It has recently become known that online bingo operator Sun Bingo will switch its affiliate program from Gamesys Affiliates to NetHive Affiliate Program. The choice of a new affiliate program to support the promotion of the operator’s offering should not come as a big surprise.
And to many affiliates’ disappointment, it was rather unsurprising that the change of program would be performed without their existing players being migrated, a practice that many operators have chosen to deploy over recent years.
NetHive is powered by Playtech, the major online gambling provider with presence in different segments of the industry and across different jurisdictions. Here it is also important to note that Playtech and its online bingo division Virtue Fusion currently power the Sun Bingo and Fabulous Bingo brands.
It was late in 2015 when the iGaming supplier replaced Gamesys as the exclusive provider of software for Sun Bingo under a five-year deal with the bingo operator’s parent company – the News UK publishing group.
As it usually happens in instances of operators switching affiliate programs, news first spread via Gambling Portal Webmasters Association forum threads. And as it sometimes happens, unfortunately quite often, threads are opened by affiliates to notify fellow affiliates that there will be something fundamentally wrong with an operator’s upcoming migration from one affiliate program to another.
In the case of Sun Bingo, affiliates woke to the realization that they would lose all their existing players and that they would have to hop onto the new affiliate program and start building a player base from the scratch.
Sun Bingo is an established and well-recognized UK-facing bingo operator. It was founded more than a decade ago and has enjoyed wide popularity among players over the years. And although there are operators out there that have always found it hard to admit that affiliates have huge, gigantic, contribution to the popularization of their brands, we believe this a fact impossible to dispute.
GPWA members, some of whom have been promoting the Sun Bingo brands since the very beginning, notified that they have recently been informed about the upcoming migration and about the fact that their existing players would not be included in that migration. However, Sun Bingo affiliate managers have explained that all those affiliates, who will lose years’ worth of hard work, will be kindly rewarded with a compensation package.
Said package would include guaranteed earnings for the next three months based on affiliates’ average earnings for the past six months. To make things a little clearer, if an affiliate with a rev share contract earned $1,000 in the last six months, they would receive $1,000 for the upcoming three months.
Although NetHive may consider this a generous offer to appease angry affiliates, it may actually produce the exact opposite effect – to anger those same affiliates even more. This move also joins the multitude of recent instances that have signaled of operators and affiliate programs’ seemingly growing disinterest in communicating with affiliates, and, what is even worse, in respecting their existing contracts and the efforts they had put into promoting brands.
