another payment venue or the affiliate forgetting to update contact details after moving or changing email addresses. Sometimes there are not. Sometimes affiliates get paid eventually, sometimes they never do. You never know. There are no venues for collection in this business as you all know.

There is no union or official association. Cap and gpwa attempt to make the casino's affiliate programs available to the affiliates for questions and problem resolution. If you kick a program out or suspend it, it is not there anymore and no one can try to hold them responsible or attempt to make them clean up. These message boards are there to facilitate dialogue, information and problem resolution.

Cap members are free to rogue affiliate programs as they see fit, like I rogued 888 when they spammed the search engines. It's an individual decision for each webmaster. There is no "company line" per se. The only time I know CAP to categorically refuse to have anything to do with a software is the futurebet case, where it is the norm to cheat affiliates rather than an occasional thing, and it went on for years.

While the purpose of cap and gpwa is solely to faciliate communication between affiliates and affiliate programs, failure to pay players comes up in conversation constantly and is taken into consideration by most affiliates. It's a way of evaluating an affiliate program - if a casino doesn't pay it's players, it likely doesn't pay it's affiliates, and the other way around. It they don't pay affiliates, chances are they won't be paying players. Eventually they don't pay their affiliate managers either, and probably the cleaning lady gets nothing too.

Rogue is rogue, and players and affiliates need to pay attention to each other. The red flags may crop up first with players, or they may show first with affiliates. Here or there, they mean the same thing for all of us.

So, affiliates who advertise rogue places just bite themselves. For instance, virtual casinos. Their trick is to shower players with bonuses, making sure no one ever reaches the WR to cash out. At the same time, they deduct all these bonuses from the affiliate income, which means they pay nothing out there either. Should a player manage to get to cashout, they sometimes pay and sometimes don't. If they do, they just take that off the affiliate income also. That's how come these guys survive year after year. As long as there are ignorant players and affiliates, they can continue to play that game and pocket all the money.

Of course there are rogue affiliates, and there are rogue players too. Both categories ruin everything for the rest of us. Rogue affiliates use all kinds of methods described earlier in this thread to get to top the search engines and catch unsuspecting novice players and send them to the crappy casinos. Rogue players cheat by pretending to be several people and collecting the same bonus over and over and made the WR shoot over the roof in the course of the years.

The long and the short of it, there is no regulation and there are no legal measures for anyone to fall back on. We all have to stick together, watch what goes on and educate ourselves and others.

For affiliates that means informing themselves by reading player boards like Casinomeister, for players that means treating their clicks as votes and only clicking on links from sites that contribute to the well being of the online casino landscape.
 
Dom you are thee best in the industry :thumbsup:
You are my #1 choice if I ever need a helping hand.and I pass your name to many.
I voted for you too at CAP's
Now if I can only get my WildCard friends to come to Bingo Chatter.
Love Ya Dom for all the hard work you have done to help many.
Tom
xxoo
 
Okay, I signed up, got a flash versino of a bingo game but it told me insufficent funds to buy cards.... maybe bingochatter.com is not it? please pm me:)
 
What a great post, Dominique.

Every now and then people come along and lash out against affiliates because they simply don't understand any of what you wrote above. I have been on the receiving end of this misplaced animosity more than once.

You work for free, spending countless hours building a site, and you only make money if one of the casinos on your site makes money because someone found your site, clicked on a link, went to the casino, signed up and actually deposited

That part bears repeating, and I will just add "and did not win".

The most nerve-wracking part is that as an affiliate you have no choice to believe the casino's stats are 100% accurate. You can track clicks on your website... but you have no way of knowing what happened once they left your site. You are at the mercy of the casino to hope that they are honest. This nervousness can be reduced by only promoting casinos which are known to be honest and have a good reputation, but even the good ones can turn sour.
 
First of all I would like to thank you for this thread, because it's really very interesting question.

When I started my website in 2005 I knew nothing about online gambling, but I knew that I could earn money. Yes, that's true, I didn't think about rogue or fair casinos, because I really didn't know about them and didn't know the differences between them. My friend explained me only how I could earn.

Ok, the business was really interesting for me, every evening I worked on my site after my daily work, I tried to categorize all casinos, add content and etc. I worked very hard without any holidays and day offs, I learned online gambling, read articles and etc. More than a year I worked for free, earned nothing from my site. 1 year ago I left my job and now I'm a full-time webmaster and working only on my site.

One day I registered at GPWA, they approved me as a private member, and I started learning about fair and rogue casinos and affiliate programs. It was a big surprise for me that some casinos can cheat players and affiliates, of course I removed them from my site. And it's not a secret, if an affiliate program is GPWA or CAP certified it doesn't mean that this program is trusted. Certified programs mean that they are sponsors of these forums, they pay money for their ads and etc. Of course, they should abide by the GPWA or CAP code of conduct.


I would like to say that the important role in my business had played the CasinoMeister forum, where I met real players, read their complaints, their success stories, and I understood that it's very important to investigate a casino before to start promoting it, it's very important to read its terms and conditions before to say it's fair and safe.

What I wanted to say that not all affiliate sites are rogue, some affiliates try to do the best for their visitors. And earlier I didn't know my business was good or bad, sometimes I thought that it was a big sin, because I knew that players lost their money. But now I know what to do, and I know that it's good what I'm doing. My main role is to prevent players from rogue casinos. Just need time to gather all information... :Read:
 
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And it's not a secret, if an affiliate program is GPWA or CAP certified it doesn't mean that this program is trusted. Certified programs mean that they are sponsors of these forums, they pay money for their ads and etc. Of course, they should abide by the GPWA or CAP code of conduct.


I would like to say that the important role in my business had played the CasinoMeister forum, where I met real players, read their complaints, their success stories, and I understood that it's very important to investigate a casino before to start promoting it, it's very important to read its terms and conditions before to say it's fair and safe.

Yes:thumbsup:
 
I would like to say that the important role in my business had played the CasinoMeister forum, where I met real players, read their complaints, their success stories, and I understood that it's very important to investigate a casino before to start promoting it, it's very important to read its terms and conditions before to say it's fair and safe.

My main role is to prevent players from rogue casinos. Just need time to gather all information... :Read:


If only most of the other affiliates felt the same way...what great statements those are aksana...:thumbsup:
 

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