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Yesterday there was a post to announce a meeting in Amsterdam that will take place during CAC Amsterdam to bring together all Gambling Affiliate Programs to discuss the industry as a whole, and move forward with an initiative to create a resource for Affiliates and Affiliate programs. 65 Operators have confirmed that they will be attending said meeting.

“Our motive on this collaboration initiative is to simply ensure that operators, gaming affiliate programs and the affiliates themselves have a resource in place that best represents our needs and those of our affiliates and business partners. Accordingly, the goal is to support an entity that is aligned with our interests and will help cultivate our community in a fair and impartial manner including developing business relationships as well as optimizing networking opportunities.” One operator representative had to say.

While I agree there needs to be a level playing field for Affiliate Programs and Affiliates, and due to the issues with CAP, something needs to be done. However, what sort of resource can be created to create a “level” playing field? I most certainly hope they are not referring to a forum.

Running an Affiliate community is a full time job. Its something that has to be done diplomatically, and has to be done by someone with experience. You can’t create a forum, and expect it to run smoothly. A forum that is run by Affiliate Programs, is a recipe for disaster. Who will be in charge? How will everyone get a fair shake?

This forum would never become an Affiliate community, it will become a platform to air out dirty laundry and issues. What happens when a fraud CPA affiliate posts that XXXXXXXXX.com didn’t pay them their $500, and then the post gets deleted? What happens when you get a rogue poker room or casino spamming the hell out of the forums and its members? Who has the authority to take care of this? If there are 65 rooms listed on the forum, how many programs are going to be pissed when they are listed as #44 and lost in the mix?

So if not a forum, what about a conference?

Another recipe for disaster. Who will run it? How will you tell rooms that pride themselves on big, loud, attention getting booths that they now only get a 10×10 to keep it “fair”?

Both of these ideas bring the opportunity for corruption. Unfortunately not every Gambling Affiliate Program operates ethically.

I hate it when people just bitch about something, without offering a solution, so here is mine.

If its a forum, it has to be run by a neutral party. PokerAffiliateListings (PAL) and CasinoAffiliateListings (CAL) is run by Jeremy Enke. He has been nothing but an industry leader in the Affiliate Community for the almost a decade. He has always run Affiliate Communities exactly how they should be: Fair, Honest, and with no shadyness going on behind the scenes. He also is launching Virtual Affiliate Expo, which is perfect for this collaboration since it saves Tens of Thousands of dollars for Affiliate Programs. I think he would be happy to lock in prices for a year or longer, so that there is no insane price increase like at other communities.

I also propose a private forum for all Affiliate Managers to discuss the industry year round. This will be a forum that Affiliates cannot read, and nothing posted in there should be shared.

The idea of a collaboration is not something I am against, and if it seems I am in this post I apologize. I actually think its a great idea, but must be done correctly or it causes more harm than good. We need something like this, but “we” can’t run it, or build it for that matter. We can only decide what we want, and who will do it.

Related posts:

1. CAC Amsterdam 2009
2. Bluefire Poker Affiliate Program

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.