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.