The iGaming market has become extremely competitive over the past several years. The reasons for this are countless. However, the fact that the industry has been adapting itself to the needs and demands of the new generation of gambling customers strikes as a particularly important reason.
It is not that the gambling market has not seen such transitions from one customer demographic to another before. What makes this transition different from any other is the fact that the new players are ones with technological savviness unseen before. To a great extent, this makes them more demanding and therefore harder to please.
In a highly competitive environment as the online gambling market has turned into recently, it is really important to have reliable partners, no matter whether you are an operator, affiliate, or a provider of gaming solutions. The relationship between online gambling operators and affiliates is a particularly interesting one and it is the relationship to be the focus of this article.
Given the fact that there are thousands of online gambling websites out there, with most of them offering exciting gaming content and attractive promotions, player acquisition and retention is not an easy task. It has always been operators’ main goal to discover effective means and ways to attract as many customers as possible and to keep them playing. And affiliate marketing has proved to be one of the most effective ways for bringing players to online casinos and other gaming and sports betting websites.
To explain how affiliate marketing works in a nutshell, operators create their own affiliate programs to manage their own affiliate armies. The use of war terms is particularly appropriate, given the competitive (yet non-violent) battlefield the iGaming market has become over the years. By delivering unique content and other creative approaches, it is affiliates’ main task to capture the attention of as many as players as possible. In exchange, they are paid a portion of the revenue generated from those same players.
As any other relationship, the one between operators and affiliates should be based on mutual trust and effective dialogue. And when the involved parties cannot trust each other or communicate effectively, the relationship becomes less beneficial or not beneficial at all for them.
Every once in a while we hear about affiliate programs changing their Terms and Conditions in a manner that affiliates do not welcome. And when such revisions in the existing T&C are introduced without affiliates being asked how these would affect their business, it is absolutely normal for these to unleash waves of general discontent.
bgo Buddies, the affiliate program promoting online gambling brand bgo, was one to implement such retroactive changes in its T&C section. The program introduced a tiered revenue sharing model based on the number of new depositing customers that an affiliate has referred within a calendar month.
Under the changed Terms and Conditions, affiliates that do not bring new customers within the month, receive a 15% revenue share. Bringing between 1-10 players secures them with a 20% share and so on. Although the changes introduced were not that major as ones made by other operators, existing bgo partners were not particularly happy about them.
According to them, the revised T&C should have applied only to new affiliates. Existing partners also argued that they were not informed about the changes in due time and were not asked to voice their opinion on the matter.
Fortunately, bgo showed that the opinion of the affiliates that promote their offering (and have humbly been doing so for years) did matter. Last week, affiliate managers started informing partners that new T&C have been introduced, ones more beneficial to existing affiliates, particularly the smaller ones that cannot bring hundreds of customers every month but promote the program in a manner that deserves due respect. Under the most recent changes, the tiered revenue share model has been kept but the minimum new depositing player requirement has been dropped.
In a highly competitive market as the online gaming one is, showing that your partners and their opinion matters to you is instrumental. Changing their T&C in a response to affiliates’ complaints demonstrates bgo Buddies’ readiness to communicate and listen to what those most affected have to say. Hopefully, there will be more affiliate programs to follow their lead and realize that the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships between operators and those that promote them is a key prerequisite for their future growth in a market that is bound to become more and more competitive in the years to come.
