It seems that once a month there is always a new affiliate running around to all of the forums posting about how PartyPoker has ripped him off. The situation is always the same. It is usually a new affiliate, and it usually involves a CPA deal. Here is how it happens.
The affiliate has some kind of promotion where he offers his friends $25 dollars for free as long as they agree to play a certain number of raked hands before cashing out. By doing this, the player meets the requirements for a real money player and the affiliate earns his CPA commission. Good deal, right? Wrong!
After the $25 is lost or cashed out, that player usually leaves never to return. So PartyPoker never made any money off of the player, and the affiliate is supposed to get payed $75. If you are smart, you can see where this is going. Once the affiliate does this to about 80 players, he starts to drool thinking about his commission check. All the while the accountant or whoever audits affiliate accounts at PartyPoker is looking at his excel sheet scratching his head. It is at this point when the affiliate manager puts a hold on the funds from leaving the affiliate’s account. This is because the value of the players referred by this affiliate is low, almost at zero.
So instead of getting payed $8,000 the affiliate now gets zero until his player values increase. This infuriates the affiliate and causes a mass surge of stupidity at the poker affiliate forums. The posts are usually answered in the same way. More experienced affiliates tell him that what he did was CPA fraud, and it is highly frowned upon in the industry. This is when the affiliate really learns that he will not see any money.
It seems to be a common occurrence for affiliates using the free deposit/poaching business model. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a right and wrong way to do it. The problem is that most new affiliates try to take the easy way out and go about this the wrong way. They offer their promotions in the chat box to players that were already referred by other affiliates, some of them spam sites, and others use shady methods of getting their sites exposure.
If you are thinking about promoting online poker, be in it for the long haul. Don’t try to scam a quick buck, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.
Filed under: Poker Affiliate Programs, Rants and Raves
