JUNE/JULY 2013
JUNE/JULY 2013
THE DIVINE COMEDY OF LINK BUILDING FROM PENALISATION HELL TO RANKING HEAVEN
GOOGLE’S ELI UZAN ON ATTRIBUTION BITCOIN AND VIRTUAL CURRENCY NEVADA GOES LIVE INFORMATION, INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS FOR THE BUSINESS OF INTERACTIVE GAMING
CONTENTS Events Calendar 04 Webmaster News 06 Giving Google What it Wants 12 The Age of Link Risk Management 15 Has Penguin succeeded? 18
Taking Online Branding to the Next Level 20 Seven Lessons in SEO 22 Mobile SEO: Looking Back and Looking Ahead 24
“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.”
Interview: Razmus Svenningson, co-Founder, Casumo 28
— Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy of Link Building 31 Google’s Eli Uzan on Attribution Modelling 36
Has your site been cast into Google Hell by Satan’s Grim Reaper, the demon Penguin? If so, you aren’t alone, and this issue we look at what you may have done wrong to fall from your lofty cloud into the brimstone. There is, however, some good news in the Divine Comedy of Google: unlike the wayward souls in Dante’s novel, there may be an escape from Google Hell. Michael Caselli, Editor in Chief
Dealing With Google: AdWords Enhanced Campaigns 40 The Socially Awkward Sportsbook 42
Optimising the Mobile Channel as an Affiliate 44 Creating Brand ‘Me’: How Affiliates Create Their own Brands 47 The Netherlands: the Next Regulated EU Market? 48 Localised Search: the Netherlands 50 The Main Factors that Influence SEO 53 Binary Options Affiliation: Let the Stats Speak 56 Internet Gaming Goes Live in Nevada, with Dennis Neilander 60 Nevada: the Ultimate Opportunity? 62 Interview: Malcolm Graham, CEO, PKR 64 Interview: Katy Stafford, Head of Affiliates at InterPartners 66 Virtual Currency and the Disruptive Bitcoin 69 Bitcoin: the Napster of Money? 74 Strategising for Social Gaming 76 How to Make a Name for Yourself as a Poker Affiliate 78 Real-time Bidding for Affiliates 80 US Data Centre 82 iGaming Data Centre 86 Market Place 88 Social Gaming and Facebook 90
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affiliate events calendar Due to their popularity and wealth of information, analysis and discussion, conferences have become an integral part of the affiliate industry and a key communications bridge between affiliates and affiliate managers. Whether used for networking, education or just an excuse to meet up with friends, the affiliate conferences listed below provide all the tools you need to improve your business.
A4UExpo Europe 2013
Affiliate Summit East 2013
Hotel Okura Amsterdam, Netherlands
Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
July 2 – 3, 2013
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The 2013 a4uexpo Europe welcomes delegates to Amsterdam to learn, share knowledge, network and be at the forefront of the ‘digital evolution’. Conference sessions include search, display, affiliate marketing, mobile, retargeting, email, social, mobile, video, e-commerce and more. The two day conference will provide networking opportunities in and around the exhibition floor.
August 18 – 20, 2013
www.a4uexpo.com/europe
www.affiliatesummit.com
Barcelona Affiliate Conference (BAC)
Russian Affiliate Conference and Expo (RACE)
Barcelona, Spain
Moscow, Russian Federation
October 3 – 6, 2013
October 24 – 25, 2013
iGB Affiliate’s end of summer conference returns to Barcelona to offer affiliates and programs the perfect environment to meet, learn and do business. The Barcelona Affiliate Conference (BAC) is one of the key events on the affiliate calendar and continues to grow in popularity with organisers already confident of exceeding the 1600-plus attendees from 2012.
The Russian Affiliate Conference was created to target the development of business in Russia and other CIS countries where affiliate marketing currently only accounts for around ten percent of total activity.
iGB Affiliate JUNE/JULY 2013
The Affiliate Summit was founded to provide education on the latest affiliate marketing industry issues and a productive networking environment for affiliate marketers. Today, the event brings together affiliates, networks, merchants, agencies, and vendors to meet, network, do business and learn industry best practices.
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webmaster news
Online Poker Goes Live in Nevada Ultimate Gaming, a majority-owned subsidiary of Station Casinos LLC, has gone live with its real money online poker site, UltimatePoker.com, becoming the first operator in the US to offer legalised online poker. “We are proud to be the first company to deliver legal and secure real money online gaming to poker players,” said Ultimate Gaming Chairman Tom Breitling. “We have worked closely with state gaming regulators to demonstrate our unique and compelling poker platform that, above all, players know they can trust. Ultimate Poker is dedicated to being the players’ choice for online poker.” Ultimate Gaming Chief Executive Officer, Tobin Prior added, “We feel our
technology is a major advantage. Ultimate Poker’s proprietary software is completely owned and operated by parent company Ultimate Gaming, allowing for continuous investment and product development. The technology was acquired in 2011 and initially developed by a US based company with a completely clean regulatory profile.” Las Vegas-based Station Casinos signed a deal in November that saw it acquire a majority stake in real money online games, social gaming and digital entertainment developer, Fertitta Interactive LLC, which itself purchased the assets of iGaming solutions firm CyberArts Licensing in October of 2011. Ultimate Poker was awarded an online gambling licence by the Nevada Gaming
Commission in April after Station Casinos was questioned at length regarding its proposed antimoney laundering and underage betting procedures and now the domain is the first since the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) prohibition in 2006 to be legally permitted to offer its services to US-based players. “This day has been a long time coming. Online poker in the United States is finally here and totally legit,” remarked Brand Ambassador Antonio Sandier. “I signed on to be the ambassador for Ultimate Poker because I knew the people behind this company would do it right. I signed on because UltimatePoker.com is where I would come to play. Now we all can.”
ARJEL Repeats call for Change in French Gaming Tax ARJEL President, Jean-Francois Vilotte, has again called on the French authorities to update the country’s iGaming taxation system after reporting mixed fortunes for the domestic online poker and sportsbetting markets. In an interview with the French newspaper Les Echos, Vilotte revealed that activity and gross gaming revenues in France’s online gaming and betting market have switched around dramatically in the past few months. He explained that the market’s structure had changed substantially, with gross profits for online poker cash games down 14 percent to €61.2 million for the 12-month period to May and tournament fees stable at €41 million.
Gross gaming revenues for online sportsbetting of €63.4 million signalled a rise of 20 percent on 2012 figures. Football played a large part in this trend and now represents 60 percent of all online bets in France, with Paris Saint-Germain attracting the bulk of punters’ cash and even Ligue 2 (France’s second division) experiencing a significant rise in volume. Gross gaming revenues for online pari-mutuel horseracing rose three percent to €103 million. ARJEL’s president repeated his call for the country to change its taxation system to one based on gross gaming revenues rather than on stakes, as is the case currently. Vilotte added that little progress was being made in terms of a
European regulatory-judicial framework: “The European Commission just needs to draw the lessons of European jurisprudence with regard to the principle of subsidiarity. On the other hand, work undertaken by the Council of Europe on sporting ethics is progressing well. “The French online gaming industry has well and truly established itself and, as expected, has consolidated,” continued Vilotte. “By way of comparison, gross gaming revenues for the sector were €188 million for the first quarter in France, compared with €145 million in Italy. The sector was down one percent in France whereas it dropped 14 percent in Italy, because of the economic environment.”
Consolidation Sparks Growth for Amaya Amaya Gaming Group Incorporated has announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2013 showing a 496 percent year-on-year rise in total revenues to CAD$38.05 million ($36.73 million). The Montreal-based company purchased Ongame Network Limited from bwin.party Digital Entertainment in October for approximately $19.42 million while November saw it pay $167 million in order to take control of electronic machine and technology supplier Cadillac Jack. Amaya stated that its improvement in quarterly revenues was “primarily attributable” to the consolidation of
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software licensing and hosted casino earnings from CryptoLogic Limited, which it acquired for approximately $29 million in early April, alongside similar gains from Ongame and Cadillac Jack. For the three months to the end of March, Amaya declared that adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation grew from a deficit of CAD$532,402 ($514,085) last year to a surplus of CAD$10.26 million ($9.91 million) although its net loss for the period increased by just over 63 percent year-on-year to CAD$7.44 million ($7.18 million).
For the full year to the end of December, Amaya Gaming predicted that overall revenues would total in the range of CAD$156 million ($150.6 million) to CAD$167 million ($161.3 million) while annual adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation are expected to fall between CAD$55 million ($53.12 million) to CAD$64 million ($61.81 million). “We’re extremely pleased with the substantial positive cash flow generated from our operations in the first quarter,” said David Baazov, President and Chief Executive Officer of Amaya Gaming.
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webmaster news
bwin Extends MotoGP Sponsorship
Leading online gaming operator bwin has signed a deal with Dorna Sports SL that will see it continue to sponsor the MotoGP World Championship motorcycle racing tour for another two years. The agreement extends bwin.com’s partnership with the MotoGP World Championship, which began in 2004, until 2015 and will see the domain remain as title sponsor for races in Jerez, Spain, and Brno, Czech Republic. “We are proud to be extending our partnership with the MotoGP World Championship for another two seasons,” said Norbert Teufelberger, Chief Executive Officer for Gibraltarbased bwin.party digital entertainment.
Industry trade group the Social Gaming Association (SGA) has announced that it will be assisting the UK Gambling Commission with the collation of industry data over the coming months, as the Commission considers formulating its future policy on social gaming. The agreement follows the release by the UK Gambling Commission of its report analysing the potential risks posed by social gaming. “We firmly support the balanced and considered approach taken by the Commission in its attempts to understand the social gaming industry and its proactive attempts to engage with the industry throughout,” said Stuart Tilly, Chairman of the SGA. “We welcome the
Caesars Prepares to Launch WSOP.com
Ladbrokes Announces Staff Layoffs
The world’s largest land-based gaming firm, Caesars Entertainment Corporation, has suggested that its soon-to-launch WSOP.com real money online poker site could be live by the summer in a conference call ahead of the 44th edition of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) tournament series in Las Vegas. “We anticipate our arrival to be sometime this summer,” Seth Palansky of Caesars Interactive Entertainment told Reuters. April saw Caesars Entertainment ask for help in testing its WSOP.com beta programme from players over the age of 21 in Nevada while the new domain is due to utilise technology from 888 Holdings, which already cooperates in the operation of WSOP-branded sites for customers in the United Kingdom, France and Italy.
Judge Derails PokerStars’ Atlantic Club Acquisition A judge in Atlantic County Superior Court has ruled against PokerStars in its lawsuit against the Atlantic Club Casino, denying the world’s largest poker site the chance to gain an early footprint in the newly regulated New Jersey iGaming market. Rational Group, which owns PokerStars and rival Full Tilt Poker, had looked set to engineer an Atlantic City presence for its leading poker business through the acquisition of the former Atlantic City Hilton before the casino terminated the deal on May 1, on the grounds that the deadline for concluding the acquisition had passed.
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SGA to Assist UK Gambling Commission
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After agreeing a marketing and licensing deal with Playtech in March to establish its Ladbrokes Israel subsidiary, Ladbrokes has said that up to 100 members of staff are now facing redundancy. Ladbrokes is the second largest bookmaker in the UK and stated that the layoffs in the UK are necessary as it looks to transfer “a number of key tasks” to the new Tel Aviv-based digital marketing services division, which officially opened in May. “As a result of this and the company’s ongoing commitment to maximising efficiency, a number of Ladbrokes employees have been placed at risk of
opportunity to assist the Commission in seeking to address any consumer protection concerns raised in the report both through the provision of more detailed and targeted data and by the further promotion of the Association’s social responsibility initiatives within the industry.” The SGA has been established to protect and further the legal, regulatory and commercial interests of the social gaming industry, providing a unified set of socially responsible standards for its members to adhere to and a unified voice to address the concerns of industry detractors and proactively educate policy makers concerned about social gaming.
redundancy and a 90-day consultation period has begun,” read a statement from the Harrow-based firm. Ladbrokes revealed recently that Jim Mullen, Chief Operating Officer for online operations at rival William Hill, has been hired to lead Ladbrokes Israel as Digital Director. Reporting directly to Richard Glynn, Chief Executive Officer for Ladbrokes, Mullen is due to take up his new post in November while existing Channels Director, Nick Rust, is to lead the firm’s operational efforts to deliver on its digital and UK/Ireland retail plans in the meantime.
Netherlands Issues Draft Gaming Legislation The Netherlands government has announced that it intends to end its current online gambling monopoly and open up its market to competition from as early as 2015. Draft legislation published in May would see online gambling operators in the Netherlands subject to a tax rate of 20 percent, which compares favourably to the 29 percent currently paid by Holland Casino and individual arcade owners, although they could also be required to contribute to a special fund to help those with gambling addictions. According to a statement from Fredrik Teeven, State Secretary for Security and
Justice, licence applicants will be required to meet “very strict conditions” in order to offer online poker, casino games and sportsbetting to players in the country while a national register of players breaking self-imposed limits is also due to be established with offenders set to face bans. Foreign operators are currently prohibited from targeting players in the Netherlands but this ban is being widely ignored and has helped lead state-run Holland Casino to post significant losses. The draft legislation is now undergoing a consultation period and could be sent to parliament for a vote as early as mid-July.
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GIVING GOOGLE WHAT IT WANTS A look at life post-Penguin 2.0, by Dave Snyder, CEO of Copypress. GOOGLe’S MaTT CUTTS has now come out and openly stated that it will be an “eventful summer” for SEOs using what he termed “black hat” tactics. This declaration comes as Google gets set to roll out Penguin 2.0, which Cutts also stated will have a deeper impact than the original iteration of the spam-fighting algorithm update. In competitive niches, the term ‘black hat’ for ‘Googlers’ is likely to just mean your day-to-day operations. The reality is that Google wants a world where webmasters only work on improving the content on their website, so it can later scrape it and create its own products. But I digress. Any link manipulation of any kind is ‘black hat’ to Google and, thus, marketers must use risk management in competitive spaces. In this publication, there are other articles on link risk management; read them. Now, what do you do to clean up your game and compete in a postPenguin 2.0 world? Going back to my earlier point, the question I am asking today is, “What kind of content is Google looking to scrape, and why?” Combine this question with another hint Matt Cutts gave us on the impending importance of authority authorship.
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What kind of content does Google like?
The knowledge graph, flight search, etc, are all part of this desire to appeal to a user’s intent.
Linkbait is doing it wrong Buzzfeed.com has made every publisher think that the key to publishing success is lists of noise. The issue is that you are not Buzzfeed, and I rarely see them in the SERPs for major terms. This isn’t to say all linkbait is bad; links are good, and so is baiting them. What I am saying is that Google wants timely, authoritative content from experts, and rarely does linkbait fall into this area.
“Google wants Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga, not Jack Kerouac. The unfortunate nature of authorship is the same as with politics: popularity is not a signal of quality.” In March, Google made waves by taking over the SERPs with its own bracket for March Madness. It was a) a timely query, and b) a query that had more than a few authority publications it knew it could rely on for the information. Today, Google prides itself on not only having information to match a query, but also understanding a user’s intent. Freshness is only a part of this.
To be, or not to be… The question becomes whether to become that expert, or hire them. To answer that question, let’s look at what makes an expert. Google is clearly going to define authorship based on a writer’s Google+ account. Here, a writer shows how popular they are among circles, and what sites they write on. So an expert writer for Google isn’t about the quality of writing, it is about popularity; Google wants
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Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga, not Jack Kerouac. The unfortunate nature of authorship is the same as with politics: popularity is not a signal of quality. This actually bodes well for businesses wanting to build authority, as it means you just have to be a savvy marketer, and not a copywriting genius.
How to build authority Publisher relations is vital. Notice I didn’t say ‘guest posting’. Guest posters are the scourge of the Internet today. Publishers hate them because they bring little-to-no value. Publishers and Google want to see contributors. Authority isn’t seeing how many places you can write for, but how often and how popular your posts are on awesome publications. The upside here is that once you create your publisher relationships and assure they have linked to your Google+ authorship appropriately, you can just get into the mode of managing content publication. You also want to nurture your Google+ profile (note I said nurture and not spam).
Niche is important When building out your authorship, the niche is important. I do believe Google will look at the categorisation of publications as it works its way through assigning authority to a content creator. Don’t stray too far
outside your vertical and understand where publishers intertwine semantically in terms of categorisation.
through authorship. The main thing that will be needed here is sheer creativity to figure out how to manage tying difficult
“If you approach your content with the mantra, ‘expertly written by experts’, then you will win in the post-Penguin 2.0 world.” If your niche is casino, figure out how break into traditional gaming websites. If your niche is sportsbook, became an expert on specific sports.
niches into major publications, but this is a point of adversity, not a point of no return. If you approach your content with the mantra, ‘expertly written by experts’, then you will win in the post-Penguin 2.0 world.
Use your new platform Once you have your new publisher friends, figure out how you can leverage their reach to impact your traffic and authorship. For example, if you write for a basketball website, you can use their authority to move the needle on an article about betting odds during the NBA finals. Remember the earlier example about the type of content and queries Google is looking to boost (or steal).
Taking it home And now, you tie your authorship to your house. Use the incredible author rank you have created on your own site, tying all of the value together in a big bow. So, the new marketing protocol continues to be about links and placements; but now, quality rules quantity, and verification of that quality will come
Dave Snyder is CEO of CopyPress. Dave began his career online as a well-respected Internet Marketing Consultant. He has spoken around the world on the topics of search marketing and social media, and has consulted for some of the world’s largest companies. He has also been an educator and writer in past careers. Dave’s passion shifted from a purely marketing focus as he worked with more and more entrepreneurs to build profitable companies, to the creation, construction, and management of startups. This passion was the inspiration behind his previous company, SteelCast, of which he was CEO.
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Penguin 4 and Beyond
Enter the age of Link Risk Management We have seen three Penguin updates and version 4, or 2.0 as dubbed by Google, is either coming or is already here, depending on when you read this. Google is getting more and more aggressive in going after spam links (i.e. paid links, spammed links, article directories, etc) and since April 2012, we have seen thousands of websites tank for previous bad practices in linking. By now, webmasters should be aware that they have to get rid of toxic links, but that’s only the start. What has to follow is a more conscious process in link building and SEO in general. Practicing safe SEO becomes mandatory if you still want to rank in 2013 and beyond.
The start: toxic links clean-up When webmasters were bombarded with ‘Unnatural link warnings’, we quickly provided a software to help toxic link cleanups with Link Detox (www.linkdetox.com). By analysing your links for those that are either toxic or suspicious and applying the Link Detox risk rating to help prioritise, we managed to analyse (as big link profiles) five million links for big sites. We also found that many large retailers like Interflora had a lot to clean up, as you can read up in the Interflora Deep Dive into Bad links.1 It’s not surprising that Interflora received a penalty in that specific case. What’s rather more surprising is how fast the company could resolve that penalty only ten days later, probably by disavowing thousands of links.2 Despite all the pain, many webmasters reported successfully revoked manual penalties after their month-long reconsideration process, or even only after disavowing or removing enough links. Keep in mind that if you file a reconsideration request with Google, a ‘full inspection’ (a deep dive) is then carried out by a Google Spam engineer, so that should be your last resort. If you are among those that had a penalty lifted, the last thing you want is to be penalised again. That prompts the need for establishing link risk management processes in your SEO.
The process: link risk management Just because you got out of the penalty, doesn’t mean you cannot get another one. Webmasters should be well aware of the inherent risks in their existing link profile and especially in new ones they might build. It’s a new mindset and process that you have to establish. Verify your existing link profile on an ongoing basis (with automated, recurring Link Detox reports, for example) and make sure that you analyse potential new links for their potential risks to your site.
Link risk management is a process and mindset There’s more to performing regular link risk checks than technical capabilities – risk management for your links is a process and a mindset. We’re not talking about a singular event where you clean up your old sins and are safe for the future. Link risk management means assessing the risk of potential new links as well. After all, you don’t want to hurt your site by building links on sites that could hurt you.
Every link is a potential risk Back in the old days, we used to say, “A link is a link” in SEO. Not so anymore. One link that could help website A could hurt website B, depending on the existing link profile it already has. This means you have to look at your link profile in whole, take every possible link source into account and only judge on new links in relation to existing ones. The times when we looked at a single SEO metrics, i.e. PageRank, are very much over.
www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/interflora-penalty/ http://searchengineland.com/interflora-is-back-what-did-they-fix-how-did-they-come-back-so-fast-150526
Performing ‘what-if’ risk checks The solution for this is already built into Link Detox. We call it ‘What-If Risk Checks’. By using software to combine not only all possible link sources but also your disavow link lists (the links you devalued in the clean-up process because you couldn’t remove them), the most complete picture of your link graph can be plotted. It should be as close as possible to what Google sees. You definitely cannot do that by hand. Then, every new link has to be checked against the existing link graph to find out if new links: ●●are in the same networks as existing links. ●●possess inherent risks from their technical aspects. ●●are easily identifiable as spam links or paid links. ●●are on websites known for selling links or spam, and much more. Each new link opportunity has to be carefully reviewed, just like all existing links. Furthermore, automated classification of link growth helps webmasters to mitigate against potential negative SEO attacks, i.e. bad links hitting their website without them knowing. While going through the process of gathering all SEO metrics for potential links and checking them against your existing links can be tedious, it’s mandatory in a post-Penguin world. Link Detox has been supporting that process with a feature called “What If” checks since October 2012, and other products will probably follow up implementing similar functionalities soon.
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When performing a ‘what if’ link simulation, make sure you ignore those links that you potentially disavowed. Keeping track of previously disavowed links is another story and a crucial detail in an ongoing link risk management. This has to be done to get an accurate picture. If you don’t take previous link disavows into account, you are simply missing the point that they are no longer accounted for. We call this method “Round-Trip Disavow” in Link Detox.
Practicing safe SEO It requires a significant amount of changes to implement link risk management properly, especially if you worked with multiple link providers in the past. This means you need to establish a central position for managing the risk of your (existing) links properly. The goal is that you, and everyone building links for you, understands that every new link poses a potential risk – be it today or tomorrow. The solution I recommend is as follows: ●●Establish someone to be responsible for the risks in your links. ●●Review your backlink profile regularly for ‘risky’ links. You can automate this with software like Link Detox.
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●●Do
not hesitate with link clean-up. If you find toxic links, get rid of them – better today than tomorrow. Don’t wait for the next penalty. ●●Manage your link sources and their contact information. In case of emergency, you need to outreach very quickly. ●●Make sure you have a good outreach process prepared. Pitch Box is a very promising product that will help you with that and should have launched by the time you read this. I was honoured to work with it in the closed beta phase. Pitch Box helps you to gather contact information and automate the outreach to webmasters with maximum personalisation; crucial for success. What really helps is the auto-follow up and tracking features that you simply need to not lose track of when contacting hundreds of webmasters. ●●Keep your link source contacts ‘warmed up’. Reach out to any link sellers/traders you work with on a regular basis to make sure they are still there. If you think these points only apply to link buying, you have missed the point. A lot of unnatural links were built manually with
directory submissions, own link networks and other practices of the past. Google likes none of that. So you either have to clean up and stop doing what you did for years, or start practicing safe SEO and establish a link risk management process.
Christoph C Cemper has been building links since 2003 and is a well-known and respected expert in the SEO industry. His company, CEMPER.COM, has been building high-quality links for over 500 major companies across all verticals in many different languages and developed the Link Research Tools, a state-of-the-art link building and SEO toolkit. Christoph holds a Masters in business administration and marketing and speaks at about a dozen search marketing conferences and SEO training seminars around the globe every year. Additionally, he holds webinars for advanced link building and publishes case-studies on ongoing Penguin and other Google updates on a regular basis.
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HAS PENGUIN SUCCEEDED?
Pete Young, Search Strategy and Social Director at Mediacom, assesses the effect of Penguin 2.0, and whether Google has succeeded in what it set out to do. THERE HAVE BEEN a lot of column inches written about Google’s latest version of the search link algorithm called Penguin – both pre and post the launch of Version 2.0. For many, including myself, I had expected more, certainly from conversations late last year at the iGB Affiliate conference in Barcelona when David Naylor mentioned a huge update in the offing. Certainly, the usual rhetoric from Google seemed to coincide with the doom and gloom outlook that many were predicting.
So has Google succeeded? One only has to look at a search for ‘blackjack’ to suggest it’s certainly not been the game changer many predicted. Aggressive affiliates are still seeing significant success in many verticals, and payday loans SERPs are still full of churn and burn affiliates out for a quick buck. So one would have to suggest the answer is a big fat ‘no’. There is no doubting that this has had some form of effect. I have seen a number of sites significantly affected by the update, however, were many of the issues outlined by Mr Cutts impacted? Again, I would disappointingly have to say ‘no’. Perhaps
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this comes down to the way I would suggest Penguin was designed to work; much of which does not affect the ‘slash and dash’ approach used by some in the affiliate space. To some, this presents an on-going opportunity, and one that many affiliates will choose to explore and exploit until such a time when Google works out how to close the loop. However, I would suggest that such a time is still a fair while off, particularly as there is only one winner in a bad SERP and that’s Google, particularly in mature verticals such as payday loans and online gaming. Certainly, the brands in these sectors are the losers and many will have to pay money to ensure visibility in an increasingly competitive search landscape.
Opportunities will still be there for affiliates looking to develop their propositions and offer value, however, I think the ‘Wild West’ days of the past are limited in terms of their lifespan moving forward. That said, those opportunities are still there. Google isn’t perfect, and never will be. Has Google succeeded in what it wanted to do? I would suggest not, however, it has certainly continued to give SEOs food for thought and keep us light on our feet. However, this won’t be the last update, and I do believe that Google is getting things right, slowly but surely. Whether, as an affiliate, you can stay ahead of the game is up to you.
Crossroads Therefore, as an affiliate, I would suggest we are at a crossroads. Short-term gain against longer-term sustainability. I certainly believe the short-term game is just that: short-term. I do believe Google will get better, and I think the increasing role of social will have a big part to play in that. As Google spreads its means of consideration wider and wider, and moves beyond simple and easily manipulated metrics, we will see a less opportunistic landscape for affiliates.
PETE YOUNG is Regional Head of SEO at Mediacom and has quietly been around the search and affiliate industry for around ten years. Prior to Mediacom, Pete headed up similar positions at Mediavest, Brilliant Media and Amaze. Peter founded Holistic Search and also writes for European search marketing blog, State of Search, and Search News Central.
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Take Online Branding to the Next Level
As an affiliate marketer, it’s more vital that ever to keep a close eye on what is happening with the search engines, especially Google, as it continues to wage war against what it perceives to be low quality websites or sites that offer little value to their users. As an affiliate, you instantly place yourself in a position where you have to prove yourself to be of greater value. Google has altered the way in which it filters search engine results to weed out websites that it believes to be of low significance to their users, and as part of this, we have all seen evidence that the majority of affiliate operated websites have had a tough time of late. We know that Google is looking to rank websites that will be able to offer their search engine users the answer to their query at first try; it hates to see that a user is having to bounce through various websites in order to find what they are looking for, so it tries to automatically filter those results in order to reduce that situation as much as possible. That can mean that totally innocent sites are at risk of being caught up in the reshuffle that seems to follow each algorithm update that Google releases. If you have read previous articles and blog posts about the fact that Google is looking for site owners to build a brand for their site, you will have no doubt shifted a huge amount of the promotional efforts you make for your site to being more brand dominated – reducing elements such as keyword anchor text percentage and the destination focus of those valuable links that you are looking to build into your site. But is that really enough to warrant becoming a brand? Becoming a brand is about more than simply pushing forward with a new focus towards your link building process, no matter how you choose to conduct that. Instead, there are potential areas within the historic elements of your website that may need to be altered in order to give a stronger brand signal. One of the best ways to find out whether you have been effective in your push to a more branded approach
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is to look into what traffic your site obtains on a daily basis, based on nothing other than brand or brand phrase search queries. Now that you have found that information, ask yourself whether you would be able to operate solely based on the volume of traffic and income such traffic generates. If your answer to this question is ‘no’, then you still have a long way to go in order for Google to believe that you are a ‘brand’.
So what can you do in order to become a brand or to continue to send the right brand signals? Becoming a brand is about more than simply altering the way that you are building links into your website; you need to go back to basics and rebuild from the ground up, which means no cutting of corners and definitely no skipping over elements that would take you a matter of minutes to change. Although it may feel like you have to re-tread the path that you have already walked in the past, you have to reform the foundations on which your site is built. You wouldn’t build a house on a foundation that wasn’t stable, so why would you consider trying to build a brand on one that is unable to provide you with the starting point that you need to be able to become a recognised brand? So moving forward from this point, you need to: ●●Go back to basics with on-page SEO, making sure pages are optimised for the search engines while keeping the content to a high quality and free from keyword saturation. ●●Ensure that the content of your website is of the highest possible quality, avoiding
duplication of content throughout the site and isolate the lower quality content into an area in which you can apply specific rules (disallow, no index, no follow, etc). ●●Undertake a complete analysis of your backlink profile, making sure to look at the anchor text distribution, the percentage of link destination, and that you are happy with the quality of the links. ●●Monitor the search engine rankings that relate to your brand search terms in order to maintain a reputation management stance and keep anything about your brand as positive as possible, especially on the first page of the search engine results. ●●Create a new outlook towards the way that you plan to build existing links, think more about how you can install your brand name on authority websites in order to give a stronger brand signal to search engines. Remember that although taking your website back to basics may well be a time consuming process, doing so will reduce the risk of penalisation – provided that your rebalancing attempts are successful and that the timescale is less than if you were to take a reactive approach to the Google algorithm updates (based on the evidence we have seen that Google Penguin is currently only being rolled out every six months). Take the time to analyse how your website is creating a brand within the industry and be thorough with what you are trying to achieve in order to produce the best results possible. Google is looking
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for you to create a trusted brand for its users, so make sure that your website is giving the right feel to everyone that lands on your website.
Managing your site through penalisation With Google releasing seemingly continuous updates the likelihood of a website, that has failed to create a brand around their presence online falling under penalisation is a developing risk. Should you be unfortunate enough to get caught up in the fallout, it can be a testing time for any website owner. If you find that your website could potentially be penalised, you need to look to take action as soon as possible; failure to do so could result in what many believe to be a ‘tier system penalty’ being applied to the site, making recovery a longer, more drawn out process. In order to make sure that you take appropriate action with your site, you need to ensure that you analyse the potential causes of the drop in search engine visibility, so try to find out what changes the search engines have made prior to your drop in ranking. Once you have established the likely cause of the penalisation, you can then look to take action to counteract the problems on your site, paying particular attention to: Google Panda: check your on-page elements such as content, header tags and possible duplication issues to make sure that you are offering the highest possible standard of information. If you identify any low quality pages or pieces of content, look to rewrite them and add more user value to the placement. Google Panda is now part of the algorithm. Google Penguin: check your off-page areas such as your backlink profile; the update is designed to eliminate spam and low quality websites alongside the Google
Panda update release, so look to remove any automatically generated links, low quality placements and ensure that your anchor text percentages are geared towards a branded focus rather than keyword linkage. Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update: unfortunately, if you fall foul to this penalisation, recovery is a very long process and, so far, we have failed to hear of any success stories surrounding a positive recovery. In this situation, the quickest and easiest solution would be to rebrand your site into a ‘brandable’ domain as we know that Google is looking for websites to create a brand atmosphere around themselves. Manual Penalisation: these penalty infringements are added to a site following a manual review by one of the Google review team should they believe that you are breaking the Google guidelines in at least one instance. This penalisation style is accompanied by a warning that is issued through the Google Webmaster Tools platform. Recovery is only possible following a manual review of your site, meaning that you need to issue a reconsideration request following your clean up efforts to bring the site back into compliance with the guidelines that Google has set out.
Conclusion Due to the continued development of the Google ranking algorithm, creating a website is no longer a process with which you can continuously move forward. Instead, you now need to be able to re-analyse any element within the creation of your site, both in the past and in the present. Ensure that you keep educated to the changes that Google is making and ensure that you keep your website compliant with what it is looking for in a
rank-worthy website and you should be able to pass through the updates without too much interruption. Aim to meet the requirements that search engines like Google are looking for, build a brand rather than a website and keep your link building techniques to a clean and brand focused approach, and you should be able to continue your development while your non-compliant competitors fall out of the search engine results as further updates release.
DAVID NAYLOR is Director and Head of SEO at Bronco Ltd. Dave started working in the SEO industry over 15 years ago and owns the successful search marketing and web development agency, Bronco, with his wife Becky. Bronco strives to be a leading search marketing company running large online marketing campaigns for companies in competitive sectors, with excellent and sustained results. His main motivational driving force is the belief that there is no point having a site if it doesn’t rank No 1. His dedication to giving clients great ROI has led to the constant development of new optimisation techniques and the ability to see algorithmic changes before most other SEOs. Dave Naylor has the reputation of being one of the best SEOs in the world, who has a proven track record of success in the most competitive markets. Recently, Bronco has formed a strategic partnership with the experienced PR agency 10 Yetis, which now enables both companies to work side by side on marketing campaigns giving clients a complete package leading to better results for the long term future.
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Seven Lessons in SEO
What 15 Years in the Game Teaches you Having been in the SEO game for well over a decade, and having recently decided to retire from consulting, I felt it would be appropriate to summarise what I have learnt over the last 15 years. My final piece of advice as a consultant will cover timeless pieces of advice which should (all being well) remain applicable, regardless of the changes in algorithms, standards or human computer interaction.
1. Don’t believe anything you hear from industry experts This includes myself. For all you know, I may be a faker with just enough of a track record and back catalogue of successful gigs to have earned historic respect within the SEO industry. Today’s SEO superstars are tomorrows SEO dinosaurs. SEO is all about the future. There’s no room for the past or even present. There are only two questions to ask yourself: does it work today? How long might it work in the future? It’s crucial to understand the degree of future proofing for an SEO project and consider this factor when dealing with performance-based contract periods.
2. There are no guarantees in SEO – guaranteed! We know that there are no guarantees in SEO and that the best way to mitigate risk is to hire a consultant on a performancerelated deal. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t, then nothing has been lost. Everyone’s a winner. The danger in these arrangements occurs when the client (you) feels that everything is going swimmingly and starts sending out signals to the consultant that the likelihood of a contract renewal is looking slim to unlikely. Outside of the contract period, with no performance bonus to pay and renewal looking unlikely, there’s no further vested interest placed in your success by the consultant. A handful of algorithm modifications and a rejected proposal or two later, the consultant who formerly had a massive vested interest in your success, is most
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likely to focus his attention on paying business while awaiting the “My world’s caved in” telephone call. My advice here is to renew or extend your performance arrangement well ahead of the contract expiry. If you’re an affiliate, think: “How do I like my affiliate managers to treat me?” The larger the incentive or commission, the more motivated your consultant will be. Ensure they’re fully onboard with your success. Signals such as “Thanks for teaching us to fish, we don’t really need you anymore” are not going to help cement a vested commercial interest. Remain mindful of this, particularly as the contract period draws to an end.
3. Plan for the worst – aim for the best! Are all your eggs in one basket? Who’s holding the handle of said basket? If it’s Google, then you really need to split the eggs into as many baskets as possible. Would you rather earn £1,000 a day from one website, or £1 a day from 1,000 websites? While there are shades of grey in SEO, the same economic law applies. That is, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. The spectrum of risk begins with no risk, and goes all the way to off-the-scale, imminent, irreversible death of a website’s natural search traffic. If you plan to push the performance in natural search, then you have to be prepared to accept a proportional degree of risk. It’s now your job and/or the job of the consultant to mitigate this risk.
4. Make SEO part of your mix Don’t just rely on SEO, build trust for your brand and improve conversion, retention, service, and add value. While these components may not be hard SEO ranking factors, they do provide a secondary effect to your SEO activities: increasing
the performance of your traffic as well as sending positive quality signals to Google. This is not to mention helping mitigate risk to your business.
5. Don’t haggle (too hard) on price Buy cheap, buy twice. SEO is only expensive if it’s not working. If you’re working on a fixed price or monthly retainer, ask the consultant if this is really enough budget to do the job in hand. The worst thing that can, and often does, happen is that an objective isn’t reached simply because the consultant or agency tried to compete in a pitch on price. Build a 20 percent margin of error into the budget and keep that budget aside should your ranking objectives fall short. Position number one yields double the traffic of position number two.
6. Trust your instincts If you think you’re being hustled or being fed bad advice, question it. Question everything.
7. Enjoy the ride Expect change, adapt, and if something fails, regroup and tackle the problem from a different angle. Most of all, enjoy the ride.
Paul Reilly is the founder of MediaSkunkWorks, a new and pioneering service provider. Paul has over 15 years’ experience in search engine optimisation and has a wealth of experience in highly competitive sectors. If you want to buy or sell links email me at paul@mediaskunkworks. com or follow me on http://twitter. com/paulreilly or stalk me on http:// foursquare.com/user/paulreilly
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Mobile SEO: Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Staying on top of mobile SEO techniques and standards can mean the difference between a good year and a great year for affiliates, writes Latitude Digital Marketing’s SEO Strategist, Janet Plumpton. Remember the days when we were first able to access the Internet from a handset? The basic WAP offering was clunky to navigate and you had to use a toggle to highlight the next link. Because of the less-than-enjoyable user experience, handset users made up a very small percentage of website traffic. Optimising for search was, therefore, a low priority. Mobile has certainly come a long way since then, with Smartphones providing an enhanced user experience. In fact, there is not much you can do from a desktop that you can’t on a mobile. Mobile devices are now with us all of the time, and offer a simple and effective way to search online. Why fire up your laptop when you can take your Smartphone out of your pocket and get the information you seek quicker and more easily? This sentiment seems to resonate with most people, as demonstrated by a recent Google study that reports Smartphone usage has risen from 51 percent to 61 percent in the past year alone.
A different animal Mobile user behaviour is very different to that on desktop. Before commencing a mobile SEO campaign, you need to determine the visitors your site is already receiving, how the site is performing as well as any pressures before deciding how
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to move forward with your site, or whether to create a separate mobile offering. Create a mobile organic advanced segment in Google Analytics to look at what percentage of your site’s visitors come through a mobile handset and how they behave; you will notice the difference in activity to that of desktop traffic. On average, search queries will be 25 percent shorter due to the fact that typing on a handset is harder and less precise than using a keyboard, and that many mobile searchers will opt for a Google suggested query. Monitor bounce rate; observe which pages are performing poorly and take a look at them on a handset. It can be easier to use a User Agent Switcher plug-in, many of which are available through the Chrome browser. In addition to using an advanced segment in Google Analytics, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools and select ‘mobile’ in the filter. Here, you can uncover top landing pages, search queries and impressions for mobile traffic. When looking at top pages, either through Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools, you may find that your mobile visitors are arriving at your site for completely different reasons. The index pages and specific product landing pages might be the most popular through desktop, but on mobile, the top landing pages after the index
page might link to an onsite blog. This is because blog posts often follow a ‘questions and answers’ (Q&A) format. Therefore, it is important not to forget that visitors using mobile search are often looking for advice, and quickly; “Where can I play?”… “What is the best item for…?” etc.
Do your keyword research The differences in mobile and desktop behaviour need to be reflected in your keyword strategy. Mobile search shows a preference for local terms as users are often ‘out and about’ when accessing data. Mobile users also include reference to ‘mobile’ in their search queries. Consider what your mobile user is searching for compared to your desktop user and see where the business needs meet. As mentioned earlier, mobile searchers will often opt to use Google suggest, so complete research on the longer-tail terms that appear for your campaign targets. Once you have a listing of terms, refine this further by comparing which terms have the higher search volume from a mobile in comparison to desktop search by using the ‘all mobile devices’ filter in the keyword tool.
Responsive, dynamic serving or separate domain? This is where it gets tricky; how are you going to display your site to the mobile
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visitor? It’s good practice to look at your current site objectively as a starting point. Is it a heavy site or is it lightweight? If the website is already simple and light, then your best bet may be to use responsive design. This is what Google advises as best practice. It is easy to manage as there is just one domain, the same URLs and no requirement to worry about additional technical considerations, including separate sitemaps and canonical tags. However, this solution only works if your site is relatively light. If you have a very heavy site full of functionality and large file sizes, you need to consider the impact this will have on load time. Research suggests that many visitors give up waiting for a site to load within four seconds. If a site is slow to load on a desktop, imagine just how slow it is going to load on a mobile, where a user may be relying on a 3G connection. Using responsive design is the ideal solution if you wish to present your visitors with the same content as your desktop site. Of course, there are then instances where you may actually want your visitor to be presented with different content. For example, there may be a particular message that you want to share with your mobile visitors, such as a voucher or
particular offer. There are two methods of doing this: either by dynamically serving different HTML and CSS on the same URLs; or by creating a separate mobile site on a different domain or a subdomain of your current site. Having a separate site on a different domain, or hosting it on a subdomain, is common practice. There are, however, additional recommendations to this method. Google advises placing annotations on both the desktop and mobile pages to alert the crawlers that there are alternative versions of the website available. A mobile sitemap is required, and it is also beneficial to include a link from the mobile site to the desktop site, and vice versa.
New algorithm update on the horizon On May 10 of this year, Matt Cutts announced the launch of a new Penguin update. The announcement has been met with trepidation from SEO experts. Will your site benefit from the algorithm update, or will you fall foul of the change? What I have noticed when analysing the backlink profiles of affiliate sites is that they can be of a low quality. Undertake some housekeeping, take a look at your backlink
profile and if you come across suspicious behaviour, such as blog roll linking and comment spam, spend time removing them as a precautionary measure. It’s better to put a little work in now than gamble with the chance of your site being affected down the road. Finally, as with traditional SEO, you should always look to incorporate social in your strategy. A third of all Facebook users access their profiles from a handset. Look to innovatively share your content across channels; share your Pinterest pins on Facebook and retweet your blogs. Social is a huge part of a successful SEO approach and will continue to be so for years to come. Staying on top of SEO could mean the difference between a good year and a great year for many gaming affiliates.
Janet Plumpton is an SEO Strategist at Latitude Digital Marketing. Janet’s SEO experience reaches across a range of sectors including gaming, retail and finance. She is also a key contributor to Latitude’s quarterly Think Works mobile report.
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INTERVIEW
Shifting the Paradigm It is no secret as to where the gambling industry is heading, writes iGaming Consultant, Rene Magri. Social and mobile have become the essential parameters to define operator sustainability, old and new. Times are changing. But how much? Rene Magri spoke to Casumo co-Founder, Razmus Svenningson, to find out. Razmus Svenningson, the coFounder of Casumo, explains to me the raison d’être of Casumo: “It is an adventure”, he says. “It is ‘new’ in the sense that you have a trajectory, a way of experiencing the Casumo World so that it leaves you with a willingness to be part of the community, and most of all, removes the aggressive side of ‘templategambling’ that common aficionados are mostly used to.” The games content is provided by NetEnt, while Casumo provides the canvas, the levels and the gamified experience. The way the user experience is crafted means that all of the more generic steps, including registration, feel like a game – basically, a layer of games to enter another layer of games where the user is accomplishing levels of a quest, an adventure, where the plan and intention is to increase engagement and tap into the playfulness associated with progress in traditional arcade/social games.
Casumo as one “We, as a cultural attitude and vision,” quips Svenningson, “are different than other iGaming Companies. We consider our product and our games to be the same: one product, one company, one brand.
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Thus, no matter where we go in terms of new products, the Casumo experience can only get better, as a single product, under a cohesive culture of ‘Adventure, Reward and Community’. “We like to challenge conventional wisdom; the status quo,” he continued. “Let’s do away with the truths that have captured the iGaming industry for a number of years. We do things differently, and that difference helps our conversion rates immensely.” At this point, I ask Razmus a very pertinent question concerning affiliates, and their role in the new social gaming landscape. As a proviso, I personally believe that the role of affiliates will change, and diminish, in the sense that those affiliates that keep
and how much it has changed, provided that the affiliates in question keep bringing value to the table. Thus, they need to adapt, build new experiences as affiliates and traffic owners/buyers. “Social has snuck up on us (in general) and some companies that were formed before it have had to adapt; others, like us, were conceived as ‘social’. In fact, we do not have a social media department per se; we are all nodes in the experience, in making things more memorable, adventurous, community-based, and unique. Casumo is, therefore, not a socialised gambling experience, but a social adventure.” He continues, “This adventure, however, will not get in the way of a VIP player that wants to go straight
“The role of affiliates will change, and diminish, in the sense that those who keep operating as they did before social (and mobile for that matter) came about, do not have a future.” operating as they did before social (and mobile for that matter) came about, do not have a future. And here we agree. However, Razmus was very keen to point out that they have a ton of respect for, and consider affiliates an essential part of the mix, no matter how varied the landscape is now,
into the games. We are very careful to deliver what the players are looking for in a way that gives them value”. Thus, despite Casumo’s user experience, if a player’s need is to go straight to games, the mode for it is there – they just turn the ‘adventure’ off.
INTERVIEW
adventures on the go? With regards to mobile (which is yet to launch at time of print), it will not be governed by any “technology-based dogma”, but rather on the “experience”. Razmus contends, “It will not replicate the whole ‘Casumo’ web experience, but rather compliment it in such a way that it makes sense, and brings value to the user on the go. On mobile, since it is inevitable, and the opportunity is immense, we have to work with a direct philosophy, an approach that assures we are using the features of the phone and the attention span of the user on the phone.”
Casumo: Quo vadis? I am intrigued by Razmus’ own personal experience and background. Despite being a creature of the industry having worked with top-end brands in our space, he has been fascinated with the wider gaming industry – the arcade industry, single-player shoot-outs and more, and the influence is visible on Casumo. Games, in their wider sense, make perfect sense in a world where entertainment is of value, beyond just the monetary side of things – by winning, but winning while having fun. Thus, the natural question becomes: “Do you see the possibility of having a Casumo Social Game?” Razmus, in his very coy tone responds, “Social Game? That would make sense. You need to know why you are doing it, and who are you doing it for. It is easy to do things just
because there is an opportunity. We need to be focused and try to do what is right. There is a huge difference between business and busyness. We are not closing any doors, however”.
it’s fun to be an ambassador... Being an ‘Ambassador’, in the Casumo world, has multiple meaning. They aim to be friendly, helpful, caring and warm, as you would expect from what is essentially ‘customer support’. However, a second and somewhat pregnant meaning of the word ambassador in this
context is that related to change. An ambassador of change is where I personally see Casumo finding its edge. As with all new things; in some way, shape or form, they will be copied – some outright, others used as inspiration. This happens with all paradigm shifts. Once it is accepted, mass adoption follows. Having said this, however, from the little time I spend getting to know Razmus, he and his team would already be working on a new paradigm as soon as that happens.
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The Divine Comedy
of Link Building Just like Dante’s medieval masterpiece, this article will guide you through a life-changing experience leading to the redemption of your SEO soul, writes BizUp COO, Matteo Monari. Like a post-modern web divinity, Google knows all and judges all, can decide on the life or death of websites and literally turn upside-down the life of webmasters at its own will. However, just as for the God of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Google’s judgements are mostly based on past conduct and ‘sins’. So, follow us in our journey from Penalisation Hell to Ranking Heaven and learn from the mistakes of the ‘sinners’ who came before you.
Google’s Penalisation Hell Some of the most aggressive link-building techniques, which have made the fortunes of many gaming webmasters in years gone by, have historically been frowned upon by Google, which has been increasingly strict about them in recent years. These kinds of links and can quickly lead your site towards ranking penalties, from which it will be very hard, if not impossible, to recover. Here are some examples:
strategy on the distribution of free website templates containing semi-hidden footer links linking back to their site. This strategy brought quick success to some, but most sites that were using this technique are now nowhere to be seen, so stay away from it.
Link networks and marketplaces In the past few months, Google has been heavily penalising networks of sites guilty of selling links more or less openly. As well as the sellers, a good amount of the buyers have also been hit hard, and are now being asked for money in order to get their links removed from the network by the same people that used to asked them for money to get their links added in the first place. If you buy links, do not buy from ‘public’ sellers: if they are well-known to webmasters, chances are they are wellknown to Google, too.
Aggressive sidebar links
Hiding links using CSS attributes – making them the same colour as the background or making them appear as standard unclickable text – is a capital sin for both the linking, and the linked-to, sites, so make sure all your links are clearly visible and identifiable as such.
Before Google started to pay (negative) attention to anchor text distribution, keyword-rich sidebar links were a good shortcut to top-ten rankings for mid-tail and long-tail keywords. This has long changed, so make sure that sites that link to you from several pages do so with your brand name or with non-aggressive anchor text – even those that decided to link to you spontaneously.
Links hidden in website templates
Links on off-topic ‘revived’ sites
In the good old days, some websites managed to base their entire link building
A common technique to quickly acquire authority sites and links was, and partially
Invisible links
still is, re-registering dropped domains with good trust factors, and turning them into gambling sites. In short, the sites that used to represent the likes of NGOs, schools and medical centres get turned into affiliate portals and gambling blogs. After some initial confusion, Google can easily detect if there is something fishy going on with the link profile of these ‘zombie’ sites, and send them and their most closely related linkedto sites straight to ‘Penalty Hell’.
Links in off-topic widgets, hidden and unhidden Just like free templates, free widgets have been (ab)used for link building purposes in the past: add a free counter to your hobby site and you will end up unknowingly linking to a site related to the not-sogenerous widget distributor through an invisible (or barely visible) link. Apart from sites with backlinks obtained thanks to counters and other tools that completely hid the ‘malicious’ out-links, in recent years, Google has also been penalising sites that have been openly sponsoring and distributing widgets that are unrelated to their core business. So, if you are a gaming site and you are planning to sponsor and distribute a widget about fashion, weather or traffic, then think again: you may be close to earning eternal damnation. As said at the beginning of this section, using one or more of the outlined techniques may cause your site, or some of its pages, to fall off Google’s first page to
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pages three or even five. If the dangerous links are focused towards a limited set of pages or keywords and are just a small fraction of your site’s backlink profile, a good clean-up followed by an honest reinclusion request may lead to your site’s redemption. However, if the links acquired via one or more of these methods constitute the vast majority or the entirety of your site’s backlink profile, recovering from the penalty may be impossible: a case of actual eternal damnation.
purgatory penguin Possibly even worse than ‘Google Hell’ is its Purgatory, a.k.a. ‘Penguin factor’. While Google’s penalisations hit sites that had reached success quickly, Google’s Penguin updates can devalue sites that acquired success gradually and, most of the time, deserved it. As a matter of fact, the types of links tackled by Google’s Penguin update are not all-out spam, but borderline cases that were common practice and not openly deprecated by Google until recently. Here are some examples:
Links in low-quality directories Ten years ago, directory submissions used to be the basic link building (and traffic building) strategy of most sites. Down the years, Google has become increasingly demanding in terms of link quality, to the point that sites that progressively acquired links from small directories in a spontaneous way risk seeing their rankings compromised by Google’s Penguin updates. A ‘clean’ link building strategy is no longer enough: if your backlinks appear on a
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significant amount of directories deemed to be low-quality by Google, you will have to spend some time in its Purgatory until you make up for your low-quality links.
Links on low-quality article directories Article directories were also very popular until a few years ago and, in some cases, are still common. Send decent, free content to these sites and they will publish it for you, granting you some low-value but possibly decent links. With Penguin, this has changed: most article directories are perceived as low-quality by Google, and can damage your image and suddenly turn you into a sinner.
Links in off-topic pages Link topicality is one of the key aspects taken into consideration by Penguin: if most of your links are in off-topic pages or on off-topic sites, you can be sure your current rankings are being negatively influenced and that you are missing out on traffic. Obtaining links on good, real sites is no longer enough to deserve a place in ‘Google Heaven’: endorsements from ontopic sites and pages, in the form of links, are also required.
Links with keyword-rich anchor texts The importance Google now applies to page and site topics used to be preserved for anchor text, to the point that until recently, the latter was the main thing competitive webmasters were concerned about. Possibly one of the main reasons for the release of
the first Penguin update, anchor text abuse is not taken lightly by Google. Whereas only slightly more than a year ago, you could push the anchor text factor until you reached tipping point and end up with just a limited penalty, things are now more serious: be even a little excessive with keywords in anchor texts and what used to be your stairway to heaven gets turned into a one-way ticket for ‘Google Purgatory’. All of the aforementioned techniques are not part of the typical black hat SEO cookbook, but are mostly just signals of a partially unnatural link profile, possibly due to SEO-driven link acquisition campaigns. This is one of the worst things about Google Penguin Purgatory: Google is not punishing you for openly breaking a clear set of rules, but for giving the impression of being ‘good’. In other words, Google Penguin hits sites that, at a certain point in their life, have most likely been cheating. The punishment for these old sins is a devaluation of the site in terms of ranking, possibly spread across most of the traffic-driving rankings. The importance given to small details by Google Penguin and the fact that the devaluation is mostly widespread make identifying the guilty links much harder than in the case of penalisations, and the clean-up necessary to redeem your soul extremely difficult. Because of this, Google has given webmasters the opportunity to automatically confess their sins and ask Google to ignore some of the links to their site: Google’s Disavow Tool. However, in the case of a widespread devaluation, hand-picking the links to keep and those to discard can
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be hard; in some cases, impossible. In this scenario, your site will essentially be condemned to an eternal status of inferiority.
ranking Heaven Considering all the sins outlined so far, deserving a place in Google’s top ten – a.k.a. Ranking Heaven – may seem like a hard, if not impossible, task. Here is a clear list of rules to follow to make sure you are walking on the righteous path.
result of an automated software, or some text-spinning algorithm. In a similar way, the search engine has made giant steps in understanding when a site or blog is ‘real’ and when it’s just a ‘support site’ or spam site, created for the sole purpose of building or exchanging links. Making use of this kind of content and sites in your link building strategy may put your site at risk and lead you to the gates of Google Hell, so make sure to always place your links in real content on real sites, created by real people.
the ten Commandments of seo 1. You shall not be lazy: do not use automated tools In order to fix most of the ‘sins’ mentioned earlier, it is necessary to manually remove the links that are most likely responsible for the eventual penalisation or devaluation of your site. As a matter of fact, Google recommends conducting a manual removal of links even when planning to use its Disavow Tool. Using automated tools to speed up the link building process (for example, to automatically create content, submit the site to hundreds of directories at once or generate fake blog comments), makes such manual link removal nearly impossible, and may deem your mistakes irrecoverable. Avoid using automated link building tools if you are not willing to take the risk.
2. You shall not lie: use real content, on real sites Google is getting better and better at understanding whether a piece of text is the genuine product of a human writer or the
3. You shall not be greedy: do not close bulk link deals When negotiating the acquisition of links with a webmaster who runs several sites, it may be tempting to acquire a whole bunch of links from different sites at once. This kind of peak in link acquisition – especially if the network you are acquiring from is already on Google’s radar – is the kind of signal Mountain View’s search engine is looking for when hunting for sites to burn in hell. Do not let your greed for links be your ruin.
4. You shall not go off-topic: only get links from related pages and sites When building links for a niche site in the gaming world, most webmasters tend to go way off-topic, being overly indulgent about the supposed correlation between the topic of the linking site and coming up with farfetched connections. To state the obvious: apart from very rare exceptions, articles about employment, education, health and finance are most likely not on-topic with
your gaming site, so don’t use links on these kinds of sites as the main ingredient of your link building strategy.
5. You shall not be egocentric: do not obsess about vanity rankings Ranking in the top ten positions for hot ‘vanity keywords’ such as poker, casino, betting or Texas Hold’em is the obsession of many webmasters. Hoping to reach their goals, most of them have been consistently using these keywords in most of their anchor texts and ended up with a penalty or with their site devalued by Google Penguin. Don’t make the same mistake: there are thousands of keywords to rank for out there, so extend your focus and don’t be afraid to vary your anchor text.
6. You shall not be selfish: also link to other sites Nothing screams ‘link building’ like an article with just one outgoing link in it. Do not be selfish and always make sure the pieces of content linking to you also link to other sites, possibly authoritative and not in direct competition with you. Your links will look more natural and you will possibly benefit from the effects of co-citation.
7. You shall not covet your neighbour’s rank: do not copy other webmasters Constantly seeing a fellow webmaster outranking you in the SERPs may lead you to replicate his link building strategy in order to steal his rankings. However, the picture you have of a competing site’s
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Figure 1: Mass link exchanges and template links: two sins that may send you straight to Google Hell.
Figure 3: an example of what 3 months in Google Hell can mean for your traffic.
Figure 4: What Google purgatory means for your site. Figure 2: a ‘revived site’ as it appeared in 2006 and as it appears now. the site is currently nowhere to be seen in Google’s rankings.
Figure 5:Google Heaven: hard to deserve but incredibly rewarding.
backlinks may be partial, or may be part of a strategy significantly different from yours (e.g. short-term vs long-term). Do not obsess over your fellow webmasters’ rankings and do not envy their link profile; Google may be about to punish them for their sins, and you do not want to be dragged to hell with them.
8. You shall not believe in miracles: do not base your success on quick tricks Sadly enough, the days of secret ‘SEO tricks’ are long gone; if they ever existed in the first place. Do not be tempted by do-itall automated link building tools, or lifechanging link offers: the only path to steady rankings in Google is a long and winding one, so stay away from the shortcuts that while promising you heaven, may lead you straight to the underworld.
9. You shall not hate your neighbour’s site: do not damage your fellow webmasters Unfortunately, in the gaming world, attempts to damage competing sites is everyday news. Ranging from negative SEO activities to DDoS attacks and hacking, these reprehensible and borderline criminal behaviours have increased together with the importance attributed by Google to the cleanliness of a link profile. Apart from being far more time consuming than promoting one site, taking down several competitor sites will very likely end up making your site the focus of the negative attention of not one, but several webmasters,
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with the subsequent risk of a ‘combined attack’ in the form of a joint spam report, or worse. In SEO, karma also plays an important role: if you cannot manage to love thy neighbour, then at least don’t try to hurt him, as this will just make you lose focus and can easily backfire on you.
10. You shall not think you can fool Google: what works today may not work tomorrow Most of the techniques potentially responsible for a site’s condemnation to Google Hell or Purgatory described earlier, used to be the secret of Google Heaven just a few years ago. Since Google is constantly improving its algorithms to identify new kinds of spam, you should not assume that what is apparently showing results today will lead you to success if you just keep pushing the same button again and again. Always keep updating your strategy and mixing your link profile: today’s successful methods could quickly become a mortal sin in the next update of Google’s webmaster bible, so you better be prepared. All of these commandments can be summed up in just two words: be natural. The only way Google can identify suspicious SEO and link-building techniques is to look for unnatural behaviours and patterns. If you make sure your site, your links and your linking sites appear as natural as possible, it will be extremely hard for search engines to discover your sins.
The best way to do so is trying to move increasingly from link building to link earning, combining traditional SEOdriven link building methods with ideas and editorial choices likely to attract spontaneous or semi-spontaneous links. Ranging from carefully researched, designed and distributed infographics and white papers to high-quality guest posts and publicity stunts, these are likely the only safe methods to progressively grant you a place in Google Heaven. So, good luck with your link-earning activities, and may Google bless you.
Matteo Monari is the COO of BizUp, a result-driven Internet marketing agency specialising in competitive segments and international link building (http://www.bizupmedia.com). With a background in Languages and Human Computer Interaction, Matteo has been a successful Internet marketing specialist for more than six years. During his career, he has worked for some of the biggest affiliates and operators in the iGaming world, helping them to successfully expand their businesses across Europe. After heading the SEO department of Europe’s leading content-on-demand company, Matteo is now leading BizUp’s link building team, providing links in five languages to clients in more than fifteen different countries. You can follow him on Twitter as @matteo_monari and contact him at m.monari@bizupmedia.com.
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Attribution Modelling Finding the Right Value By Eli Uzan, Industry Manager at Google Israel. What got you the job you always dreamed of? Was it the perfect interview you had, the suite you bought a few days earlier, that joke you told the interviewer on the way out, or was it your strong CV? If you knew the exact value of each of these elements beforehand, you would have probably improved your chance of getting the job. These elements are not equally important, the question is defining what is more and what is less. John Wanamaker, who is considered to be the father of modern advertising, is well known for his saying: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Today, more than 100 years after this was said, advertisers have more and more touch points with their potential customers, meaning that understanding what is wasted and the exact value of the rest has become a challenging task for any marketer. If we consider the campaigns of the big brands, they will usually include a media plan spread across TV, print, radio, out-of-home, digital and more. An average customer will probably be exposed to the campaign on several different channels, creating the question: what was the value of each of the different channels in the customer’s journey? This is a question marketers have been struggling with for some time. Luckily, when it comes to affiliates, most marketing efforts are carried out online, and in that arena, we’re getting closer to finding the answer to this question.
Today and tomorrow In today’s online world, most marketers assign 100 percent of the conversion value to the last click, but as is the case in
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football, the one scoring the goal didn’t do the entire job himself – the ‘last click’ isn’t all there is to it. Attribution models help us understand the value of each interaction along the customer’s journey. There are what we call ‘silent contributors’ along that journey; contributors that don’t get the proper credit although they do contribute to the final outcome. The first step is to get a better understanding of the different journeys users have before completing the desired action on your site; doing this with Google Analytics is quite simple. Examining this conversion path can also be helpful in better understanding the way each channel helps with the discovery of your services, retention, conversion and more. Recently, Google Analytics launched an attribution modeling tool. The tool allows you to assign a different weight to each interaction you have with the user prior to the conversion using different attribution models. There is no clear way to decide which attribution model works better without testing the different options. As you probably know your target audience better than anyone else, this understanding and its match to your business model will help you decide which model you should test first.
Common attribution models The Last Interaction model (last click): this model is used by default in most serving and tracking systems, including Google Analytics and Google AdWords. It actually gives the entire conversion credit to the last interaction with the user. When to use: in cases where the sales cycle is short, where there is almost
no consideration phase and when not too much research is performed by the potential customer. The First Interaction model (first click): this model attributes the entire conversion value to the first step of the user’s journey. When to use: the first interaction model is mostly useful for brands with less brand awareness; those interested in exposing their product or service at certain stages while still optimising these campaigns using the final outcome of the journey. The Linear model: in the linear model, we’re giving the same weight for every stage of the customer’s journey. When to use: in cases where every stage of the sales cycle is equally important, from awareness, to exploration until the final purchase. If you’re promoting a brand with low awareness in an industry where users tend to perform a significant amount of research, this might be a useful model to test. The Time Decay model: this model gives more credit to interaction that occurs closest to the conversion itself. When to use: when the consideration phase is short or in cases where users tend to purchase only at specific times. A good example could be a product that is sold only at the weekend. On weekdays, you would want to give a lower credit, while giving a higher credit to each interaction as the weekend is getting closer. The Position Based model: this is actually a combination of the first and last interaction models. It gives more credit to the interactions
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at the beginning and towards the end of the journey. When to use: in cases where awareness is low, but the promotion is attractive enough to hold a consideration phase without too many interactions, while still gaining significant exposure when the user is getting closer to the decision phase.
Attribution in search Google AdWords allows you to start these tests focusing mainly on search. The Search Funnels report within AdWords shows you the conversion funnel by click or impression. By doing that, you can spot the keywords that act as silent contributors and which keywords you thought were top performers, but actually need a lot of support from other keywords. If we look at the world of poker, for example, a reasonable funnel can look like this: “How to Play Poker”>>>“Free Poker”>>>“Poker Strategies”>>>“Online Poker” This starts with learning about the game, and moves to gaining some experience, learning some advanced techniques and eventually looking for the brand where they will start playing for real money.
Using a last click interaction model, we would have given the entire credit to “Online Poker” and no credit to the silent contributors we see beforehand. This creates a significant opportunity for the more sophisticated marketers in finding a more optimal bidding strategy. Keywords like “How to Play Poker” will probably be less competitive and others that tend to be towards the end of the funnel will be more competitive than they should be. Although this isn’t a real life example, this type of scenario happens across many industries. In this case, it would be interesting to test the Time Decay or the Position based models as the discovery and last interactions seem to be the important ones. Testing doesn’t end with finding the right model, as you should always continue testing the exact value you assign to each interaction.
Just a start for the attribution journey Attribution modelling is a very popular topic, but it is still a very challenging area. In certain channels like search, we already have useful tools and actionable reports that can help us move forward. A more sophisticated attribution across channels is
harder, but with the proper use of Google Analytics, the amount of insights can be surprising and extremely useful. We have to remember that the data we do see is just a sample of what’s happening in a multi-device world; the popular journeys you spot are probably even more popular in reality. The first thing to do is to start breaking down the most popular acquisition channel to the different funnels, testing the different attribution models in that channel alone for a quicker win. At a later stage, marketers will be moving to a more holistic view of their marketing efforts using all channels, and Google Analytics is a good place to start. Eli Uzan is the Industry Manager of iGaming, eCommerce, Health and Binary Options at Google Israel. Throughout his time at Google, he has been providing consultancy services to large iGaming brands in different areas of online marketing, business development and product. Before joining Google, Eli was the co-founder and COO of an Internet company. Eli holds an MBA and a BSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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UNIBET ADVERTORIAL
UNIBET OPENS FOR BUSINESS IN BELGIUM Johan Vermeulen, Affiliate Manager for Unibet Belgium, defines the consequences of the reregulation of the Belgian market for Unibet.be. ON JULY 4TH 2012, Unibet.be received its F1+ licence in Belgium, enabling one of the most significant sportsbetting operators to re-enter this reregulated market – historically significant because Unibet had been present in Belgium since the acquisition of the local operator Mr. Bookmaker in 2005. At the beginning of November of the same year, the partnership with the international Rank Group also provided the opportunity for Unibet.be to exploit its casino activities through the acquired A+ licence. The attribution of these two important licences was the final chapter in a long process of reregulation. Unibet actively participated in this process, working closely with the Belgian Gaming Commission to provide an inside view on the essential needs and demands to be implemented. With “customer protection� as a central theme, this newly-regulated market had to enable approved operators (be they single or multi-product) to create a safe environment for their customers, as well as one that was competitive towards illegal operators. It was complicated challenge that resulted in the Gaming Act of 2011 defining the possibilities and requirements of the entire sector. Not only did this regulation guarantee a safe environment for customers, it also legalised the actual individual activity of
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online gambling and betting and allowed licensed operators to open up the market. The creation of the legal framework finally made it possible for licensed operators like Unibet.be to distinguish themselves from other illegal online gambling websites, thus boosting the credibility of the entire legal industry. We have always given absolute priority to the security of our customers and the new framework created a legal foundation for that protection, making it a requirement for all operators aiming for a licence. The illegal websites have been blocked, ensuring maximum security for users of compliant operators and offering total transparency to the Gaming Commission. Furthermore, as a licensed operator, it meant we could kick-start the promotion of our brand through all channels of communication in an effort to promote our multiproduct platform. How did Unibet.be manage this kick-start and can you tell us a bit more about the results? As a multi-product platform, Unibet.be offers its customers three important product verticals: sportsbetting, casino games and poker. Considering there is stronger competition from a number of single-product casino
operators, Unibet.be consciously chose to advertise solely on the sportsbetting vertical in all above-the-line communication. By exploiting the different assets embedded in the various sponsoring contracts with, for example, Jupiler Pro League, Unibet. be succeeded in building exposure on and around the football pitches of the Belgian First Division. Furthermore, Unibet chose television for the north and south of the country as a main medium. Obviously, these high-pressure branding campaigns are supported by exposure online through some of the most renowned sports
UNIBET
From the moment Unibet was legalised in Belgium we started a partnership with our website VoetbalNieuws.be. Unibet was already known as a betting company with a wide variety of betting options for soccer fans, so that was the perfect match for the largest football site in Belgium. It’s great working with the affiliate managers who are very passionate and skilled. Together we try to optimise the partnership every day to a higher level. Michael Tanret: voetbalnieuws.be
content websites available – sporza.be and sportwereld.be, amongst others. A final and very important base of communication in this market is and will remain Unibet’s affiliate partners, who operate both locally and internationally. All of these efforts resulted in growth over two important areas. Unibet.be succeeded in achieving a 35% market share in online sportsbetting at the end of Q1. Meanwhile, the online gambling market as a whole grew substantially from 2012 to 2013. How do you see the further evolution of the market? Unibet.be will continue to invest in the Belgian market in the short-, midand long-term. Belgium remains one of the most important growing markets for Unibet as a whole and that justifies substantial marketing investments. Recently conducted market and brand studies have shown us a direct and 1 to 1 correlation between brand awareness on one hand and market share on the other. Knowing this, Unibet.be can focus more than ever on the acquisition of new customers. This acquisition is consequently driven by the strong combination of our above-the-line awareness campaigns and the activation of our affiliate partners. These campaigns will be constantly conducted throughout the year in order to establish and secure market share and growth.
Official mobile app for Royal Standard de Liège football club created and powered by Unibet
You say you are working with affiliate partners… Even though Belgium does not really have a strong history of a very active affiliate market, as opposed to Holland for example, the regulatory process does open up all possibilities. Because of market regulation our affiliate partners can promote our brand without any restrictions, and so we have not only invested heavily in building the right platform but we have also freed up extra resources to be able to handle and manage the questions and traffic coming from our partners. We at Unibet Affiliates listen carefully to what our partners want, support their initiatives and help them to put them into practice. Mobile as an acquisition channel has been and still remains a major challenge for many affiliates. In order to cater for our customers’ and partners’ needs, Unibet has developed a stable and dependable mobile solution which integrates Registration, Authentication and
Analytics, along with customer information and presentation of the core product lobby. Unibet mobile now means multi-channel (tablet + Phone + Apps), multi-brand (Maria and Unibet), multi-product (sports book, casino, bingo, slots, card games, and much, much more), as well as offering extensive flexibility for multi-jurisdiction, regulated markets (Belgium, Denmark, Australia, etc). Affiliates no longer need to use separate links for desktop, tablets and mobile. Our system recognises the channel and the market (country) where the customer comes from and redirects to the relevant landing area. In March this year we also completed the development of the Unibet API, which proves affiliates with full access to the Unibet feeds, giving partners all the necessary information about prematch and live events and allowing them to create pre-populated and remote bet slips. Please come and meet the Unibet affiliate team at stand F10 at the Amsterdam Affiliate Conference.
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INSIGHT
Dealing With Google Challenges
AdWords Enhanced Campaigns It seems that Google loves creating challenges for its advertisers, be it paid search or conversion tracking or any of the animal and other-named algorithm changes made in the cause of improving the user experience. In the coming months, there are a number of changes in the pipeline beyond those outlined by Matt Cutts,1 Enhanced Campaigns in AdWords being the biggest. Changes to AdWords on July 22 will make Enhanced Campaigns mandated for all. This article will look at what this means and how to get the most out of it. Enhanced AdWords As of July 22, 2013, all AdWords accounts will have their previously separated campaigns for mobile devices rolled in with their desktop campaigns. As Google explains it: “People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study2 of multi-device consumers found that 90 percent move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices – PCs, laptops, tablets, Smartphones, hybrid devices, minitablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviours on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar… “With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.”
Because mobile searchers have different intents than desktop computer searchers, this will enable you to use the same campaigns but value their CPC differently based on your own conversion tracking. To this end, Google now uses percentage bid options to fluctuate bids for the same keyword based on devices, locations, time of day and more. Google provides a series of webinars that explains much of the processes but requires an AdWords account to access it. If you were wondering how Google will choose what campaign it picks, it will be to its financial gain, or as the company puts it, “For each match, we’ll identify a primary and secondary campaign. The primary campaign will set the main preferences for the resulting merged campaign, and will incorporate some of the settings from the secondary campaign. In most cases, the primary campaign is the one targeting desktops, laptops, and tablets, and the one into which the secondary campaigns (those at targets mobile devices) will be merged.” Things to note to improve enhanced results: 1. Use conversion optimiser: it has evolved into a really smart algorithm and takes into account a variety of factors like time, day of week, browser type, and so on and then looks at those factors on an individual basis and adjusts its bids 1
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automatically. Not being able to break out mobile and tablet from desktop like you used to, with all three devices running at the same time and conversion optimiser is in place, after awhile, Google will just optimise the expensive devices out of the equation. 2. Create baseline bids: initially, bids now come back to the keyword and the manipulations act against the baseline bid, so choose the amounts well; everything is up and down from there. It is easier to set numbers based on your previous bidding history and the knowledge that modifiers can be used to increase up to 300 percent or decrease by 90 percent. 3. Modifiers rule: all the multipliers work in conjunction with one another. Consider device, time of day and location as filters to your targeting. If somebody shows certain characteristics then you can filter to bid more (or less) aggressively. Let your bid multipliers overlap. A user who matches your keyword and is nearby at the right time of day can be targeted easily. That approach works well for retailers with physical locations, but a small percentage of AdWords advertisers fit that description. So, you need to go through what can be manipulated and make decisions. Every time slice you add, every location you include – they will all report back detailed statistics including conversion rates. The
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/ 2 http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf 3 http://vshow.on24.com/vshow/learnwebinars#exhibits/ec
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higher your conversion rate, the more you can afford in the auction, and the more traffic you can get from matching users. 4. Sitelink extensions: with the introduction of ‘Enhanced’ comes more availability of sitelink extensions and the ability to manipulate when and to which device certain links are shown. This is great for including phone numbers during business hours or to push certain visitors to different pages. 5. Scheduling ad extensions: ad extensions can now be scheduled. You can turn off your call extensions when your phone lines close. You can change your sitelinks if your sale ends at X time. I’ll leave the other use cases to your imagination. 6. Be imaginative: if you are offering mortgages, watch for the locations and then drill to smaller areas to find the best areas within larger DMAs – whatever you offer, may find areas that convert better and can be done on a country level. 7. Ads convert differently: you can use the ability to set different ads for different devices, or time may be an element – you can set when a sale ends and begins; or, say, you are doing ads for a restaurant – breakfast, lunch and dinner specials can be timed. Again, imagination is needed. 8. Grab what you can now: look through all of your campaigns; the keywords that you have paused for mobile or desktop should be noted and set to zero or -90 percent where applicable. Similarly, the good converters for each should also be recognised and bids set appropriately. 9. Use Google call forwarding: when you choose to use this feature, Google will
assign and display a unique forwarding number with your ads on both mobile and desktop devices. This number is automatically generated for each ad group. Whenever a customer calls this number, the call will be rerouted to your business phone number. In ads on high-end mobile phones with full browsers, users can click to dial the number. By varying where the numbers are used, you can improve conversion tracking and improve effective bidding. This feature is only available in the US, UK and Germany at the moment. 10. ‘ValueTrack’ parameters: go beyond the Dynamic Keyword Insert and play with the ifmobile/ifnotmobile option. The {ifmobile:[text here]} construct is used to insert text into an ad or URL for mobile visitors only. The {ifnotmobile:[sometexthere]} construct is used to target desktops and tablets in Enhanced Campaigns.
How this may apply to gaming There are a number of ways the Enhanced Campaigns can be used to the benefit of the gaming industry: ●●Setting separate ads for mobile and non-mobile devices can help with determining the landing pages – platforms can be pushed for apps or downloads. ●●Locations can be used to point to your better converting programs by location. ●●Location can also be used to ensure any regulations are met for specific countries. ●●Localising ad copy can be done dynamically. ●●The setting of bonuses based on time frames for various programs can be set
to start and stop appropriately. sitelinks at the ad group level opens up opportunities to test; while the power is mainly for location-based advertising, I am sure the more creative advertisers will soon find others ways to take advantage of this one. ●●Remember: display can still be separated out, so try and make use of this. ●●Allowing
The changes are coming and there is no way to avoid them. So, start reading more and perhaps start a small account separate of your others and turn on Enhanced before the others. This will give you the experience you will need when making the necessary set-up changes in your bigger account when July 22 rolls around.
Frank Watson is CEO of Kangamurra Media and has been involved with the web since it started. For five years, he headed SEM for FXCM, which was once one of the top 25 spenders with AdWords. He’s worked with most of the major analytics companies and pioneered the ability to tie online marketing with offline conversion. He has now started his own marketing agency, Kangamurra Media. This new venture will keep him busy when he’s not editing the Search Engine Watch forums, blogging at a number of authoritative sites, or developing some online community sites. Frank was one of the first 100 AdWords professionals, as well as a Yahoo! and Overture ambassador. He is on the Click Quality Council and has worked to diminish click fraud.
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The Socially Awkward Sportsbook iGaming Consultant, Aideen Shortt, examines the revenue generating potential of social P2P betting. Social gaming is all the rage, from the 570 years’ worth of Angry Birds that is played daily, on mobile devices alone, to the pervasiveness of Zynga Poker online. The sector is the latest darling of the gambling industry with companies around the world tripping over themselves to get a part of the action, and with analysts such as Morgan Stanley projecting that the $1.7 billion social gaming market value today will grow to $2.5 billion by 2015, it’s hardly surprising. To date, gaming products, specifically bingo, poker and slots, have been the focus of attention from industry participants, while sportsbetting has largely been ignored by the larger companies. Despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter are natural homes to sports banter and are the second-screen destinations of choice during games and events, there is a legitimate question as to the extent of the real revenue generating opportunities of social P2P betting, rather than social gaming. Several new start-ups are each attempting to carve out a niche for themselves in social betting, but right now, it appears that each is pulling in their own direction and trying to find and fill a gap that may or may not exist at all. There are definitely lessons to be learnt from the past when it comes to social betting. In 2000, backed by millions of VC dollars at the height of the dotcom boom, an ambitious start-up called Flutter.com was launched, aimed at the social betting audience; this was before we even knew what a social betting audience was, given that Facebook was four years away and Twitter wasn’t even an idea. Flutter.com intended to capture the mass market – the small stakes P2P betting market – and it was the first company to make any sort impact. But its real legacy was not the development of the P2P market, but the creation of Betfair
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(who acquired the company in its second year). Flutter’s “bet against your mates” proposition was not embraced by the mass market but, instead, the long-term opportunity was found to be in the pricing. It was all about the over-round, or more specifically, the lack of over-round that an individual punter laying a bet had versus a traditional bookmaker who had a margin to make. And so began the entire concept of ‘better odds’ that remains the bastion of Betfair’s market positioning today. While it can be argued that Flutter was simply ahead of its time, in that it needed the existence of social networks to succeed, this is not entirely the case. Facebook has definitely changed the landscape, in that opinions and chit-chat are now easily capable of being spread across a far wider global spectrum. However, consumer behaviour in terms of people betting against their friends has not evolved since Flutter’s time. “Want to bet on it?” is still something people say with their mouths, not their fingers. The founder of BuddyBet, one of the new entrants, has been vociferous in the industry press, declaring war on the ‘outdated’ bookie model. It’s a massively naïve and over-reaching claim, however, it is reminiscent of the Betfair founders having walked a coffin through the City of London to launch its site, sounding the death knell for traditional bookmakers. Well, it didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now, and the reason is that no amount of hyperbole and wishful thinking will change consumer behaviour to the degree needed. The business model behind social gaming succeeds because consumers are willing to pay for the entertainment they get while consuming a product online, whereas the ‘entertainment’ of betting takes place offline. In the same vein, there
are no ‘level ups’ or ‘bonus rounds’ to be paid for in sportsbetting and, as of yet, no company has uncovered a natural role for virtual goods (trophies, accolades, etc) in this sector. Finally when it comes to betting for cash against other people, the exchange model works because the concept is built on price and backing/laying, not on betting against peers. Friends who bet with friends do not pay a third-party a commission to do so, and even then the vast majority of social bets are impulse-driven and immediate; for example, a fourball playing a round of golf will bet at each hole, not via a free-form bet slip available online, and bets made on actual sports events are done so in person, as is the back-slapping and taunting. And don’t get me started on the argument that people will use social betting sites to arrange forfeit bets with their mates. “The loser wears a dress to the pub” is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in real life, it’s the domain of movies, stag weekends and Halloween. And even then, the deal is sealed over a pint, not the Internet. The key to unlock the profits of the social betting sector, and there is a key, lies in focussing on current social behaviour itself and looking at revenue generation opportunities from that perspective without any need for change. This is why companies such as BETFUZE – which isn’t a social betting site but is socialising betting by overlaying networks, features and hooks on traditional betting – may succeed and, ultimately, why the real winners will be the traditional bookmakers who will benefit from the education and recruitment of new audiences via the social betting and social sports sites (which may be why they’re not addressing this space in any great hurry). They don’t have to do it. Someone else will.
INSIGHT
Optimising the Mobile Channel as an Affiliate
Daphna Silberman, Director of Business Development at Spiral Solutions, pinpoints the three must-have components for an effective affiliate mobile strategy.
The growth of the mobile gaming industry in recent years is absolutely staggering. Much of this growth can be attributed to the increasing availability of advanced Smartphones and tablets, the popularity of mobile apps, and the increasing trend of shopping online, surfing the web and interacting with social media using a mobile device. With online casino operators reporting that more than 50 percent of players are arriving via mobile, and more than 75 percent of emails are being read on mobile devices, it is more critical than ever for the online gaming affiliate to have the right strategy to optimise the mobile channel. Here, I will detail the top three must-haves for the mobile casino affiliate.
2. A website with responsive design
1. A flexible brand
To get players from point A (the device they’re using) to point B (the casino you’re promoting), it is important to have the right tools. For example, the casino should have the means to recognise whether the player is using a tablet, a Smartphone, or PC, and redirect them to the optimal platform for the best gaming experience. Another essential tool is a mini-Smartphone site, which allows an affiliate to automatically redirect mobile visitors to an optimised mobile site for his device. An additional feature of the mini-Smartphone site is the multilanguage capability for supported countries, which detects the language in the visitor’s country and presents the appropriate language. The affiliate simply takes the code from the site and inserts it into the header of their site. QR (Quick Response) Codes are another useful tool to put on a PC site, to allow users to quickly and easily reach the casino directly on their mobile device. iFrames, as well, are a great addition to any website, and allow players to receive an email or text message with a direct link to the mobile casino.
A mobile casino does not exist in a bubble. The best type of casino to promote is one that offers multiple platforms designed to support various mobile devices, including Apple and Android systems, as well as software for PC. This allows players to be more flexible with their gaming, and increases crossmarketing opportunities, which generates higher revenue for the casino and, in turn, for the affiliate. The BrightShare Affiliate Program, for example, represents three leading Microgaming casinos, each with downloadable casino software for PC, a Flash-based Instant Play casino available through the casino’s website, and a variety of mobile platforms. All three casinos feature the highly successful HTML5 mobile casino which features HD graphics, and supports the widest range of mobile devices. This flexibility allows players to extend their gaming across the various platforms, and facilitates the conversion process by providing the player with the ideal platform for whatever device they’re using.
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Responsive design is about killing several birds with one stone by designing a website to dynamically adapt the content and layout on the screen on which it is viewed, whether PC, tablet, mini-tablet or Smartphone. Responsive design is not just about screen size, it is about site performance; how the site operates in terms of tapping versus clicking, and how the messages are prioritised to ensure that the most important messages are always visible. Making your website responsive and operating with casinos that offer responsive design websites are a fundamental part of any successful mobile strategy.
3. The right tools for marketing to mobile
Location, location, location As they say in Real Estate, the three most important things are location, location, location. The same applies to mobile casino marketing. Some operators are available on the App Store in regulated markets such as the UK, and offer the ability to track affiliate traffic reaching the App Store. This allows players to install the casino app directly to their devices from the same reliable and trustworthy source as they use for all their other mobile apps, and with this unique arrangement, the affiliate will still reap the benefits. There is no doubt that we will continue to see mobile traffic increase as more and more devices hit the streets. Even today, more tablets are being sold than PCs – and this trend is visible in many countries worldwide. While play on PC previously dominated the online casino market, this balance has shifted towards mobile and lifetime values of mobile players are continuing to rise. Online casino affiliates who wish to benefit from this growth would do well to promote flexible casinos that support multiple platforms for both mobile and PC, to ensure that all their websites feature responsive design, and to work with an affiliate program that offers proven strategies and targeted marketing tools for mobile traffic. Daphna Silberman is Director of Business Development at Spiral Solutions. Daphna has been with Spiral Solutions for more than a decade serving in several roles including Director of Acquisitions, Mobile Marketing Manager, Head of Media and Brightshare Affiliate Program Manager serving All Slots Casino, which gives her a well-rounded and deep understanding of the iGaming world. As part of her current role, and due to her vast knowledge in the mobile casino space, Daphna also specialises in providing assistance and guidance to affiliate partners on how to serve the emerging mobile market.
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Creating Brand ‘Me’
How Affiliates Become their own Brands Brands come in all shapes and sizes. Most people think of brands as things such as Coca-Cola, Innocent, Facebook, Volvo, etc. Everyone and every website can also be a brand, but to build a website as a brand takes more than a unique name and a few links. A brand is defined by Wikipedia as “The name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s product distinct from those of other sellers”. Being unique could therefore make you a brand, but not necessarily a valuable one. In order to be successful as an affiliate, you need to create a memorable, unique, valuable brand. In the past, affiliates were tarred with the brush of the ‘spammy’ few who simply scraped content and blasted it across a network adding affiliate links (or cookie stuffing, etc). The ideal affiliate site created unique content, adding a few relevant links pointing to something that enhanced someone’s life, and had a distinct, unique voice and style that differentiated it from everything else. The truth has always lain between the two – most affiliate sites have some quality content, some affiliate links to help readers but not all content is unique or high quality. Becoming a brand is both easy and complex (isn’t everything?). Defining your niche, finding your voice and researching your vertical are straightforward. Building your audience, creating value-added content, becoming a unique, trusted voice in your vertical, increasing your visibility on relevant keywords, increasing readership and becoming a resource is not easy, but it is achievable.
Defining your niche One of the keys to creating and maintaining an online brand is identifying and defining your niche. While being all things to all people may seem attractive, in the history of brands, very few, if any, have taken this tack. Even Argos has a specific focus. Brands identify their niche and stick to it. Within gambling, the sub-niches of poker, bingo and others are specialist niches. Writing the same old tired poker tips is not,
however, a differentiating factor. Having a widget that chooses a ‘hand of the day’ from a famous player/game could be something that distinguishes your site from others. Running a research experiment into the frequency of certain numbered balls at a bingo hall, or similar, could make you a resource that is referred to before people go out to that hall. There are ways to be unique – it just takes time to find them. (Please note – these ideas are not necessarily unique or legal – please check before undertaking any work in this vertical.)
Mentions Once that uniqueness within your niche is found and you’ve built your site up, reaching out beyond your site/echo chamber is key. Remember: building a brand is not about getting links, it is about getting mentions (and maybe no link) on sites in content relating to your niche. A bingo blogger or forum user mentioning how they always look at your ball selection frequency chart before leaving or logging on will help increase the relevancy of your brand even without a link. Mentions of a brand online help the algorithm perceive it as a brand – no link required. While this seems to fly in the face of SEO, most experienced SEOs will concede that for branding, a mention is still valuable. Your unique voice and unique content needs a unique look on your unique site. Having a WordPress site with a basic template hardly screams ‘brand’, so finding an inexpensive graphic designer who will work with you to craft a look and feel for your blog with a corresponding logo will help encourage people to view your site as a unique and distinct ‘brand’. The more people who perceive it as a brand, the more it is likely to get a mention with or without a link. The more distinct it is, the more memorable it is, and the easier it will be to
work with other brands and the more likely it will become a valuable earning site for you.
Links While brand-only mentions are important, links are still needed to rank. In order to become a brand, the unique content you and your team of experts are crafting for your niche (exclusive Texas Hold’em mud wrestling finals live coverage, for example) needs to be found, and that happens through being found in search engines on the whole (but not exclusively) which comes as the result of having good links. Links both direct people to your site from other sites and help your ranking. When initially building a brand, focus on brand name or URL links only. Don’t try and rank for ‘poker tips’ or ‘online bingo’ straight away, the focus has to be on simply building authority. That isn’t to say you should not optimise, only that the early focus in link building to create a brand needs to be on the name of your site and not an exact match non-brand keyword for ranking. I might go as low as five to ten percent of links being non-brand when first building links. With so many spam sites trying to worm their way into the search results without any intention of adding value, affiliates who stand out with quality content (not syndicated, re-hashed content) will increase their value and their income. Becoming a valuable brand within your niche may take time, but the rewards are worth it. Judith Lewis is a search and social media consultant working in an agency on large brands. She has been doing this stuff since late 1996 but has been online since 1985, almost non-stop. You can read more about her at http://www.decabbit. com and see her speak at conferences if you’re really keen.
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The Netherlands
The Next Regulated EU Territory? Historically, Holland has been a liberal country for many things, but iGaming is currently strictly prohibited; something that is set to change should the present government get its way. With an estimated 700,000 online players, Holland is the 17th largest iGaming jurisdiction in the EU by market volume (H2 Gambling Capital) with GGR estimates, depending on taxation, that vary between €130 million and €250 million. Willem van Oort and Jasper Hoekert tale a look at various aspects of the landscape for iGaming in Holland, and its ability to be Europe’s next major regulated market. Ecommerce Holland is a mature ecommerce market, with high Internet penetration and decent online payment penetration thanks to the eWallet owned by the Dutch banks (iDeal) and the fact that Dutch people have historically proven to be quick adopters of new technology and are open to innovation. Dutch Internet users also have a high visit frequency (comScore) – all basic ingredients for a healthy ecommerce market.
The present market The size of the present market is €2.3 billion, with nine percent coming from ‘.com’ Internet gambling. This is low in comparison to other jurisdictions where online represents 12.5 percent (EU average) of the total GGR. It seems there is room for growth here in the Netherlands under a regulated market framework.
By product segment Betting In a regulated market, betting will be the leading product (31 percent estimated product market share). With the Dutch being fanatical about their soccer, as always, betting is still a growing segment – remember from your trips to Amsterdam that there are no betting shops on the high street. With Unibet and bwin leading the pack in Holland, the Dutch will catch up quickly. Perhaps we will see a sponsored shirt in the Eredivisie soon?
players will claim their piece of the market. With a handful of strong local brands competing with international brands, this will be a competitive market from day one of the regulation.
Poker The Dutch have been part of the poker boom during the last eight years. Poker shows on TV (including the phenomenal Poker Champ of Holland TV series) have established the market very quickly, and online poker is expected to take 12 percent of the GGR in Holland. Looking at the Danish model, Holland would need international liquidity as a ringfenced model would not be sustainable.
Bingo/other games This segment, with an estimated 12 percent seems small, but considering that bingo does not enjoy a great history in Holland, it will be an interesting sector to follow over the next two years.
Lottery Online lottery is expected to claim 23 percent of the market, by the holders of the present licences Staatsloterij, De Lotto and Postcode Lottery.
Impact Having reviewed the product categories, it is important to explore what other impacts the regulation of iGaming will have on the Dutch market. The following are what we believe will be some of the key points.
Online casino games Online casino games will be second. Representing 22 percent of the online market, this seems a strong sector. Assuming all casino games will be regulated (unlike Spain, where slots aren’t yet regulated), local and international
Media and marketing Similar to most other markets, the Dutch media landscape is rapidly changing; changes in technology, consumer behaviour, the continuous growth of trust in e-commerce and mobile/online
payments and economic changes all drive disruptive innovation which again drives change in media consumption, and of course, brings advertising opportunities. The average Dutch media consumption is 6.9 hours per day, with the biggest shares being for TV and Internet, with single people consuming the most media on a daily basis. More than 25 percent of all media consumption is performed while multitasking (TV, mobile, etc), and a continuous growth of multi-screen usage is expected for years to come. When looking at the frequency with which people use different media types, we see 90 percent of Dutch people using the Internet more than once a day, with only 50 percent watching TV more than once a day. Whilst total media spend for the Dutch market is decreasing slightly (down seven percent), online ad spend is still increasing (15 percent YoY). This growth is mainly fuelled by an increase in search spend. Online ad spend surpassed TV ad spend and is estimated to reach 1.15 billion in 20121 . Confidence in the Internet and mobile as marketplaces is very high and together with France, the Dutch market has the highest number of people using Internet/mobile for banking, share trading, insurance, business and shopping.
Digital marketing Unlike most other mediums, digital advertising experienced growth of 8.4 percent in 2012 in the Dutch market. The digital landscape is pushed forward by new technologies and changes in consumer behaviour, a trend we see growing stronger in the years to come. Looking at the digital landscape, according to figures released in the Deloitte/IAB report into online ad spend 1
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IAB Deloitte Report online Ad spend H1 2012
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for H1 2012, we see that the bulk of ad spend consists of search (54 percent), display (21 percent) and classifieds (17 percent), while affiliate marketing grew to a value of €131 million, an increase of 3.3 percent from 2012. Digital and technological innovations also bring an immense range of opportunities for companies looking at the Dutch iGaming market. Some of these innovations are seen both in iGaming as well as in advertising; the transition to live betting and real-time media is an innovation that has changed both advertising as well as the iGaming industry. With the immense growth of social and mobile advertising, the massive opportunities driven by RTB (such as the implementation of external data sources, the quality of reach and frequency at relatively low cost), the maturity of the local affiliate industry and the new display formats, we see digital The Netherlands Issues Remote Gaming Act May saw the release of the Dutch Remote Gambling Act which stipulates under which conditions online gambling will be permitted in the Netherlands. The Act amends the current Betting and Gaming Act (Wet op de Kansspelen: ‘WoK’). The consultation procedure ends on July 21, 2013. Remote Gambling Act The Remote Gambling Act aims to perform the following tasks: • regulate remote gambling (online games of chance); • create a central register for the exclusion of games of chance; • expand the enforcement instruments of the Games of Chance Authority; • adapt the tax arrangements, including a differentiation of the tax on games of chance. For parties who wish to apply for a licence to offer online games of chance targeted at players within the Netherlands, the following components from the proposed Remote Gambling Act are relevant: • The applicant should have its (a) principal establishment in the European Union, or (b) in a state appointed by the Minister of Justice as guaranteeing an adequate level of protection of the interests that the WoK aims to serve; • The applicant should have an ‘appropriate’ legal status: an equivalent of the Dutch private limited company; • A central register for the exclusion of participants to games of chance will be created. The licence holder that may
advertising playing a huge role for anybody that wishes to enter the Dutch iGaming market and be successful.
Sports marketing Dutch people love their sports; football, hockey, cycling, swimming, golf and tennis being the most popular. By far and away the biggest sport in the Netherlands is football. The most popular football clubs are Ajax, which has the greatest number of supporters, followed by Feyenoord, PSV Eindhoven and FC Twente. Statistics show that over 7.2 million people attended a football match in the 2011/2012 season (KNVB), and on average, 86.05 percent of the tickets are sold during an Eredivisie match. Similar to developments we see in the media landscape, we also expect to see big changes in the sports marketing environment. One of the main changes is that Fox has acquired a 51 percent stake in the Dutch football rights holder, Eredivisie offer remote gambling cannot allow the participation of an individual that has no subscription with the license holder, firstly. Further, the license holder cannot allow persons (a) under 18, or (b) that have an entry in the central registry for the exclusion of games of chance, (c) that have indicated (at their own initiative) that they have overstepped the borders of their gambling behaviour. • The tax on games of chance will be differentiated: 29% for land-based providers, 20% for remote providers; • There will be a levy for exploitation of the licence that will be published by Ministerial Decree; • A contribution to charitable organisations may become obligatory; this will also be stipulated by Ministerial Decree; • All other regulations on restrictions, provisions, duration and assignability of the remote gambling licenses will be stipulated in a (forthcoming) governmental decree. Internet consultation procedure From now until July 21, 2013, all stakeholders are invited to post their comments on the proposal. The aim and purpose of the Internet consultation is to get a clear sight of the enforceability, of best practices, of room for improvement and of other interests that may be affected. Following the consultation, feedback will be taken into consideration and may also lead to adjustments in either the proposal itself or the Explanatory Memorandum (Memorie van Toelichting). Information on the new Remote Gambling Act provided by DLA Piper: blog.dlapiper.com.
Media & Marketing CV, for a fee reported to be €1 billion, and will launch a new channel offering Dutch football, TV series and movies as a free-to-air broadcaster. Other expected changes are forecasted to be with regards to media usage, technological innovation and the individualisation of marketing in general. The Dutch sponsorship market saw a decline of three percent in 2012, falling from €840 million in 2011 to €815 million in 2012. The main reasons for this decline are firstly, that some of the big sponsors, such as Rabobank, Aegon and DSM, have stopped and/or changed their activity and secondly, the impact of the harsh economic climate. With the potential change in legislation, the Dutch market also expects to see a huge change in sports marketing. Providers that enter the market as soon as it’s legalised will be looking for visibility on (official) websites, team/player shirts, grass signage, advertising hoardings, scoreboards, branded content integration in (live) TV shows, TV/radio commercials during sporting events, co-host and/or licence games, print advertisements in sportrelated magazines, and more besides. We also expect to see celebrity endorsements similar to that in other countries where the market has been regulated for some time. With the Dutch sports marketing environment already proven to be extremely active and dynamic, we are all looking forward to the changes in legislation and, perhaps, seeing the first iGaming business becoming the main sponsor of a Dutch Eredivisie club. All data in this article is courtesy of H2 Gambling Capital and IAB/ Deloitte. Willem van Oort is eGaming Consultant for the Dutch and Spanish market at GranVia, and founder of the Gaming in Holland Group on LinkedIn – key resource to the Dutch market with 700+ members. http://linkd.in/gaminginholland. The themes in this article will be discussed at the Gaming in Holland Conference on June 11 in Amsterdam. This conference is co-hosted with the iGaming Super Show. www.GamingInHollandConference.com. Jasper Hoekert is eGaming Marketing specialist, and Managing Director of REVENUE ENGINEERS.
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Localised Search The Netherlands
With the floodgates teasing their way open over the next couple of years, we take a look at the online marketing and SEO opportunities that lie in the Netherlands and what you as affiliates need to prepare for. By Jonathan Murphy, Account Director at OBAN Multilingual. The first thing to note with the Netherlands’ online landscape is that the small size of the country relative to its neighbours has no real bearing on what’s happening in the Internet world. Well, OK, there are around half the online users found in Spain, a third of the users in France and about a quarter of the users of Germany, but compare that to total population and landmass and it’s clear to see that the Netherlands is punching well above its weight in Internet usership. In fact, at 92.6 percent, the Netherlands is second only to Norway and Monaco in Internet penetration in Europe and also has the highest frequency of Internet usership of any country worldwide. It is a rife online market with a huge buzz of activity.
Sophisticated behaviour The effects of this are clear to see in the highly sophisticated online behaviour. For example, in 2011, nearly 80 percent of Internet users in the Netherlands purchased goods online. Indeed, one in five of these users purchased from non-local sites, which shows a great opportunity for non-local brands to enter this market and convert well. This behaviour is seen in other highly sophisticated online markets such as Scandinavia, where there is a lack of strong local brands and sites leading to a lot of purchasing on sites outside of the country itself (anyone who’s marketed an ecommerce site in this region before will know how fruitful it can be). So, in terms of acceptance there is a great opportunity for businesses to enter the online Dutch market, no matter where you are based, and convert well from search opportunities.
Stay local However, a common misconception with search marketing in the Netherlands is that
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because the Dutch speak English well, that English sites ‘will do’ and, like marketing to Scandinavia, you don’t always need to localise. In more cases than not, this is wrong for the Netherlands. The online market, as mentioned, is rife and there are over five million registered ‘.nl’ ccTLDs. By way of comparison, in Russia, where there are over four times the amount of Internet users, there are four million ‘.ru’ ccTLDs; in Spain, where there are twice the amount of Internet users, there are only 1.6 million ‘.es’ ccTLDs. Dutch users are accustomed to seeing high quality content in their own language, and in a competitive business area and in a very competitive online market, to do well you really do need to localise. Top tip: in comparison to other smaller population markets, the volume of the local ccTLD (.nl) in the Netherlands is significantly higher. This means that for link building, you can’t get away with relying heavily on ‘.fr’ and ‘.de’ links to rank well. You need to cover the best local opportunity first (which will eventually run out after one to two years of activity depending on intensity), and then you can expand.
Social In terms of local content and sites, an important area to comment on, if social is part of your SEO strategy, is that social media usage is also high in the Netherlands and there is a diversity of platforms available. Twitter and LinkedIn experience their highest penetration rates worldwide in the Netherlands, so this presents a massive opportunity. Amazingly, one in four people in the Netherlands have a LinkedIn account (perhaps more interesting to those targeting a B2B audience). Last year, LinkedIn rolled out advertising in local language so, as per
the previous point, getting local language ads created for this is advised. There is also a major online social media platform called Hyves (www.hyves.nl), which was only overtaken by Facebook in terms of numbers of users in late 2011 as the leading social site, and still has a significant audience base. Its features are very similar to that of Facebook, with good advertising opportunities for banners, branded networks and brand profiles for companies to engage. Again, assuming you’re entering a competitive space in the Netherlands, this is a great way to get an edge both for your SEO and social strategies.
Serious opportunity Overall, the Netherlands holds a serious online opportunity for brands to engage and convert online, but it is extremely competitive and you need to bring enough bang to the market to make your buck. A high amount of pre-launch research is advised here in terms of investigating the search landscape around your targeted opportunity and analysing keyword difficulties, competitor sites and linking opportunities to make sure you’ve a viable route-in that will allow you to rank at the right cost to make enough money back. Certainly, you’ll probably find that a local ccTLD and lots of local content is fairly paramount when weighing yourself up against the competition. Finally, get yourself a good local link building team specifically for this market. This may sound obvious, but you need every edge here and, in our experience, hiring knowledge through local journalists and gaming professionals is important for gaining that edge. Veel success!
INSIGHT
Matters of Influence Affiliate Coach, John Wright, explores the main factors that are influencing the SEO strategies of today’s webmasters and affiliates. In the past year or two, there have been many people writing articles that seem to revolve around a specific theme: is SEO dead? – as if the SEO game has changed so completely that it is no longer possible to trick Google into getting your way with ranking a site (mainly) through link building. Well, you shouldn’t be thinking that you can trick the search engines but, for the large part, gone are the days of launching a new site, loading basic content, blasting it with links and sitting back to watch the search traffic coming in. Those days may still exist in certain quarters, but the job of an SEO consultant has certainly been in a state of constant change. So, if you can’t fix a few on-page issues for SEO and build links to rank, then SEO must be dead, right? Well, not exactly. Today, there are simply more factors that need to be taken into consideration to implement any SEO, or perhaps more accurately, marketing strategy. With Google the leader of search engines, it is, in theory, trying to encourage webmasters to be natural with their marketing efforts relating to search and wants you to focus on what is best for the user. That said, there are many factors that contribute towards any marketing and SEO campaign. These factors may not previously have been associated with search engine optimisation but are now very relevant. There are a lot of dated guides out there on what you need to do to get your website to rank and, unfortunately, there are too many webmasters that believe you need to just
buy high PR links to achieve your results. So what are the factors that contribute to your SEO efforts? These factors include: ●●●Natural link building ●●●Social media marketing ●●●Mobile optimisation ●●●Content strategies ●●●Rich snippets ●●●Conversion rate optimisation
Natural link building Anytime I perform SEO work for someone, one of the first things I do is check their current link profile. Out of all the clients I work with, less than ten percent would have what I call a natural link profile. Perhaps 20 percent of the time, the client doesn’t have many links at all, sometimes none, while about 70 percent of the time, I find their link building efforts to be unnatural and has either already cost their site a penalty or is making it much easier for them to get one. Here are a collection of areas that I’d consider to constitute unnatural link building: ●●●Little-to-no social media links ●●●Over 80 percent of links are rel=”follow” and hardly any nofollow links ●●●Over 50 percent of links feature anchor text ●●●Anchor text, when overused, features the same keyword with no variation ●●●The majority of links have nothing in common with their topic ●●●There are many links coming from sites with different languages
The problem is that in 2011, and earlier, this type of unnatural link building would probably have worked perfectly for ranking a website, which meant that the ranking game became one of who had the best resources for link building, or who had the largest budget to buy links. I have to admit that as of May 2013, I still see this tactic work with an SEO agency that does this to rank extremely high for ‘Their city SEO’ and, sure enough, they charge clients money to rank for keywords. How do they do it? They buy low-cost, high PR links that have nothing to do with the webmaster’s topic, and focus primarily on anchor text. As long as they can do this to rank they will continue to get business, but I have seen one of their sites banned and they repeat the process to get another one up. Unfortunately for their clients, they will see a short-term gain in rankings followed by a crash. So what is considered natural link building? You always need links to rank, so think of links as votes; but links can also be a source of traffic, as well. If you focus on trying to get more traffic this way, it implies that links would come from a relevant source that has something in common with your website. Using a restaurant site as an example, there are plenty of quality and relevant link sources that can be obtained, such as the sites of local newspapers and magazines, local bloggers, local restaurant guides and local business directories. Of course, anyone that writes about that city in particular could, in theory, write about
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that restaurant. A restaurant is a business that would have enough in common with social media that people would expect to see comments and discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.
Social media marketing You shouldn’t fully rely on search engines for most of your traffic and this is where social media can be a good source: however, it is being acknowledged as a factor for SEO.1 If websites are going to be linking to your site and talking about you, it makes sense that the same would occur in social media, so social media mentions and links should be part of your link profile. The main reason you should focus on social media is traffic.
perhaps their homepage features less than 100 words of text and sometimes almost no text at all with most being available in the form of links. The Google Panda update punished sites that featured duplicate content as well as pages that were too weak on content. The other problem I see with content is more from a strategic point of view, and I will use two examples to highlight how a webmaster can create more pages of content, which can become something they can rank for and get traffic.
traffic away from your competitors. In theory, those that work hard should get rewarded more.
Rich snippets In a previous article, I covered ‘rich snippets’ and suggested that this will indirectly have a positive effect on your rankings. Days after writing it, it was acknowledged by Google’s Eric Schmidt that authorship with rich snippets would help your ranking efforts. Even if that didn’t have an effect, your click
“There are a lot of dated guides out there on what you need to do to get your website to rank and, unfortunately, there are too many webmasters that believe you need to just buy high PR links to achieve your results.”
Mobile optimisation If you have been looking at your analytics data over the past few years, you should be noticing more mobile traffic hitting your websites. Just to put things into perspective, a recent zdnet.com article2 mentions that Android has surpassed 900 million activations, with 400 million last year and 100 million activations two years before. You will probably find that some mobile traffic and websites are now behind in adapting for these visitors. Most websites don’t look good or are not readable on a mobile phone and if you don’t fix this, you are going to get users bouncing. I typically see five to ten percent higher bounce rates for websites from their mobile visitors when their site isn’t optimised. If you are designing or redesigning a site, you will want to consider this in the planning stage and perhaps consider responsive web design (RWD) as your means of achieving this. There are plenty of articles to back up the claim of why responsive design is good for SEO.
Content strategies For most SEO clients I deal with, I can usually find some recommendations on improving their content or creating a content strategy. As much as link building is helpful for rankings, so is content. I say, “No links, no rankings”, and the same goes for content: “No content, no rankings”. One common problem I encounter is sites that are very low on text;
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1. Casino affiliate Many casino affiliates tend to have similar content in common; they have pages like blackjack, bet365 casino review, casino bonuses, online casinos, and so on. This has, perhaps, become the standard type of content and when you are one of hundreds of sites with the same content, it is going to become difficult to rank. If we look at the affiliates that have more content, there are some topics that webmasters have written less about and this all becomes an issue with time and effort. Those that take the time to do more will tend to get rewarded. So what are additional pages that casino affiliates could add to their sites? ●●●Slots reviews: there are probably over 5,000 of these games available. ●●●Casino manager interviews: is anybody even doing this? ●●●How to fund your NETELLER account: with screenshots or maybe a video.
2. Online casino An online casino should also have its fair share of content, but not all of them do. Some might have a page dedicated to banking or deposit methods but not pages on the individual deposit method itself, like NETELLER, for example. All the site’s games should have a dedicated page and a blog is an easy way to generate more content and share promotions on the site. Writing more content takes more time, and this is a chance to get more search 2
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through rates in the search engine results pages (SERPs) would certainly increase. Anonymous writers are now going to have a difficult time getting their content to rank. Just like responsive design, this is something all webmasters should implement in their websites.
Conversion rate optimisation I saved the best for last with this topic. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) has been around for long enough, but is still a foreign topic for most webmasters. Again, those that focus on conversion and improving their users’ experience will reap the greater rewards. Simply put, improving the conversion rate of your website means to reduce the bounce rate. Bounce rates are a metric that Google uses in its algorithms; specifically, I’m referring to when users are in the search engine, find your site and bounce back to the SERPs to find another site. The theory is this: why would Google want to keep giving you traffic if the users are constantly going back to the search engine to find what they are looking for? It either implies that your content isn’t good enough, is difficult to find, or that its presentation isn’t optimised. Optimising your website for conversions is one of the best things you can possibly do. People are leaking sales all of the time, and there are plenty of books and companies out there that focus on this field.
1 http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/white-paper/google-ranking-factors-uk-2012/ (http://www.zdnet.com/google-io-by-the-numbers-900-million-android-activations-7000015432/)
INSIGHT
Some of the common problems I experience when it comes to conversion are websites that are missing important calls-to-action. For casino affiliates, I see this for pages that are just full of text. Paragraphs of text are a bit of an obstacle for most viewers and you have to remember that people scan first before they read. If you don’t make use of images, videos, bold content and titles then you are giving the user too many reasons to bounce to find another site. For sites like affiliate programs or online sportsbooks, some are just missing one significant call-to-action to begin with. If you want your users to do something, make it easier for them to find it; like a sign-up button that is large and has enough contrast against the rest of the website. Sometimes, webmasters can go the opposite way and have too many
calls-to-action all competing for the user’s attention which can have a negative impact. The design of your website can also have an important influence on bounce rate. If the content appears too far down on a website, you may have made it difficult for the user to find what they were looking for. Having a good layout to complement the content on your pages is important, and this also falls under the name of UI/UX design: User Interface and User Experience. So, once again, focus on the user and things will work themselves out in the end.
Conclusion So yes, gone are the days of just buying links and taking crappy websites and pushing them up in the rankings. What we are learning from all of the changes in SEO is that it is going to take work to get more
traffic and to help your rankings. The good news is that not everyone likes to work, so there is always an opportunity to do more with your websites. SEO is not dead and probably never will be as long as people have a reason to search for something. If you focus on providing a good service and value for your users, this is the first thing anyone should focus on when implementing any SEO campaign. John Wright is an affiliate coach and the main editor at Gaffg.com a site that promotes gambling affiliate programs and is a resource for webmasters. He has been in the gambling industry for over 10 years and focusing his time and energy into affiliate websites and consulting services including SEO, website designs, UI/UX designs and conversion rate optimization.
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INSIGHT
BINARY OPTIONS AFFILIATION
LET THE STATS SPEAK By Michael Katz, CEO and Founder of Sociarati Media. There’s almost as much speculation around the growth of the binary options industry as there is around the actual financial markets. For the past four years, companies have been trying to explain the meaning of binary options to the masses. The fate of the binary options industry was just as ‘up and down’ as the trades being placed inside the platforms. Marketing teams have come and gone. But now, in June 2013, binary options have started to gain recognition in wider circles and traders have actively begun to search for more information, and started trading, online. In plain and simple English, a binary option trade is having the ability to predict the market movement of a specific stock, currency pair, commodity or index within a pre-selected time range. For example, if the price of Google is currently being traded at 857.23, all a trader has to do is decide if this stock will go up or down in a given time period. The biggest plus point is that all of the aforementioned financial instruments are traded at the mid-price. Therefore, there is no spread on the buy and sell rate, and the concept becomes a lot more appealing and easier to understand than trading in an online Forex platform. This has now been explained in hundreds of YouTube videos and dozens of review sites. Additionally, ‘Binary Options Trading’ has finally become a popular keyword phrase for thousands of prospective traders. As shown in the Figure 1, ‘Binary Options’ as a keyword phrase began to soar dramatically in January 2013 and has been growing ever since. Looking at the map in Figure 2, we can identify the geographic location of Google users who are searching for binary options. Obviously, the USA as a whole has the largest overall number of
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people actively looking for binary options, but the highest density of keyword searches is actually in South Africa. There are many platforms which are changing their policy towards accepting US traders despite the lack of regulation within the industry. Until now, the only regulation in existence is from the Cyprus-based CYSEC. However, after recent events within the Cypriot economy, many feel that the Cyprus regulation is not the way to go. Similar to the gaming industry back in 2004, many operators will accept US traders while it is still considered a ‘grey’ area. For experienced affiliates in the realm of search engine optimisation, this opens up a whole new world of opportunity. Binary-related keywords are being searched on, but the market is still not as crowded as the iGaming industry. There are, as yet, no specific sites which really dominate the positions and keywords relating to binary options. Figure 3 shows a list of the top keywords within the binary options industry. The data is from Google Trends. On the actual searches taking place in Google for binary options, Figure 4 provides us with a territorial breakdown. Bear in mind that these searches are by no means the only keywords that are currently bringing in binary options depositing traders. These are, however, the most targeted, with the highest conversion rates on the traffic brought through organic search. Another successful tool being used by dozens of affiliates to capture the attention of would-be binary options traders is YouTube. Video productions showing everything from opening an account to placing winning trades are featured alongside search results in Google as well as YouTube. Videos didn’t work particularly well for gaming, but it’s
the opposite for binary options. The current successful formula consists of a 60-second video, tailor-made for the brands being promoted. With the incorporation of a well-structured AdWords online video campaign, the cost of a ‘view’ for videos targeted to interested users is between $0.06 and $0.27 cents per view. Video adverts can be shown in YouTube search results as overlay video adverts at the start of popular videos and as recommended videos in the YouTube sidebar. Promoting binary options brands and knowing which brands to promote is the next step. There are many brands making many promises, however, the three key factors to take into consideration when promoting a binary options brands are: 1. The conversion rate of the sales team. 2. The CPA amount and tracking system. 3. From which territories traders are accepted.
Conversion rate Conversion rates represent the number of leads received against the number of first-time depositors. Unlike online gaming operations, binary options operators have a sales team working a tough round-the-clock schedule who actively contact, by telephone, all ‘leads’ driven into the platform. Despite the industry growth of binary options platforms, there are still a considerably low percentage of new customers who make a deposit without being contacted by a sales representative. This segment of depositors is called ‘self-activation’. The current industry standard for conversion of sales leads varies from broker to broker. The range is vast and typically anywhere from 15 to 30 percent. Usually, when there is more information on the referring site, such as reviews, trading examples and account advice, the
INSIGHT
CPA
conversion rate is at the higher end of the scale. This is a good reason to add as much content about the brokers as possible. Additionally, when finalising a CPA deal with a broker, it is totally acceptable to question the sales conversion.
There has been a lot of discussion about the CPA offered by binary options brokers. Speculation ranges between $150 and $500. However, as with the online Poker industry in the past few years, the higher CPAs are few and far between.
Figure 1
Today, the going rate is between $200 and $350. Also, something to bear in mind is the minimum deposit amount, which can be as little as $100, but the majority of brokers only accept $200. Reporting is also crucial. HasOffers has been predominant is representing the majority of binary brokers due to the company’s ability to capture serverside tracking.
Territories Going back to the statistics mentioned earlier in this article, the USA has the highest number of searches for binary options. Therefore working with brokers who accept USA traders should also be a factor to consider when choosing which broker to work with.
Figure 2
Summary
Figure 3 Related terms
Top | Rising
binary trading
100
binary trading options
100
trading options
95
binary option
40
binary options brokers
25
binary trade options
25
binary brokers
25
binary options forex
25
best binary options
25
forex options
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In short, the mind set of new traders is very similar to the mind set of poker players and some casino game players. All the trends indicate that the binary options industry is only at the beginning of realising its true potential. The English-speaking markets are becoming crowded but still contain much opportunity for experienced affiliates. There is, however, a world of potential for good language-focused affiliates. Hot territories right now include Germany, Italy, Japan and China.
Figure 4 Global
Local
Local
Local
Local
Local Searches
Monthly
Searches
Searches
Searches
Searches
Searches
US
UK
CAN
AUS
SA
Binary Options
201,000
90,500
22,200
9,900
6,600
2,900
Binary Options Trading
22,200
9,900
2,400
1,300
1,000
590
Binary Trading
14,800
5,400
2,400
880
880
390
Binary Options Broker
4,400
1,600
590
210
140
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Keyword
Michael Katz is CEO and founder of Sociarati Media, a full service social media marketing agency specializing in strategy and campaign planning for the online gaming industry. Michael has been a part of the online gaming industry since 2002 and has specialised in social media since 2010. Michael can be contacted by email at Michael@sociaratimedia.com..
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evenue Share
FEATURE
INTERNET GAMING GOES LIVE IN NEVADA It has been a case of patience and perseverance, writes former Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman, Dennis Neilander. CASINO-STYLE GAMING was first legalised in Nevada in 1931. The modern regulation of land-based gaming in the state began with the adoption of the Nevada Gaming Control Act in 1959. Casino-style gaming was legal in Nevada only with respect to the United States until New Jersey legalised gaming in Atlantic City in 1977. Since then, gaming has proliferated throughout the United States and currently, only two states do not allow some form of gaming. The regulators and policy makers in Nevada and other states have overseen a slow but ever-evolving industry since those early days. While the land-based industry evolved, a new form of gaming began to emerge around the world – Internet gaming. The first legal online gaming sites that began to impact the US were established pursuant to the passage of the Free Trade and Processing Act by Antigua and Barbuda in 1994. It appears the first online sportsbook opened in 1996 from Antigua and the first online casino site was opened in 1996 under licensure by the Mohawk Gaming Commission in the Kahnawake Territory of Canada. The regulators in Nevada and other US states were monitoring these activities closely
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as online gaming began to proliferate on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis in Australia and Europe.
such activities criminal. Because of these limitations, the regulators continued to establish relationships with other Internet
“It is with a sense of pride, relief and some reservation that I observe the online gaming industry in Nevada in its infancy� By 2001, Internet gaming had become a multi-billion dollar business. At that time, I was the Chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board and Brian Sandoval was the Chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. Together, we participated in the first attempt to legalise, regulate, and tax Internet gaming in the US. During that year, the Nevada legislature passed the first Nevada Interactive Gaming Act that provided a framework to licence and regulate Internet gaming. However, at that time, the legality of such activities under US and other jurisdictional laws was unclear. The legislation was contingent on finding that federal law would allow such activities. In August of 2002, we were notified by the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) that the Federal Wire Act made
gaming regulators and study the best practices around the world, but could not move forward. A major breakthrough occurred in 2011 when the DoJ reversed its opinion and declared that the Wire Act was only applicable to sportsbetting and no other forms of gaming. While various proposals for federal legalisation were considered in the intervening years, no bills were passed and states began to move forward without a federal solution. The regulators and policy makers updated the 2001 legislation to reflect best practices in the area of regulation. Former Gaming Commission Chairman Sandoval had become the Governor of Nevada and he called to order the Gaming Policy Committee to shape the future for Internet gaming in the state. The regulators adopted a robust model to regulate this newly legalised activity
FEATURE
I wish to congratulate the state of Nevada and, specifically, the Nevada Gaming Control Board on the launch of their online gaming industry. The Board has developed its online gaming framework in an expert, consultative and informed way that will be an example to other regulators. Andre Wilsenach, Executive Director of the Alderney Gambling Control Commission
and drew upon the experiences of other jurisdictions that had been regulating this activity for several years. Currently, over 20 licence investigations have been completed and licenses issued for operators and service providers. On April 30, Internet gaming went live in Nevada when the regulators authorised Ultimate Gaming to deal the country’s first hand of real money Internet poker. It is with a sense of pride, relief and some reservation that I observe the online gaming industry in Nevada in its infancy.
The patience and perseverance of numerous individual stakeholders has paid off. There are many unanswered questions and experiences that await the regulators, policymakers, operators and players. As one veteran European Internet regulator told me, “You can study something all you want, but at some point, the only way you learn is to do it.” I still believe a federal overall umbrella would have been a better model, but I also understand the states were patient for many years and will move forward
TOBIN PRIOR, CEO of Ultimate Poker, talks to iGB Affiliate… …on poker returning to the US “Everybody’s happy that we’re back. Our tournaments are oversubscribed – we’re having to launch our tournament lobbies 45 minutes before they start. People are just really happy to have a product that’s good, solid, and that works.”
…on the challenges “We didn’t think that we’d have to physically verify quite as many people as we are. It’s a source of frustration for some players, but once you’re through it, it’s done. So, that’s required us to make sure we’re resourced to handle that. We have some very sophisticated geolocation and some of that involves technology that confirms that a player’s mobile phone is in Nevada. One of our carriers hadn’t enabled that service, but with all the other carriers, it’s been working really well. So, those are challenges which are outside of our control unfortunately, and we’re working really expeditiously with the carrier to resolve that one issue. Otherwise it’s been remarkably plain sailing so far.”
…on ‘Day One’ of launch “We dealt our first hand at a sit-and-go at about 9:02am on Tuesday, April 30; the first hand of legal real money online poker in America. We’ve been dealing hands since then and we’ve had a lot of interest and a lot of sign-ups from many countries around the world, and from a lot of states outside of Nevada. But, obviously, you can only play within Nevada in terms of the regulations. So, the interest has been good and sustained.”
…on the surprises of ‘Day One’ “I was surprised that we ran as smoothly as we did because
now. I also believe offering poker-only as a starting point will be helpful to eliminate the inevitable bugs, but for this activity to be truly successful, other games will need to be offered. There are also a lot of questions regarding the feasibility of states compacting with other jurisdictions, but I believe once the hurdles of the first compact are cleared, others will be easier and will follow. As with the history of landbased gaming, patience and perseverance will prevail as the legal Internet gaming industry evolves.
these technology things are always prone to bugs, but we ran really well. I was surprised with the rapid amount of interest from a core of poker players. There’s clearly a pent-up demand for people who want this product. Americans love playing poker – you can see how many customers Full Tilt and PokerStars used to have here over the years. They have been waiting for this new era of legitimate online poker, delivered by people they can trust. We’ve had people in the chat rooms saying ‘This is fantastic, I haven’t played since Black Friday’, and, ‘It’s great to have poker back’. It’s the reception that’s surprised me most; how excited people are to have online poker back.”
…on meeting and beating expectations “We’ve beaten expectations, but it’s still Nevada, and it’s still a relatively small market; therefore, one has to be realistic about this, but we’re doing well. Our games server has performed fantastically – we haven’t had a hitch in our software at all. There are challenges in terms of geo-verification and the hurdle for identification verification and confirming where people live is very high, and it will be high for everybody. So it takes time for some customers to get signed up but once they’re through, it’s very good.”
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FEATURE
THE ULTIMATE OPPORTUNITY?
Jason ‘Wolf’ Rosenberg explores whether Ultimate Poker is the beginning of the ultimate opportunity? THE RECENT LAUNCH of the first legally licensed and regulated online poker site in the United States has had the gaming world buzzing. As of the time of writing, Ultimate Poker, the branded online poker site for the Station Casino group, is accepting play from residents of Nevada and is starting to see some regular action. While unlikely to ever rival the size of many of the established online sites available outside of the US, due to the limited market size in Nevada, it is a very important first step in the re-emergence of online gaming for the American market. The new site uses software first created by CyberArts, an international gaming software development company that was acquired by Ultimate Gaming in 2011. Ultimate Gaming, a majority-owned subsidiary of Station Casinos based in Oakland, California, manages the gaming operations, and they are also the exclusive gaming partner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The site opened for a 30-day trial period in early May and, depending on results, there is a possibility that they may not even be live at the time of the publication of this article. The company has been taking some heat in several areas, not the least of which are some alleged negative associations with one of their software providers. They have also had several growing pains related to player identification, their mobile verification partners, site up-time, and
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player communications, however, all of these are issues that are likely to be taken care of quickly.
indicates a willingness to provide the processing solutions that are being asked for by players and affiliates. It would be
“In the short-term, going through the onerous and costly licensing process, at least for today, provides no guarantee of success, or even clients. The services that affiliates can offer will become more attractive, and the market should provide a real opportunity for them in the long-term.” One of the more encouraging notes has been the ability of verified players to process deposits without having to go to one of the Station Casino locations. The site accepts electronic cheque transfers, paper cheques, wire transfers, and, a first for the post-UIGEA market, MasterCard credit and debit card deposits. While MasterCard transactions are currently only available for deposit, (withdrawals are only available by mailed cheque or at a casino cage), this is a very positive move for both the operators and players. I spoke to Tim Richards, Senior VP of Interactive Solutions for Global Cash Access (GCA), whose company provides processing solutions to approximately 1,000 casinos globally. He was pleased to see that MasterCard had made the decision to provide processing for the new site, stating: “This movement by one of the two major Card Issuers to accept online transactions clearly
great to see Visa follow suit very soon.” Affiliates are well aware that the availability of processing is key to the success of an online gaming operation, and to their own earnings. Land-based casinos have always enjoyed two major advantages over their online cousins: the first being the close-to-100 percent conversion to real money activity from their visitors, (excusing the spouses coming for a show); and the fact that people entering their casinos have money in their wallets, or credit and debit cards that will work at their ATM kiosks. In order to service a wider online market, it is critical that they are able to effectively expand the deposit choices available to their players. NETELLER has made visible overtures to re-enter the market, and there are many other wallet options that would love nothing more than to add their services. For affiliates to maximise their profitability, the ability for their members to
FEATURE
“For affiliates to maximise their profitability, the ability for their members to play on multiple sites is important, and processing options, and how they are used, go a long way to making this happen.” play on multiple sites is also important, and processing options, and how they are used, go a long way to making this happen. If it is difficult to withdraw funds in a timely fashion from Site A, it is more difficult for them to then play on Site B. Great for Site A, but not so good for their competitors, or for affiliates in general. As the more mature non-US market has shown, everyone benefits when deposits and withdrawals are easily facilitated, and can happen quickly.
First mover advantage Being first-to-market has provided the new Ultimate Poker with the advantage of being the first Nevada licensed online operator that is able to generate a database of players that are interested in real money online gaming. Doing this without the help of affiliates, at least for now, the company is able to capture what is likely to be the majority of interested players early, without the need to share any of the revenues with affiliates. So, is there an opportunity for affiliates to market this site in Nevada? Ultimate Poker hasn’t made an announcement in this regard as of yet, and there is a real possibility that they might not feel the need to engage affiliates, at least in the short-term. I recently spoke with an interactive division executive of one of the major strip operators in Las Vegas that also has plans to
launch its own online poker site in the very near future. It was made clear that affiliates are not yet seen as an essential part of their early marketing. One of the reasons was that the operator feels that it already has the majority of Nevada gamblers on its database, and it makes better business sense to make its own best efforts to have those players register for the new site before having players be tagged to external affiliates. Hard to argue with that logic. Furthermore, with only the single affiliate currently licensed in the state, and the high cost of obtaining that licence, the affiliates themselves are also not yet present. It was also pointed out that from a gaming control and regulatory standpoint, the gaming operator in Nevada is ultimately responsible for the actions of its affiliates, and can be liable for fines or other penalties should its affiliates engage in marketing or advertising practices that are not in-line with the regulations in place. Ultimately, this means that affiliates are likely to be selected very carefully by the operators, a practice that is, for the most part, nonexistent in online markets outside of the United States. This also means that using sub-affiliates is also going to be a hard sell, as it will be even more difficult for the interactive gaming operators to be able to control communications, while still remaining liable for their actions.
The bottom line In the short-term, going through the onerous and costly process of becoming licensed within Nevada is only the first step, and at least today, provides no guarantee of success, or even clients. The number of online operations in Nevada and other US states will grow, and so will the competition between those online operators. The services that affiliates can offer will become more attractive, and in demand. Coupled with increased processing options, the market should provide a real opportunity for affiliates in the long-term.
JASON ‘WOLF’ ROSENBERG is CEO of American iGaming Solutions, LLC. Mr Rosenberg has more than 11 years of online gaming industry experience and has provided expertise and strategic solutions to over 50 online gaming operations. Based in Las Vegas, his focus is now educating, consulting, marketing, and management for licensed US regulators, operators, and their service providers. Jason can be contacted at Wolf@ AmericaniGamingSolutions.com.
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INTERVIEW
The Virtual Reality of Online Poker Following our interview with PKR’s Founder and President, Jez San OBE, in the previous issue of iGB Affiliate, we take a look at an extract from the forthcoming fifth edition of iGaming Business’ The Global Business of Poker, where report author, Rachael Church-Sanders, speaks to Malcolm Graham, PKR’s Chief Executive Officer. What attracted you to PKR; could you see it was ahead of the game in terms of other offerings at the time? The view at the time was very much that PKR could, using the team’s background in video gaming, offer poker players a much better user experience online and build something that was much more fun than was available back then. Most people were playing poker with their friends around a kitchen table, not trying to grind out a living, and PKR therefore saw the opportunity to make a living out of offering poker to people who wanted to play it for fun and utilise the team’s video games history. As they were more about video gaming than online gaming, it made sense for me to join and offer that experience and then also bring in guys with transactional, compliance and marketing expertise. We built up the new team between February and August that year (2006) and then launched at the end of August. How were you affected by what was happening regulation-wise in the US at that time? Obviously, around that time, the Americans were bringing in anti-online gaming legislation so it was a frustrating time for the industry. However, we took the decision not to launch in the US and instead wait to see how things panned out. Consequently, we weren’t directly affected when the UIGEA was passed in October of that year, only two months after we launched. There
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was a worry that some of the US-facing operators might suddenly switch their attention to Europe and take some of our customers, but in the end, we were quite fortunate that some decided to continue concentrating on that market and the others that were forced to pull out suddenly had to do a lot of internal reorganisation to change the scale of their businesses. Therefore, we were given a little bit of a window to carry on establishing ourselves in the market while some of them were distracted by losing 40 to 50 percent of their customers overnight. We also concentrated on promoting ourselves as a visual product that was very different to all poker rooms out there and so gave ourselves a good point of differentiation. Are there any markets of interest to PKR or that are already performing well? Over half of our customer base is from the UK and France. France is an intriguing market and PKR.fr is doing well at number five. It is a modest business for us but profitable, and we expect it to become more interesting as time goes on. We are also in Denmark and Italy but the latter has been a tougher nut to crack as we arrived there quite late. We are positive about the Netherlands and Sweden and momentum is definitely behind regulated markets. Deciding to enter new markets, however, can create a huge stress on a business because each one is so different and can distract you from concentrating on the new and better regions, so there are
some markets that we have chosen not to enter. Spain, for example, is not a market we have had any exposure to because we found it to be rather challenging – which has been evidenced by operators giving their licences back. What strategies have you employed to acquire and retain customers at PKR? This industry is certainly competitive so we are always looking at new ways to engage with our players. PKR’s signature in-game experience has always offered poker fans an added layer of realism through avatars, rich environments, emotes and chip tricks. With our latest software release, players can now use PKR loyalty points to purchase virtual food – e.g., pizzas, olives, cookies and sushi – to consume in a series of distinctive animations, or to use as gifts to friends at the table. Our virtual drinks selection has also been expanded. There have also been a number of enhancements and additions to the wide variety of avatar clothing and accessories as well as sports collectibles. It is a modest-sized business and fits in with the look and feel of our site. In terms of other innovations, we recently launched real money poker apps for iPad and iPhone. Initial feedback suggests that consumers are moving in that direction, i.e. from desktops to tablets and mobiles. People want cool apps. An Android poker app is also in the works and should be launched soon.
INTERVIEW
How successful was the television advertising campaign you ran in late 2012/early 2013? Targeting 18-34 year-old men, that particular TV advertising campaign launched on Friday, December 21 on Dave, and ran until January 23, 2013. The campaign appeared across multiple channels in the UK such as LWT, Channel 4, Film4, Dave, Watch, ITV2, ITV4, Five Digital and a range of Sky channels including Sky Movies and Sky Sports. In terms of whether we felt it was successful, let’s say it led to a decision to do another campaign. Television is still a very powerful way of supporting a brand. There’s a lot more gaming on TV generally now, and there’s a plethora of TV channels, but how much more we do this year will depend on how the next campaign goes.
In terms of expanding into other games, could there be a PKRBingo.com one day, for example? The answer is that it would be harder for us to do something for bingo than we have for poker or other table card games because it isn’t our core expertise. I wouldn’t rule it out completely, but in terms of what we have planned this year, bingo doesn’t feature too highly so far. If we did do something in the future though, it would probably be with a partner with experience in that space.
dramatic impact on us, although I am sure Zynga will build a successful real money poker proposition. Finally, what’s your outlook for the poker industry in general? Poker has obviously become a tougher market than it was, but regulation is moving in the right direction overall. I am sure there will be many more speed bumps on that particular road, but the direction is pretty much spot on. Meanwhile, mobile is certainly having a resurgence for poker and has created a bit of a fillip for the industry. We would obviously like to see the US open up at a faster pace and state-by-state seems to be the way forward now rather than federal progress. Finally, the market for poker may have peaked, which is the opinion of many, but it is still quite a big market and it is all about catching market share in that context. The industry should see more lower value customers in my view, and a growth in casual poker players.
of Poker
The Global Business of Poker (Fifth Edition) provides in-depth analysis on the factors affecting growth in the poker industry to 2016, and offers a range of intelligence to inform and shape your business strategy. To order your copy, please call +44 (0)20 7954 3489 or email reports@iGamingBusiness.com
l Business
Are you concerned by Zynga entering the real money poker market? Zynga has a lot of customers and it will be interesting to see how successful its partnership with bwin.party will be. However, I don’t think it will have a
The Globa
What are the essentials for a successful online poker product? Fundamentally, it had better work! Poker is a complicated piece of technology. You’ve got thousands of people playing against each other, so making sure the technology works is very important. We offer a great visual experience so, of course, that’s what the customer sees, but behind the scenes you also need to offer a great customer service. Offering things such as speedy responses to questions and finding someone who can access your data quickly, is vital. In the early days, our set-up was quite complicated and it was a challenge keeping all the various parts moving, but nowadays, we have a very scalable infrastructure. The game is completely rock solid so it is a question of enhancing the experience they get from their fellow players and our customer service team.
We also offer promotions and bonuses that are sensible. We want to keep our customers as long as possible and keep them playing with us rather than someone else. One of things we are seeing is that poker is becoming a much more casual experience. People are playing on their tablets and their mobile phones; they aren’t sitting down and grinding out multiple tables as much as they used to. That’s good from PKR’s perspective, as that fits with our proposition. Our players play more frequently for smaller stakes and that suits us well.
The Global Business of Poker
Fifth Edition
Rachael Chur ch-Sander
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INTERVIEW
A BRAND APART This issue, iGB Affiliate talks to Katy Stafford, Head of Affiliates at InterPartners, about the re-launch of the company’s brands and the changing landscape for affiliates.
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It is a significant period for InterPartners, with the re-launch of the InterPoker, InterCasino and VIP Casino brands. Just explain at what stage the company is with the re-launch, and how it will affect the brands moving forward. InterPoker has already been successfully migrated and launched on the Ongame poker network. Players can now enjoy more concurrent games, larger tournament prize pools, fast fold poker, instant rewards and exceptional promotions. InterCasino launched on May 22 on a brand new custom-built gaming platform. The new platform is designed for an optimal gaming experience; no more downloads, no more waiting for each game to install separately – players can play their favourite games instantly in their browser. All games are available to try for free, and the game lobby is very easy to navigate. Also, players can see all available bonuses in a special section of their account, choose the offer that they like best, and claim bonuses instantly without having to deposit. They can always keep track of how close they are to clearing their bonus with real-time progress bars and can cancel a bonus with a click of a button.
how will the move to the Amaya platform ensure that they remain preeminent names to the players, and what does it provide that the GTECH platform wasn’t giving you?
The InterPoker and InterCasino names are well established brands in the industry –
Significant changes in operations such as this are always keenly observed
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“Affiliates are not the ‘one guy in a garage’ outfits that some operators believe – they are innovators, SEO experts, and some of the best Internet marketers out there.” InterCasino and InterPoker have built up their reputation based on trust, security, customer service and great games and promotions. Our values and brand principles will not change. What will change is how broad our game offering will be and how often our platform is updated and improved. We have full control over what features and updates are built. This is a key benefit for us, and will allow us to become a much more robust and modern company. We plan on actively listening to our players, and focusing on features they want to see.
by the affiliate community. What specific impact will these changes have on your existing affiliate partners? As you have said, the brands are already well established within the industry. The changes in operations will make us much more efficient. Internally, we have overhauled our acquisition and retention tools completely. We have selected the best-in-class solutions for CRM, email marketing, and business intelligence. Existing affiliate partners can expect to see higher conversion rates and better player retention. In terms of acquiring new affiliates, what sort of incentives are you offering to bring in new partners? Why should the re-launched InterPartners brands appeal to them? Starting from June 1, we have been running a special promotion that awards new affiliates with a guaranteed 50 percent commission for their first three months, and up to 50 percent lifetime revenue share. They will also have the chance to earn up to $15,000 cash in prizes for reaching milestones of monthly NDPs. In terms of strategy, do you see this re-launch as an important step in the continuing development of the
INTERVIEW
company as a whole? Is it a strategically necessary step to keep pace with the progress of the wider industry? Yes, of course. The gaming industry is incredibly dynamic, and quickly adapting to change is key. The new platform will bring us to the forefront of innovation and provide the very best gaming experience for our players around the world. Our goal is to continuously research, ask our players about what they want, and then deliver. When it comes to industry progress, the continuing relevance of affiliates, especially for the top brands, is an often discussed topic. Where do you stand on the continuing relevance of affiliates? Do they remain key to the industry’s growth, or will there be a time when their importance will diminish? Affiliates continue to be a key driver of traffic to operator sites. Affiliates are not the ‘one guy in a garage’ outfits that some operators believe – they are innovators, SEO experts, and some of the best Internet marketers out there. More than anything, they understand the players and working in close partnership with them is very important for us. Prior to the re-launch process, how would you describe the performance of the InterPartners affiliate program – has it been a productive 2013, and year-to-date? So far, this year has been ‘business as usual’ for the program, with added focus on the re-launch. We have been working
on promotions for both new and existing affiliates, which will be live on the site shortly. You can expect some great player promotions and aggressive marketing once the new site is live. We’ve also been working closely with our customer service and retention teams to ensure that the migration goes smoothly. A major focus for us this year is to release a full mobile poker and casino offering. The Ongame mobile poker client is already built and will be available to our players very soon after re-launch. The casino will follow closely and we’re very much looking forward to the rest of the year. Post-re-launch, what factors do you see having the most impact on the affiliate side of the business – are there external factors that you think may positively or negatively impact performance? We feel that the growth of mobile, and mobile gaming specifically is a gamechanger for the online gaming industry. Affiliates will eventually notice a drop in revenue if they don’t adapt to changing player preferences. More and more, customers demand a quick, easy, and responsive experience with game-play, and online in general. To maximise performance, they will need to perfect mobile advertising and spot quality mobilefriendly sites. The convenience of instant click games and the launch of our mobile platform will definitely make for happier players and affiliates.
How hard do you think the landscape is for affiliates at the moment – have market conditions and the economy made life tougher for them? If so, what can they be doing to optimise and adapt their businesses? We believe affiliates are facing more competition than ever, which definitely makes things tougher for them. Frequent changes in regulation can have a big impact on affiliate revenue as well. In order to be successful, affiliates need to be flexible and dedicated. Always being in tune with market news and forecasts, keeping up with the latest online trends, and capitalising on the growth of mobile is what will set the winners apart. Finally, what advice would you have for an affiliate starting up in the iGaming industry today? Choose your partners wisely – look for those that have a long-standing and good reputation in the industry. Watch for those who offer you a quick buck and provide little-to-no support. There is no such thing as easy money in this industry, make sure you ask for advice and do your homework on the sites you are interested in promoting. Keep updated with the latest SEO practices and ensure your sites continue to put out lots of fresh relevant content. Keep up with iGaming news and trends, and know which potential partners are progressive and innovative.
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Virtual Currency and the Disruptive Bitcoin In recent months, Bitcoin has exploded onto the radars of companies operating within the digital sphere – a controversial new virtual currency with the potential to be the catalyst for disruptive change. This issue, online gaming consultant, Aideen Shortt, provides an overview of the Bitcoin phenomenon, and explores its potential affiliation with the gambling industry. Throughout history, countless musicians and bands have claimed that it takes ‘ten years to be an overnight success’. Having originally launched on January 3, 2009, Bitcoin is neither rock and roll, nor yet an unmitigated success, however, in the past few months, it has rocketed into mass consciousness, seemingly from nowhere, to the point where it has recently been the subject of media hype and frenzy, user explosion, financial analyst review and even the key case study of a paper by the European Central Bank (ECB) dedicated entirely to addressing the virtual currency extravaganza. To say Bitcoin is controversial would be an understatement, and the very fact that it’s founder (or founders – it’s still unknown whether it was an individual or collaborative effort) was now disappeared hacker hiding behind the false name of Satoshi Nakamoto does nothing to lend credibility in the eyes of the doubters.
What are virtual currencies? Money is an institution that has changed over time, from early barter to the current day trusted fiat system, which is any currency that is recognised, authorised and regulated by a country’s government. Given the evolving nature, it’s hardly surprising that global technological developments,
leading to almost 35 percent of the world’s population having Internet access today, have led to the concept of virtual currency. The ECB highlights that regardless of the form money takes, it is associated with three functions: 1. A medium of exchange. 2. A unit of account where a standard numerical value can be applied to the value of goods, services, assets and liabilities. 3. Store of value that can be saved and retrieved in the future. A virtual currency is a type of unregulated digital money, the issue and control of which lies with developers rather than a central government or financial institution. In general, there are considered to be three types of virtual currency: 1. Closed schemes which have little or no link to the real economy, and are typically used for online gaming. These currencies can be purchased with real money or earned through game play or loyalty, but only used for purchasing virtual goods, and cannot be traded outside of the game community. For example, World of Warcraft has WoW Gold that players use to equip themselves for ongoing and higher levels of play. 2. Schemes with unidirectional flow where currency can be purchased or earned but cannot be exchanged back to original or real money. The now defunct
Facebook Credits was a perfect example of this format. 3. Schemes with bidirectional flow where users can buy and sell virtual money according to established exchange rates. Linden Dollars, the monetary scheme in Second Life, the world where users recreate an entire virtual life online, have value both inside and outside the community as they can easily be converted back to US dollars. There are several reasons behind the existence of virtual currencies. First and foremost is the generation of revenue through virtual goods, but there are also additional benefits for companies such as locking-in users, increased loyalty, KYC through players earning additional currency by identifying preferences, or simply the creation of a float (in unidirectional and bidirectional schemes). Bitcoin takes virtual currencies to a new level in that it can be used to buy both virtual and real goods, and its very creation was based on bypassing or overcoming the limitations of traditional monopolistic and centrally controlled currencies.
What exactly is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a decentralised encrypted currency that exists only online, stored in a user’s digital wallet that is available to download for free through open-source software. Bitcoin is not pegged to any real
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world currency; instead, the value and exchange rate are determined by supply and demand in the market at any given time. Each Bitcoin is divisible to eight decimal places, enabling its use in all transactions. Bitcoin transactions are anonymous and money is simply sent from one computer to another without the involvement of a central clearing house or financial institution. That being said, every transaction and change of ownership of a Bitcoin is registered and recorded, with each Bitcoin permanently carrying its entire history as part of its code, so that in some circumstances (e.g. law enforcement) they may/will be possible to trace. The legal status of Bitcoin is unclear. In March, the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed to regulate Bitcoin exchanges; this suggests that the agency is unlikely to shut them down, however, there are no set guidelines as of yet. In Europe, there are arguments being made that Bitcoin should be treated as ‘other currencies’ under the Electronic Money Directive. However, this directive defines electronic money under three independent criteria: 1. Stored electronically. 2. Issued on receipt of funds not less than the value of the monetary value recorded electronically. 3. Accepted as a means of payment. Bitcoin fulfils the first and third criteria, but not the second.
How does Bitcoin work? Reminiscent of the Gold Rush, Bitcoins are created and introduced into the system through ‘mining’. Mining is the process of validating and time-stamping each Bitcoin transaction through complex algorithms and mathematical solutions. Miners use their computing power to find valid ‘blocks’ and are rewarded in Bitcoins for their crucial effort and contribution. The
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reward started out as 50 Bitcoins per block uncovered, however, this is (intentionally) halved periodically and is currently at 25 Bitcoins per successful endeavour. At the same time, once again intentionally, the algorithms become more and more complex and difficult as further Bitcoins are released, therefore requiring increasing amounts of power and resource. The number of Bitcoins that will be released has a finite cap of 21 million (there are currently 11 million in circulation) and the rate of block creation is roughly constant over time – six per hour. With the regular reductions (approximately every four years) in Bitcoins per block, the currency is expected to reach capacity in around 2040, at which time it falls entirely into the realm of the economic theory of supply and demand, and miners on an ongoing basis are expected to generate revenue at that time through transaction processing fees. Anybody can become a miner and, indeed, there was a rush of participants recently both causing and following the media hype. However, there are countless reports that for the most part, given the continuously increasing costs of both hardware and electricity to meet the continuously increasing complexities of the algorithm, individual small-time miners are spending more than they are earning in the process. Once the Bitcoins are released and owned, their value comes from use as a purchase medium or trading them on newly-formed exchanges. Currently, the problem with Bitcoin as a viable currency for buying goods and services is that there are only 100 or so retailers or outlets that accept it, and unless a tipping point is reached where Bitcoin has a widespread use comparable to real-life currencies, this will limit and inhibit its acceptance in the mass market.
The emergence of Bitcoin has led to the establishment of numerous exchanges where Bitcoin can be traded, the largest of which, Mt.Gox, operated from Tokyo, caters to 80 percent of all transactions. In 2012, Mt.Gox saw an average of 9,000 to 10,000 new accounts created every month. This number doubled in January, tripled in February, and sextupled in March (when over 57,000 new accounts were created). Trading Bitcoin is both volatile and risky; in fact, there have already been several boom and crash cycles in the value of Bitcoin, mainly caused by cyber attacks. The first significant crash, involving approximately 400,000 Bitcoins worth almost USD$9 million at the time, took place in June 2011 when the value was knocked from USD$17.50 to USD$0.01 within minutes when the Mt.Gox exchange was hacked. In early April 2013, a DDoS attack crippled the system, followed a few weeks later by a technical hiccup that slowed transactions and caused widespread panic selling, which in-turn caused the price to plummet from a high of $260 to approximately $60 in a matter of days. The value temporarily recovered and reached $120 to $140, and has now stabilised, for the moment, at around $80 per Bitcoin. The technical slowdown in April was caused by a dramatic rise in traffic and trades, with the number tripling in the 24 hours before the panic sales frenzy and accounts created in the first few days of April significantly surpassed the entire total for March. Keeping up with demand is problematic, and the fact that the load is borne primarily by one exchange is a red flag to many, as any issues (internal or external) at Mt.Gox can be seen to cripple the currency. Aside from a desire to destabilise the Bitcoin currency in general, the DDoS hackers’ motivation is to abuse the system
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for profit. Creating a situation where everybody panic-sells; they wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. This volatility, along with general scepticism about the currency, have led to comparisons being drawn between Bitcoin and Tulip Mania; the period of time in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices on the newly introduced tulips reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed – which is widely considered to have been the first speculative ‘bubble’.
Liquidity
Is it legal?
While there is no hard data available, it is estimated that the number of owners of the 11 million Bitcoin in circulation is only in the tens of thousands, and of those, the majority (reportedly just under 80 percent) are simply holding on to their money. It would appear that right now, mining is the end-game and owners are unwilling to part with their Bitcoin in anticipation of significant value hikes. This may change given the recent crashes, however, Bitcoin was designed to be continually appreciative, and so much of the currency will always remain illiquid and kept as investment.
Bluntly put, neither consumer usage nor operator denomination of gaming in Bitcoin (BTC) change the legality, or not, of the underlying customer or operator activity. Contrary to breathless media earlier this year, Bitcoins do not make online gambling legal, in the US, or anywhere else. This point was extensively explored at the Social Casino Summit in April in San Francisco by both attorneys and operators present and chaired by James Gatto, of Pillsburylaw.com. Generally, ‘virtual currencies’ including play money poker chips traded on a secondary market, virtual currency given away, earned, won or lost, and BTC specifically may trigger unexpected legal issues.
The problems with Bitcoin Aside from the wildly fluctuating value described earlier, there are many problems with, and concerns about, Bitcoin.
Security The Bitcoin algorithms have never been compromised, and due to the authenticated history attached to each and every Bitcoin, counterfeiting is virtually impossible, but security in general is a huge issue, even beyond the exchanges. Each coin is a series of digital signatures with a public and a private key. Any loss or deletion of the key causes those Bitcoins to be lost entirely – and there have been losses, some due to lack of back-up and wallet management by the owner, but mostly due to hackers and thieves using Trojans to access computers. The Winklevoss twins, arch-nemeses to Mark Zuckerberg after the legal battle in the early days of Facebook, are significant owners and investors in Bitcoin and they have been public about their advice to other owners, and admittedly store their wallets offline on hard drives and USBs located in three different safes in three different locations – such is their perception and evaluation of the security risks.
Usability The ‘last mile problem’ is a major one for Bitcoin at the moment. Its use as a tool of purchase is extremely limited. Mass acceptance will only occur when Bitcoin has the value and approachability of real tender in the marketplace – and this ranges from retail outlets to ATMs.
Independence The very nature of Bitcoin, its independence and decentralisation, is also working against it, in the short-term at least. Trust is a major issue with money, without which a currency is ultimately worthless, and this is where a government-recognised, centrally managed currency will always have the advantage over Bitcoin; although the level of this advantage may change under circumstances such as those in Cyprus recently, when the government froze bank accounts. Bitcoin advocates will be hoping for more instances of instability like this to see their pet project gain traction.
Reputation Currently, the highest use of Bitcoin in a single marketplace is on Silk Road. Silk Road is hidden in an anonymous part of the
Gambling is still gambling and social gaming is still just gaming. (Elements of consideration, chance/skill, prize, in different combinations determine whether an activity is gambling, a lottery, a contest, or some other activity. In what form a player earns a right or pays to play affects whether or not consideration is present, but little basis exists to conclude paying or playing in BTC presents any special, exceptional fact.) Operating any sort of a virtual currency-related business triggers a host of federal and state laws in the US, as well as those of other countries. Many of these unexpected non-gaming legal and regulatory minefields may be avoided by structuring any gaming business to steer clear of a need for money transmitting licensing, prospective markets/jurisdictions which carry overly burdensome anti-money laundering requirements for merchants, examination of Bank Secrecy Act requirements, etc. As more and more Bitcoin exchanges or ‘miners’, as opposed to gaming operators or merchants as such, have to comply with registration, reporting and monitoring of Bitcoin issuance and sales/redemptions, the perceived value of Bitcoin transactions and anonymity utilities will drop. By David Gzesh, Legal Counsel at Gzesh Law Offices
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web called Tor, where the main products for purchase are illegal drugs. This is tarnishing the reputation of the virtual currency to both potential retailers and users. In addition, the anonymous nature of Bitcoin has led to allegations of all manner of other unsavoury purposes, such as tax evasion, money laundering and terrorism financing.
Ponzi scheme Many analysts and commentators suggest that Bitcoin has the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme in that users buy into the system using real money, but can only leave and reclaim their cash if there are sufficient numbers of other people that want to buy their Bitcoins; i.e. if new participants enter the system. This point is arguable on both sides, however, with the losses from Ponzi schemes in the past few years, there is much scepticism around anything that might appear to be dubious.
Bitcoin and gambling Bitcoin is interesting with respect to its role in the gambling industry. While larger, licensed operators do not accept the virtual currency, and none have publicly come forward with any sort of opinion in either direction, there are some new and smaller gambling companies that are accepting Bitcoin, such as the Bitcoin-only online poker site, sealswithclubs.eu. Advantages for operators are low transaction costs, access to new markets and demographics that new payment partners always bring, and the fact that there is a likely correlation between early Bitcoin adopters and gamblers – mining or owning Bitcoin is a significant gamble. Users could probably get better odds in Vegas and at least in Sin City rather than a server warehouse, their drinks would be free, so it is likely that this small base of Bitcoin punters would be sports bettors, casino players and poker nuts as well.
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The downside and risks of Bitcoin, however, cannot be underestimated – especially for companies with reputations, P&Ls and licenses to protect. ●●The anonymous nature of Bitcoin and trouble, for now at least, of identifying where the money has come from goes against every KYC and fraud management requirement and effort made by operators, and until this feature can satisfy reputable regulators and legislators throughout the world, it is hard to imagine this currency being available as a standard. ●●In-line with licensing requirements, operators need to have funds available to cover potential outlays. With liquidity an issue, it is unlikely that any single entity would have sufficient Bitcoin to cover its risk, and going to the marketplace, with all its volatility, bears unpalatable risk. ●●For unscrupulous operators, Bitcoin deftly gets around the implementation of UIGEA quite simply by not involving financial institutions, and if this becomes a real problem it will not only tarnish the currency, but may have wider implications in the rollout of US legislation which is currently in its nascent stage.
Future Bitcoin has been compared to Napster, the music file sharing system, in that it operates on the same peer-to-peer principle. Napster forced the music industry to change, but it doesn’t play a major role in comparison with current leaders such as Spotify or iTunes. Like Napster, Bitcoin could crash out, shut down or disappear, but it in that case, it is likely to leave a lasting legacy. Indeed, there are already Bitcoin copycats such as Litecoin, Zerocoin or Ripple/OpenCoin that are eager successors, and/or there may be a role for the larger payment behemoths such as VISA – which recently acquired PlaySpan, a company whose platform handles transactions for digital games and
goods on several worldwide social networks – or Amex, which bought Sometrics that works with video game makers to establish virtual currencies within their games. Who knows what the next few months or years will see. Essentially, Bitcoin is, at present, an Internet experiment that some anticipate will become a full blown alternative currency while others expect it to disappear like pixie dust in a fairytale. The reality is that many of the advancements we enjoy today started out innocuously and without consideration or knowledge of where they would end up. Let’s not forget that connecting computers and the very Internet itself started out as a technical experiment – and look where we are today. Aideen Shortt is a veteran of the gambling industry having been involved in a range of senior roles since the outset of online betting and gaming. Her experience straddles both operator and supplier sectors, she is an active participant and speaker at industry events and has an extensive network of contacts. She was originally employed as part of the marketing team that launched flutter.com (now Betfair) and from there moved to Coral Eurobet (part of the Gala Group) as a senior member of the marketing team, progressing during her time there to the position of Marketing Director for the online business. In addition, Aideen has held director level roles at Skybet (part of BSkyB) and Chartwell Technology, and has now set up as a private consultant working for a range of different sectors within the industry including Paddy Power, fantasy gaming company Clever TV, Jersey’s leading IT and data centre, Foreshore Limited, and also media companies Bluff Europe and Sport Business. Aideen is a graduate of University College Cork (Ireland), and has a Master’s Degree from Kingston University in the UK.
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BITCOIN: THE NAPSTER OF MONEY? One person at a time, change becomes inevitable, writes iGaming Consultant, Rene Magri. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has always been a great disruptor to traditional business. The collective nature of the technology – a technical or transactional journey between one person and another – makes it an ideal ‘from the ground-up’ movement that symbolically ‘overthrows’ the dinosaurs. Peer-to-peer has proved the catalyst for incredible changes in the business world, and in a number of industries: music – Napster, the poster boy of this movement and the first ‘sacrificial lamb’, if you will, went down and brought the music industry with it; Skype – a product that, in my view, changed the business models of mobile operators and opened up communications to small-time providers, aiding the disruption of a $7 trillion industry. Last but not least, we have Bitcoin. But can Bitcoin do what Napster did to music, and what Skype did to communications?
Bitcoin: the end of money? Fundamentally, all of the big paradigm shifts associated with Bitcoin are a tad overboard, in my view. Certainly, Bitcoin is having a huge impact, but as more of a catalyst than the real disruptor that will change money forever. It will make virtual, online currency-like systems more prevalent, but as a ‘money shot’, so to
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speak; thus, becoming the ‘Napster of money’, rather than the ‘Skype of money’. However my own preference would see it become the latter.
some senses). Why? Since the value of Bitcoin is very fluid, and holding on to your Bitcoins is very much like an investment, it becomes a gamble. Thus, any gambling
“Bitcoin is having a huge impact, but as more of a catalyst than the real disruptor that will change money forever.” What is the point, really? Chris Dixon, a well respected Venture Capitalist and Partner with Andreessen Horowitz (in themselves a top venture firm), as well as investors in many companies that are genre-defining, is very bullish on Bitcoin. In a recent Pando Monthly event – an event where entrepreneurs and/or investors are interviewed at length about trends, history, and the future – stated: “Bitcoins will serve as a release valve for the economy... they will get more people to buy online, and pay and/or receive money, who traditionally use Visa. Also, should I want to pay for an article on the Wall Street Journal, I would be able to do it easily, without having to input my bank details – which until now have made such transactions very laborious and, thus, impractical.”
Why is it relevant for gambling? As alluded to elsewhere, the nature of Bitcoin is very much akin to gambling (in
company that accepts Bitcoins would increase its chances of acquiring players. However, this comes at a price. Since Bitcoins are not regulated, controlled and are anonymous, the nature of the player coming in through Bitcoin is very hard (if not impossible) to profile. This, legally, is very problematic for operators in our space. If, on the other hand, operators diversify and build a social games arm (for example) where micro-transactions become the order of the day (and virtual currency, by its very nature is what fuels such business models), then Bitcoin becomes a boon for such a business. It is not uncommon, and I dare say, extremely useful as competition continues to enter our space from ‘outside’, to apply different charging models to specific channels to maintain growth levels and sustain significant commercial operations. Having said this, there are a number of operators that decided to cross the chasm
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“Since Bitcoins are not regulated, controlled and are anonymous, it is very hard (if not impossible) to profile the players using them. This is legally very problematic for operators in our space.” and accept Bitcoin, or be totally ‘powered’ by Bitcoin. Indeed, there are a number of poker, lottery and casino sites that are entirely focused on Bitcoin transactions – it remains to be seen how other major operators will observe this space, and whether they will ultimately take the plunge to capitalise on this alternative currency.
Bitcoin(ed) affiliates? There are a decent number of affiliate programs paying affiliates in Bitcoins across a wide range of industries, and the trend seems to suggest this is only the beginning. However, the point at stake in this instance is, “What makes Bitcoins attractive to affiliates?” One thing that comes to mind is the following: operators or affiliate program owners in any industry could pay affiliates in Bitcoins – based on a value agreed to beforehand and corresponding with the value of Bitcoins at ‘date X’ – leaving affiliates with the possibility of making further profit (or losing it) by trading the Bitcoins they earn as commission through the program.
I understand that this is a bit of a stretch, as it translates as a risk for the operator (day-to-day business risks), but it could work in some instances.
Money has never felt so ‘friendly’ As alluded to earlier, I could see Bitcoin become the ‘Skype’ success story in the currency space it is disrupting. Whether it can or not at this point is very hard to tell; the Bitcoin movement is still in its early stages, and its impact is still being measured and responded to by politicians, intellectuals, competition (like opencoin), adaptations like MintChip (a Canadian government-supported virtual currency) and Amazon Coins, and god knows how many other ‘hacks’ there will be to the Bitcoin phenomenon. All this is good, in a sense. But, speaking of hacking, to make Bitcoin a truly ‘alternative currency’ requires trust, and a high level of it. So far, the hacking of the main exchange, Mt.Gox, did not help with this. Albeit, as Nakamoto wrote in his paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, that “The system
is secure as long as the honest nodes collectively control more [computing] power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.” Most companies in the wake of Skype, Napster and other P2P businesses did not ‘see it coming’. And with regards to Bitcoin, I believe that in many ways we are not yet seeing its full potential. We are not even seeing the proverbial tip of the iceberg as, for all we know, the currency that made the industrial revolution prosper might very much be at the end of its journey. Bitcoin might be a ‘money shot’, but one that provides a deadly wound to the currency system as we know it.
ReNe CoLIN MAGRI consults iGaming companies on customer acquisition, new business models, and mobile and social channel monetisation. Through his network, he can reach customers in over 100 countries. He can be reached at rene@clearlead.eu
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Strategising Today for Monetisation Tomorrow How affiliates can capitalise on social gaming, by Income Access’ Shelby Landeck. For a sector so keen on privacy, the importance of affiliates in iGaming has to be one of the industry’s worst kept secrets, but they’re also one of its biggest success stories. Whether operators like it or not, affiliates help to generate a significant proportion of operators’ player bases and, as a result, their revenues. This is done by generating high-quality traffic, deploying intelligent marketing techniques and by acting as high-level, third-party endorsers for their brands, products and websites. Without affiliates, a number of the industry’s household names may struggle to acquire and retain some of the highest valued players across highly-regulated European markets. Outside of iGaming, however, many people will be unaware of the significance of affiliates. A UK Internet Advertising Bureau report, released in March, highlighted online gaming as the fifth highest spending sector for online performance marketing, an industry which received more than £800 million in investment in 2012. Affiliates play such a vital role in gaming that many European operators set aside 30 percent or more of their overall marketing budgets – which can often exceed $100 million – as part of their player acquisition strategies. With a number of European markets, beginning to open their doors to regulated online gaming, and with others, including Sweden and Holland, keen to follow in the footsteps of Italy and Spain, iGaming is showing no sign of slowing down in the region. When entering new markets, both established and localised affiliates play key roles in generating new and – what every operator seeks – sustainable, high-spending traffic. Setting up an operation can cost operators tens of millions of dollars in new fees and taxes. During an expensive and often risky time for operators, the right affiliates can give gaming brands a distinct competitive edge over their rivals. The great success many affiliates and operators have had in working together in
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Europe, however, has not simply emerged overnight. It has taken them many years to perfect techniques, to find the right partnerships and to develop long-lasting relationships that are able, if done properly, to reap huge rewards.
better liquidity and larger prizes. According to poker data website PokerScout, Ultimate Poker has managed a seven day average of just 158 players in the fortnight since the site was launched.
The social prize Planning ahead For newly regulating markets, particularly in the US, planning and initiating a traffic-driving strategy now rather than later will almost certainly lead to a stronger database of high-spending, loyal players and, crucially, future monetisation. And by mirroring the evolution of a mature and regulated European market, the potential for affiliates across the Atlantic, European partners planning to re-enter the US, as well as for real-money and social gaming operators, is vast. On April 30 of this year, Nevada’s Ultimate Gaming became the first operator to launch an online poker site in the US since the wider market was effectively closed down by the introduction of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Only two dot.com websites, PokerStars and Full Tilt, chose to remain in legal limbo and continued to accept US players. Today, Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey are so far the only states to have enacted intra-state online gaming legislation. However, with regional governments desperate for tax dollars in order to either fill gaping budget deficits or fund good causes such as education, other larger states will almost inevitably follow suit in the coming years. There is also the prospect of a number of these states ‘compacting’, or legally merging poker liquidity, in order to boost the number of players, and therefore revenue, that is needed to operate a sustainable poker operation. But, as Ultimate Poker has experienced in the first few weeks of operation, driving traffic is no easy feat, particularly from such a small pool of players and, equally, from one which arguably would rather deposit their money on offshore sites offering
While effectively targeting and acquiring traffic may be a priority for new online-facing intra-state US land-based organisations such as Ultimate, this has not, until now, been a problem for social studios. One blogger on marketing website Optimove succinctly suggested that “social games have the reach, online gambling has the money”. Cost and market saturation, however, continue to burden the social gaming industry. For a number of years, operators relied predominantly on Facebook, both as an operating platform and as a means of cheaply acquiring and retaining players. In addition, they employed the services of niche analytics firms in order to track and trigger marketing efforts on Facebook. However, the world’s largest social platform is increasingly becoming prohibitively expensive to many operators. With social studios rapidly maturing from developer-led to business-focused, professional outfits, operators are hurriedly seeking more cost-effective solutions in order to capitalise on the growing global appetite for social games. So, where will alternatives come from? As so often in iGaming, the model can be found in Europe, where, for the last decade or more, operators have used vertical-focused affiliates in order to reach their blind spot: quality, lifetime revenue-generating players who are highspending and loyal. Not only that, while referring some of the market’s best and most profitable customers, affiliates – or ‘marketing partners’ as they’re known in the US – simultaneously act as third-party endorsers for high performing brands and are able to create the buzz and additional visibility that certain operators are unable to generate without their help.
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Score One for the Little Guy Three free ways to make a name for yourself as a poker affiliate, by Robbie Strazynski, Founder of Cardplayer Lifestyle. These days, there are essentially two major classes of poker affiliates: let’s call them the ‘super affiliates’ and the ‘little guys’. The super affiliates are the ones that have full-time staff and generate tremendous revenues and traffic. This traffic is achieved either by having one hugely popular site or, alternatively, by having a network of interconnected domains. They’ve got big budgets, big ambitions, and all the right tools in place to keep them at the top of the poker affiliate pyramid. The little guys, by contrast, are usually one-person outfits with minimal budgets and limited resources. Despite being outmanned and outgunned, however, it doesn’t mean that the little guys are incapable of making names for themselves as poker affiliates. The key for them is finding creative and innovative ways to stand out using the two currencies they do have: time and passion. While it’s impossible to compete on equal footing with the super affiliates, smaller poker affiliates can still effectively carve out a niche for themselves through clever, well-thought-out marketing tactics. Here are three ways that the ‘little guys’ can grow their reputation in the industry, which won’t cost them a penny:
1. Make your poker website the best it can be It can never be repeated enough: your site should be a fountain of new content. Whether it’s you or others who actually do the writing, post new content as often as possible, create the infographics and embed
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the videos – you’ve got to do your utmost to make your website one that will attract new poker traffic and return visitors. The keys to having a strong web presence are publishing as frequently as possible and becoming an authority for your niche audience. It is this audience for whom you will keep producing new and engaging content. Cost: Zero.
2. Drive Traffic to Your Site via Social Media, Guest Blogging, and Poker Forums Social media It’s not enough to just have an audience; you’ve also got to do everything in your power to keep your visitors engaged. Anyone can open a Twitter account or create a Facebook page or LinkedIn profile, but it’s intelligent and systematic use of these great free tools that help to keep your audience wanting more of the poker content you’ve got to offer. Aim to collect likes, comments, shares, +1s, and retweets from your audience as though they were poker chips you want to add to your stack. Be hungry for them. Each social media channel should also have its own unique characteristics that set them apart from one another and from your site. Sure, you can paste links back to your site from anywhere, but feeding your followers a steady stream of bonus content, like behind-the-scenes pictures, extra stats, or even just interesting poll questions, is what will stoke interest and help you build a flock of railbirds loyal to your brand.
Guest blogging Aside from social media, guest blogging is a terrific way to drive more poker traffic to your site. If you’re a great writer, put those talents to use and start cranking out excellent articles. Develop uniquely-tailored content for each site you pitch a proposal to, so that your articles are most likely to resonate with those sites’ target audience. Readers are, thus, naturally much more likely to click on the link back to your site in order to check out more of the content you’ve produced. Critically, just as important as the backlink is an ‘author-rel’ link to your Google+ profile. Not only does that add to your authority as a writer of good content, but the more of an authority you are, the more it will, in turn, boost the site you’re guest posting on. (So if you’re still not on Google+ yet, get to it already!) Whether it’s on other poker sites, in gaming industry publications, or anywhere else on the web, good guest bloggers are always welcome. You’ve just got to be proactive about seeking out opportunities.
Poker forums Many forums have strict rules about linking to websites. That said, you’re almost always allowed to have a link or two in your signature so long as you’ve been active enough. So, don’t just be a poker forum dabbler – be an active participant. Stick with this strategy long enough and it will not only lend more authority to each and every post of yours within the forum, but it will also probably lead fellow members
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to see what else you have to say about all things poker (i.e., on your website). Besides the more popular poker forums, you can also branch out to the top gaming affiliate marketing forums and employ a similar strategy. Chances are that if you’re a gaming affiliate, you like to talk and read about poker too. So far, so good, and you still haven’t yet had to open your wallet.
3. Use the Twitter acupressure method Okay, so I just coined a term. What I mean to say is that just as focusing on particular pressure points can effectively get the entire body to respond, poker affiliates can target particular Twitter users with the goal of reaching the widest possible audience. Essentially, Twitter has allowed ‘regular people’ to connect with famous and popular people like never before in human history. The informal nature of this social media tool lends itself to being utilised most effectively by extroverts. Leave your shyness behind and start trying to connect with influential and authoritative people. For poker affiliates, this means getting in touch with members of the poker media as well as the pros themselves.
What sometimes works is tweeting with a shout-out to a poker pro after you’ve published some content in which they were mentioned and politely asking for a retweet. What works even better is the ‘slow brew’ of trying to form a relationship with these high-profile poker people over time. You alone as a poker affiliate have a limited reach, but you could potentially leverage the vast audiences of the poker world’s most popular Twitterati by getting them to want to broadcast and share your content far and wide. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t forget to thank them if they’re kind enough to oblige. Case in point, two Daniel Negreanu retweets helped to more than triple my site’s (average) traffic in February. In the same way that the Apollo 13 astronauts utilised the gravitational force of the moon to slingshot their space vehicle back to Earth, so too can you harness the much greater power of poker’s big shots to help propel your own craft far faster and higher than it could go on its own. Note that the Twitter acupuncture method only works if your interest in connecting with people is genuine. Poker players in particular can spot a bluff a mile away.
Guess what? You’ve still got just as much (or as little) money as when you started reading this article.
Conclusion I started out in poker affiliation when I founded my site, Cardplayer Lifestyle, back in 2009. In the almost four years I’ve spent climbing towards my current average traffic of 3,000 unique monthly visitors, I have yet to spend any money whatsoever on advertising (save for printing business cards). Simply put, I just love all things poker and have dedicated myself to slowly, but surely, making a name for myself as a poker affiliate. Score one for the little guy!
Robbie Strazynski is the founder of Cardplayerlifestyle. com, the go-to news and information resource for recreational poker players and fans. Robbie is also the co-creator of the Poker Notes Live Android mobile app, which allows live poker players to take quick, efficient notes on their opponents, thereby improving performance at the felt. His full-time occupation is being the Casino Editor in the Content Marketing department for the Euro Partners family of brands.
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Real-Time Bidding for Affiliates Is this the end of online marketing as we know it? By Ziv Baram, CEO and co-Founder of Cudbert ltd. Real-Time Bidding (RTB) has been drawing a lot of attention and money from venture capital funds, analyst firms and online advertising giants such as Google (AdX and the acquisitions of Admeld and invite media) and Facebook (the launch of FBX) in the last few years, creating a significant amount of buzz. The basis for the buzz is the shared view that RTB is causing a major disruption to, and changing the course of, online advertising as we know it. This change is happening very quickly, and analysts like IDC predict that by the end of this year, most of the display ads sold indirectly in the USA will be sold and bought using RTB, with the UK, Germany and France expected to reach to this point by end of 2014. RTB was first applied to automate indirect sales of online display advertising and since then have been applied to automate other forms of advertising such as direct sales and premium display; mobile; video and even out-of-home, TV and radio. RTB is growing in popularity as it enables advertisers to reach the right user, in the right place, at the right time with the right message on an impression-byimpression basis, and assign an individual value to each and every ad impression. Leveraging advanced technology offered by a growing number of suppliers, advertisers can evaluate and price over 40 billion ad impressions per day in real-time and place bids on reaching specific users. RTB is gaining so much popularity as it dramatically improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the advertising process, and by that benefits all players in the ecosystem: the affiliate, the user, and the advertising program.
Efficiency ●●Reducing
operational costs: research figures published by Google and several other leading companies show that at least 40 percent of the total costs of advertising online are operational costs; money spent on facilitating the advertising and buying traffic. In comparison, in TV advertising,
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only two percent are operational costs. This operational inefficiency is increasing the overall cost of acquisition and cuts from the profits of both affiliate and the operator. ●●Eliminating waste: the basis unit for all advertising is impressions ‘packaged’, which are priced in units of thousands – CPM. This model generates a lot of waste as advertisers spend significant parts of the budget on users they don’t necessarily desire. RTB is fundamentally changing this model as impressions are bought and sold one-by-one; ‘handpicked’ by the advertiser and the publisher. It provides a great opportunity for the affiliate to sell each impression to the program that offers the best pricing for that user, and for the program to buy only the users it is looking for, for the pricing it can afford. ●●Real-time and the law of large numbers: RTB performs an auction in real-time for every impression in less than 100 milliseconds and repeats the process millions of times per day. It facilitates experimenting and the fast validation of new models and assumptions and, through that, optimising the campaign and audience segment models.
Effectiveness Reach the right user, in the right place, at the right time with the right message. ●●Right user: RTB is customer-centric, where first, second and third-party user data is used to inform the buying and selling decisions of each and every particular ad impression. It allows the publisher/affiliate and the advertiser to make an informed decision whether to buy or sell. ●●Right time: RTB allows the advertiser and the publisher to use data on external factors like developments in live sporting events or changing weather conditions to modify their campaign in real-time. ●●Right place: using ad verification tools, contextual tools and data passed on by the publisher, the advertiser can buy impressions that are only
displayed in a desirable placement and price it accordingly. ●●Right message: using dynamic, creative optimisation tools and audience data, contextual data and ad verification tools, the advertisers and the publisher can control what messages to display as well as test multiple ad variations per segment and placement in real-time, increasing the likelihood that it will attract the preferred users.
Transparency With RTB, advertisers have the greatest level of transparency available on the individual user and the context in real-time, which significantly increases the value of each ad impression and the corresponding price it will be willing to pay to the affiliate.
Summary As long as individual impressions are being grouped into a bucket and sold at a pre-negotiated price, they are not being fairly valued and are often sold under value. In the long run, affiliate programs that have better performing campaigns could pay more to target the right users and better performing campaigns will have a positive impact on the affiliate and the program. RTB is not a silver bullet, but it is changing online marketing as we once knew it. It has great potential to generate great value to affiliates and programs, but could also hurt you if you do not adapt in time. Thus, it’s imperative that whether you are an affiliate or work for an affiliate program, you understand the RTB landscape, its expected implications to your business, and how you could successfully utilise RTB to your benefit. Ziv Baram is CEO and co-Founder of Cudbert ltd, a company that specialises in programmatic media buy and systems integration. Was previously spent over seven years at Spiral Solutions where he gained experience in all aspects of the iGaming business.
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US Data Centre The Regulatory Map Since the US Department of Justice publicly reversed its position on the scope of the 1961 Wire Act in December 2011, conceding that it only reserved jurisdiction over sportsbetting, we have been reporting on various state activity with regards to the broadening of intra-state lottery and iGaming models. This issue, we see the very first patch of white on our US map to signify Nevada taking the first legal US bet, courtesy of Ultimate Poker. Nevada: White Regulated Gaming Type: Poker-only Operator Type: Applicants with existing land-based license (open to foreign operators) Estimated Go Live Date: Live. April 30, 2013, will go down as the day when online poker legally returned to the US, as Station Casinos subsidiary Ultimate Gaming went live with its real money poker site in Nevada. UltimatePoker.com offers limit and no-limit games of Texas Hold’em via single table cash games, sitand-go events and multi-table tournaments featuring buy-ins starting from a few cents up to $100. Ultimate Gaming’s Chairman, Tom Breitling, said, “We are proud to be the first company to deliver legal and secure real money online gaming to poker players.” On May 9, Ultimate Poker reportedly discontinued the use of all services from Iovation in light of previous links to the now defunct Ultimate Bet. Illinois: Green Regulated Gaming Type: Online lottery
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Operator Type: Illinois Lottery controlled Estimated Go Live Date: Online Georgia: Green Regulated Gaming Type: Online lottery Operator Type: Georgia Lottery controlled Estimated Go Live Date: Online Delaware: Green Regulated Gaming Type: Full-service online gaming Operator Type: Centralised iGaming system via Delaware Lottery and operated by the three state casinos Estimated Go Live Date: End of summer, 2013. Delaware has completed its RFP process which was released on behalf of the State Lottery inviting applications for the provision of the back-end technology platform and operations manager services. The Lottery hopes to have iGaming up and running by no later than September 30 of this year. The law also provides for the state to explore compacts with other states, a function also evident in the Nevada and New Jersey laws.
White
Live (iGaming)
Green
Legislation Enabled/Lottery Online
Amber
Work in Progress/Under Consideration
Red
Undecided/Back to the Drawing Board
Blue
No Movement
Black
Prohibited/ Pending Prohibition
Maryland: Green Regulated Gaming Type: Online lottery Operator Type: Maryland Lottery controlled Estimated Go Live Date: 2013 Michigan: Green Regulated Gaming Type: Online lottery Operator Type: Michigan Lottery controlled Estimated Go Live Date: 2013 New Jersey: Green Regulated Gaming Type: Full-service online gaming Operator Type: Atlantic City casinos with existing land-based license Estimated Go Live Date: 2013. Finally, at the third attempt and after over two years of campaigning, New Jersey has passed its intra-state online gaming regulations into law. All parties are hopeful of a 2013 launch date after Governor Christie signed the bill at the end of February, having conditionally vetoed it earlier in the month. Intriguingly, the bill is absent of the “bad actor” provision evident in bills in Nevada and Delaware which has ruffled a few feathers, especially with PokerStars hovering over
esota
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New York Verm
Wisconsin Michigan Washington
Maine
North Dakota
Montana Oregon
New Vermont Hampshire
Minnesota Idaho
South Dakota
Wisconsin
New York
Massachusetts
Pennsylvania
Michigan
Wyoming
Rhode Island
Connecticut
Nebraska
a
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Iowa
Nevada
Ohio Utah
Illinois
Maryland
Colorado California
Kansas
Missouri
Ohio
Delaware
Indiana West Virginia
North Carolina
Tennessee Arizona
Virginia
Kentucky
Oklahoma New Mexico
South Carolina
Arkansas
Illinois
Indiana
Mississippi
Alabama
District of Columbia
M
Georgia
Louisiana Texas
West Virginia
Missouri
Kentucky
a deal to become a permanent fixture in Atlantic City. However, Atlantic Club terminated the deal on May 1, citing that the deadline to conclude the purchase agreement had passed. The Rational Group, PokerStars’ owner, and the Atlantic Club are currently in the throes of a lawsuit over the termination. California: Amber Present Status: There are three bills in the California Senate in 2013 that deal with some form of online gaming regulation. AB51 is the Internet Poker bill introduced by Senator Rod Wright that would limit online poker to the state and to those who have obtained a license from the state. Only holders of existing land-based licenses, including gaming tribes, can apply. Senator Correa’s SB678 is less detailed; in fact, the only details evident in the bill’s 14 lines of text is that Internet poker sites can be operated in California, the Gambling Control Commission is in charge, and people can apply. Senator Wright has also introduced SB190, a sportsbetting bill that would
Arkansas
Mississippi
Louisiana
Florida
permit current land-based licensees to take wagers on non-Californian sports events (or teams), however, whether this will extend to the Internet is unclear, but is not ruled out. California will continue to be eagerly watched, being the fifth biggest economy in the world, but there remain many variables that could swing the iGaming argument in either direction.
Tennessee
Massachusetts: Amber Present Status: Senator Bruce Tarr has introduced S197 that would permit companies to offer online gaming in the state under license of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. There is also an online lottery bill in place although there is little information as to the support of either bill.
Alabama
New York: Amber Present Status: Non-binding version of budget bill supportive of online poker has been passed. Pennsylvania: Amber Present Status: Online poker bill
North Carolina
introduced, but costs may prove a barrier for operators.
Mississippi: Red Present Status: Back to the drawing board Iowa: Red Present Status: Dead for the year
South Carolina
District of Columbia: Red Present Status: Back to the drawing board Florida: Red Present Status: Back to the drawing board
Georgia
Connecticut: Red Present Status: Undecided Utah: Black Present Status: Prohibited Texas: Black Present Status: Texas remains in the ‘prohibited’ group as we are only dealing with state-level legislation, but the state has put forward plans that would allow it to optin to any federal law governing iGaming.
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Florida
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US Data Centre Top Gambling Websites by State Competitive Intelligence Services company, Experian Hitwise, provides data on the top visited gambling sites ranked by US Internet traffic for the entire US and by state based upon a sample of ten million US Internet users. The data does not include mobile traffic. Most Popular Gambling Websites Nationwide Ranked by Visits Share Month of April 2013 Websites
Total Visits
PCHLotto
Visits Share Rank Rank March 13 Feb 13
22,492,699
6.16%
DNR
DNR
Rank Jan 13 DNR
Lottery Post
16,987,020
4.65%
2
1
1
Florida Lottery
13,890,737
3.80%
3
2
2
PCHSlots
12,756,108
3.49%
4
4
4
NY Lottery
12,586,187
3.45%
5
5
3
PCH Instant Bingo
11,949,723
3.27%
DNR
DNR
DNR
FreeSlots
11,585,700
3.17%
6
3
5
Texas Lottery Commission
10,644,651
2.91%
7
7
7
Pennsylvania Lottery
10,171,436
2.78%
8
8
8
WorldWinner
9,816,253
2.69%
9
6
6
Source: Experian Hitwise US
Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from Illinois – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented Visits
Segmented
Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from Massachusetts – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented
Segmented
Visits
Rate
Massachusetts State Lottery Commission
57.04%
91.59%
PCHLotto
3.37%
1.79%
FoxWoods Resort Casino
2.66%
38.81%
Lottery Post
2.44%
1.81%
FreeSlots
1.83%
2.07%
PCHSlots
1.61%
1.68%
WorldWinner
1.51%
1.98%
PCH Instant Bingo
1.50%
1.60%
Twinspires.com
1.42%
3.86%
TVG
1.36%
7.49%
Rate
Illinois Lottery
27.92%
84.12%
Lottery Post
7.96%
6.11%
PCHLotto
6.45%
3.55%
FreeSlots
3.73%
4.35%
PCH Instant Bingo
3.69%
4.05%
PCHSlots
3.64%
3.90%
King.com
2.39%
4.89%
Bovada.lv
1.68%
11.85%
FreeLotto
1.49%
4.49%
Powerball
1.33%
2.46%
Source: Experian Hitwise US
Source: Experian Hitwise US
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Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from California – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented Visits
Segmented Rate
California Lottery
19.87%
94.42%
PCHLotto
6.61%
8.73%
WorldWinner
3.51%
11.34%
PCH Instant Bingo
3.33%
8.78%
PCHSlots
3.32%
8.54%
Sport Bookie Online
2.86%
22.45%
FreeSlots
2.66%
7.43%
TVG
2.61%
35.50%
Daily Racing Form
2.55%
18.06%
King.com
2.29%
11.25%
Source: Experian Hitwise US
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data provided by
Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from New Jersey – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented Visits
Lottery Post
14.30%
8.50%
New Jersey Lottery
11.58%
89.52%
PCHLotto
5.67%
2.42%
Covers
3.23%
10.26%
NY Lottery
3.17%
2.51%
PCHSlots
2.96%
2.47%
Harrah's Casino Hotels
2.96%
6.87%
Lottery USA
2.88%
7.05%
PCH Instant Bingo
2.81%
2.39%
King.com
2.54%
4.03%
Segmented Rate
Source: Experian Hitwise US
Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from Iowa – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented Visits
Segmented
Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from Nevada – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented Visits
Rate
Segmented
Most Popular Gambling Websites Ranked by Visits from Florida – 4 Rolling Weeks Ending May 4, 2013 Websites
Segmented Visits
Rate
Segmented Rate
PCHLotto
16.10%
1.37%
Sport Bookie Online
31.21%
47.07%
Florida Lottery
44.98%
FreeSlots
9.02%
1.63%
PCHLotto
6.04%
1.54%
PCHLotto
5.71%
6.98%
PCH Instant Bingo
7.86%
1.33%
PCH Instant Bingo
3.75%
1.90%
4.23%
96.38%
PCHSlots
7.62%
1.27%
PCHSlots
3.71%
1.84%
Florida Lottery - Second Chance Drawing
Powerball
6.16%
1.76%
Covers
3.21%
6.07%
Lottery Post
3.98%
6.79%
PCHSlots
2.85%
6.80%
PCH Instant Bingo
2.79%
6.81%
WorldWinner
2.24%
6.70%
FreeSlots
2.06%
5.34%
www.us-lotteries.com
1.44%
14.01%
Daily Racing Form
1.38%
9.09%
WorldWinner
4.24%
0.88%
California Lottery
3.18%
2.91%
Brisnet.com
3.51%
4.58%
Ketqua.net
3.12%
39.44%
King.com Harrah's Casino Hotels Game Colony.com Source: Experian Hitwise US
2.73% 1.97% 1.97%
0.87% 0.92% 5.22%
VegasInsider.com Harrah's Casino Hotels FreeSlots
2.07% 1.90% 1.84%
Source: Experian Hitwise US
9.76% 2.63% 0.99%
91.75%
Source: Experian Hitwise US
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IGAMING DATA CENTRE iGB Affiliate monitors the latest data trends from intelligence services companies in and around the iGaming sector. This issue, we focus on the latest research from information specialists, comScore, which details the top five search engines in Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe and North America ranked by the percentage of unique searchers per search engine. On the facing page, comScore also provides a breakdown of the worldwide Internet audience, as well as key demographic information relating to online behaviour and age distribution.
TOP 5 SEARCH ENGINES BY REGION ASIA PACIFIC 28%
26%
18%
17%
11%
19%
15%
14%
10%
10%
10%
LATAM 43%
EUROPE 55%
13%
12%
NORTH AMERICA 39%
20%
18%
13%
11%
Source: comScore. Note: all percentages on this page reflect market share of the combined number of unique searchers only for the top five sites highlighted, and do not represent market share for the entire Internet landscape.
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DISTRIBUTION OF WORLDWIDE INTERNET AUDIENCE The US is no Longer the Centre of the Online Universe
87%
OUTSIDE US
42%
13%
ASIA PACIFIC
66% 34%
1996
2012
EUROPE
NORTH AMERICA
M/E AFRICA
LATAM
27%
14%
9%
8%
TIME SPENT AND GROWTH ACROSS REGIONS
UNIQUE VISITORS (MM)
HOURS PER VISITOR
US Users Spent Most Time, Whilst Asia Pacific Outgrows Rest of the World
42.8
26.9
22.7
18.9
18.2
M/E AFRICA
NORTH AMERICA EUROPE
LATAM
ASIA PACIFIC
+7%
+6%
+2%
+7% 596
637
382
+1%
408
127
ASIA PACIFIC
Global average 24.7 Hours a month
EUROPE
135
M/E AFRICA
211
215 129
NORTH AMERICA
Dec 11
131
Dec 12
LATAM
AGE BREAKDOWN FOR THE EUROPEAN AND ASIAN INTERNET AUDIENCE 17%
15 - 24 21%
ASIA PACIFIC
EUROPE
45 - 54 55+
28%
12%
25 - 34 35 - 44
9%
16%
22% 24%
22% 29%
iGB Affiliate JUNE/JULY 2013
87
MARKETPLACE
7314 bet365 affiliates (148x52+3mm). 24/11/2011 15:38 Page 1
Welcome to the MarketPlace listings section of iGB Affiliate magazine. All listings are taken from the 2013 version of our iGB Affiliate Directory; a 150 page guide to the affiliate programs and service providers who are currently active within the iGaming sector. To request a free copy of this publication or to have your company listed please contact Ed Grundy on Ed@iGamingBusiness.com or call +44 (0) 207 954 352. ADVERTISING, MARKETING & PR
CASINO AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
Isle of Man Post Office
777Affiliates
www.gov.im/post
www.777affiliates.com
Lyceum Media
888
www.lyceummedia.com
www.888.com
Olympian
24Play.com
www.olympiangaming.com
www.e-play24.com
AFFILIATE NETWORK
32Red Affiliates
Income Access
www.32redaffiliates.com
www.incomeaccess.com
7Red
Betsson
www.7red.com
www.betsson.com
Aff Europe
TradeTracker
www.affeurope.com
www.tradetracker.com
Affiliates Star Venus
BINGO AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
www.affiliatesstarvenus.com
770.com
Affiliates United
www.livepartners.com
www.affutd.com
888
All You Bet
www.888.com
www.allyoubet.ag/affiliates
Affiliates United
Dafabet Casino
www.affutd.com
www.dafabet.com/casino
Bet365
Best Pay Partners
www.bet365.com BingoCams www.bingocamspartners.com Ladbrokes www.ladbrokes.com Luckyjar Affiliates www.luckyjar.com
Officially sponsored by
bet365affiliates.com www.gambleaware.co.uk
Come On www.comeon.com Commission365 www.commission365.com EnergyCasino.com www.energycasinopartners.com Europartners www.europartners.com Grande Vegas Casino www.grandevegasaffiliates.com iGamefriends.com www.igamefriends.com Intertops www.intertops.eu Jackpot Capital www.jackpotcapital.eu Ladbrokes www.ladbrokes.com Liberty Slots www.slotsvendor.com Llama Gaming www.llamagaming.com Mansion (i-Affiliates) www.iaffiliates.com Mojo
www.bestpaypartners.com
www.mojoaffiliates.com
Bet365
Mr Green
www.bet365.com
www.mrgreen.com
BetEnergy
Mybet
betenergy.com
www.mybet.com
Betfair
Nordic Gaming
www.betfair.com
www.nordicbet.com
Paddy Power
BetVictor Casino
Paddy Power
www.paddypower.com
www.victorsaffiliates.com
www.paddypower.com
PAF
Brightshare
PAF
www.paf.com
www.brightshare.com
www.paf.com
StarGames
Casumo
Referback
www.stargames.com
www.casumoaffiliates.com
www.referback.com
TradeTracker
Cherry
Rich Club Affiliates
www.tradetracker.com
www.cherryaffiliates.com
www.richclubaffiliates.com 7314 bet365 affiliates (148x52+3mm). 24/11/2011 15:38 Page 1
Officially sponsored by
88
bet365affiliates.com iGB Affiliate JUNE/JULY 2013
www.gambleaware.co.uk
MARKETPLACE
Roller Casino
DafaPoker
Affiliates United
www.rollercasino.com
www.dafabet.com/poker
www.affutd.com
Slotastic!
Intertops
All You Bet
www.slotastic.com
www.intertops.eu
www.allyoubet.org
Llama Gaming
Bet3000
Slotland www.slotlandaffiliates.com SpringBok Casino www.springbokcasino.co.za Stan James www.stanjames.com Star Games www.stargamesaffiliate.com Trade Tracker www.tradetracker.com
www.llamagaming.com Mybet www.mybet.com Nordic Gaming www.nordicbet.com Paddy Power
www.bet3000.com Bet365 www.bet365.com Coral www.coral.co.uk
www.paddypower.com
Dafa Sportsbook
PAF
www.dafabet.com/sports
www.paf.com
IAS Bet
PKR
www.iasbetaffiliates.com
FINANCIAL SERVICES
www.pkr.com
Intertops
24 Option
Stan James
www.24option.com
www.stanjames.com
Aff Europe
Star Games
www.affeurope.com
www.stargames.com
Neto Partners
Trade Tracker
Llama Gaming
www.netopartners.com
www.tradetracker.com
www.llamagaming.com
Winamax
Luxbet
www.winamax.fr
www.luxbet.com
Exbino www.exbino.com Trade Tracker www.tradetracker.com LOTTERY AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
SKILL GAMING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS Affiliates United www.affutd.com
www.intertops.eu Ladbrokes www.ladbrokes.com
Merdian Bet www.meridianbet.com
Bet365
Mybet
Player’s Lottery
www.bet365.com
www.mybet.com
www.theplayerslottery.com
Betfair
Nordic Gaming
PAYMENT SOLUTIONS
www.betfair.com
Intercash
BetVictor Sports
intercash.com
www.victorsaffiliates.com
Neteller
iGame.com
www.neteller.com
www.igame.com
POKER AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
PAF
www.perhead.com
888 Poker
www.paf.com
Sportingbet
www.888.com
Star Games
www.sportingbet.com
Affiliates United www.affutd.com Bet365
www.stargames.com Trade Tracker www.tradetracker.com
www.nordicbet.com Paddy Power www.paddypower.com PerHead
Stan James www.stanjames.com Topbetta
www.bet365.com
SPORTSBETTING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
Buzz
888
TradeTracker
www.buzzsports.com
www.888.com
www.tradetracker.com
www.topbetta.com
7314 bet365 affiliates (148x52+3mm). 24/11/2011 15:38 Page 1
Officially sponsored by
bet365affiliates.com www.gambleaware.co.uk
iGB Affiliate JUNE/JULY 2013
89
webmaster world
Social Gaming and Facebook What Affiliates Need to Know Social gaming and Facebook are joined at the hip and, even in the face of competition from mobile, they’re still growing. Michaela McNamara, Editor at CasinoAffiliatePrograms.com, takes a look at the connection between the two and how affiliates can benefit. Facebook’s rise from Ivy League oddity to worldwide phenomenon went hand in hand with the growth of social gaming. Simple, browser-based games like FarmVille and Texas Hold‘em Poker have caught on like wildfire with the public and are now catching on with affiliate marketers. Though social gaming has lost some ground to Smartphone-based mobile games in the past few years, as many as 250 million people are still logging onto them every month. While a user base the size of the population of Brazil might be good enough for most CEOs, it’s not good enough for Mark Zuckerberg. He has been encouraging social gaming growth on Facebook, including the introduction of real money gambling. This is all great news for gaming affiliates who are looking to diversify their portfolios with social gaming and gambling options. It also means that creating a social media strategy that integrates Facebook and Twitter is more important than ever. Affiliates who embrace social gaming are poised to ride the next big wave of Internet gambling, and here’s what you need to know to get started.
Social gaming, then and now Social gaming giant Zynga launched its mega-hit Texas Hold‘em app on Facebook in July of 2007. Zynga’s timing couldn’t have been better as that was when Facebook’s massive growth spurt had really kicked in. The popular card game helped the company launch other big hits like Mafia Wars and FarmVille. Millions of players became hooked on Zynga’s unique brand of addictive game play and (limited) social interaction. At its peak, FarmVille was drawing a mindblowing 35 million users every day. Unfortunately for Zynga, another product launched in July of 2007 that would alter its fortunes in a big way. That’s when Steve Jobs announced a new product
90
iGB Affiliate JUNE/JULY 2013
from Apple called the iPhone. At the time, few people realised how the Smartphone would revolutionise just about everything we did on the Internet, including playing games. As the years rolled by, both Facebook and Zynga went public with IPOs that were nowhere near as hot as investors had hoped. Today, tepid stock prices and a user base that’s been eroded by competition from more interactive Smartphone-based gaming has sent Zynga and Facebook in search of new revenue sources. Big-time online gambling shops have already launched several real money gambling apps and more are in the works. Right now, real money social gambling on Facebook is limited to the UK, but that probably won’t be the situation for long. In short, social gaming 2.0 is on the way and gambling apps and social gaming affiliate programs are likely to be a big part of it.
Social gaming today Though social gaming has taken a big hit from mobile gaming over the past few years, it’s still drawing big numbers. So what does today’s social gamer look like? Back in the heyday of FarmVille, the average social gamer was a woman in her 40s. Although that demographic is still well represented today (which is why bingo games were some of the first real money gambling offerings), it’s not nearly as dominant as it once was. According to a recent report from the ad group Sponsor Pay, women account for 54 percent of all social gamers. Age-wise, the social gaming space is a very diverse place, though younger players tend to prefer mobile games. Of course, each game has its own unique demographic. For example, 74 percent of Texas Hold‘em players are men, while nearly 80 percent of bingo players are women. Understanding demographics for social games, or anything else, make creating meaningful content a lot easier.
Social gaming content tips Gambling affiliates are already pretty good at creating content in their respective niches, and extending that skill to the social space isn’t a big stretch. The key to Facebook content is to keeping posts short, but adding value. A good example of how gaming can be promoted can be found on IGT’s MegaJackpots page. The content here is timely, enticing and there are plenty of contests to keep readers coming back. IGT must be doing something right because it has racked up over 100,000 ‘likes’ in just five months.
Social gaming affiliate programs There’s plenty of room for affiliates in the new social gaming order. On the gambling side, familiar companies like 888 and Unibet have already launched apps and are ready for business.
And finally Social gaming has definitely lost some ground to mobile over the past few years, but it’s still a formidable force on the web and a natural fit for gambling affiliates.
Michaela McNamara is Editor at CasinoAffiliatePrograms.com (CAP), the world’s largest online gaming affiliate marketing community, and the Internet’s primary location for online gaming brands and affiliate marketers to come together and do business. CAP is owned by Affiliate Media, Inc, an independent online publishing company focused solely on affiliate marketing. Our experts gather, create, and publish information about affiliate marketing and share it with the larger worldwide community to help affiliates better promote leading Internet brands world-wide (and profit by doing so).
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