As many of you know, I am probably one of the most optimistic and positive affiliates around. However over the past year, one thing has really been bothering me. It’s that poker affiliates really do not get treated like the business people we are from many of the rooms.

A prime example of this, and one that has been complained about in multiple forums is payment processing. Getting paid for being marketing agents (which essentially is what we are) should not be that difficult. Likewise, requiring us to open up players accounts at rooms is absolutely ridiculous. I should be able to market a poker site without having to have a players account. I know many people may say, “What’s the big deal?”

Well for starters, there are many rooms that happily take U.S. affiliates, but then have no real way to pay us. Oh, wait, we can open up a foreign bank account to have the money wired too! And then from there wire it to our U.S. account.

I lost a fair chunk of money at Paradise when they moved platforms. The money was in my players account for months (that I couldn’t withdraw) and then POOF, my players account disappeared. The only way for me to get paid was if I opened up a foreign bank account……No thanks.

Furthermore, I am a business person, not a poker player. In a post UIGEA environment, it is understandable that there may be issues with processing PLAYERS money both in and out. So stop putting us affiliates in the same category!

The affiliate departments at every room are branches of the overall marketing departments. Therefore affiliates need to be treated like every other person or company the marketing department deals with. Here’s an example to put things into perspective. If one of these rooms bought an advertisement in Bluff or CardPlayer, would they make them open a players account in order to get paid? Fu** no they wouldn’t. They’d cut a check or send a wire, just like they do for every other payment the marketing department makes.

I know affiliates who receive 100K+ per month into players accounts. This is just retarded. So the question becomes, is there a solution?

Yes, I think there is. The problem right now is that there is no universal processor like Neteller. It brings tears to my eyes thinking of the convenience when we were able to cash out affiliate revenue SAME DAY to a debit card or ACH transfer. Likewise it was a convenient Ewallet, where we could move all of our affiliate money too.

As many of you know, I was in California last week. One of my meetings out there was with some of the people from AffiliateSpeedpay. Our industry needs a product like this. Having 97 different ways to get paid, and having to jump through hoops at the beginning of each month is ridiculous. If all the major poker sites would simply pay us via Affiliate Speedpay, our lives as poker affiliates would be much easier.

Operators however are not going to voluntarily come together and adapt to a product like this unless WE as affiliates push for it. I am taking this initiative on, and you guys are going to hear a lot more about this product in the coming months.

Likewise there are going to be some fairly large changes in my professional life, which I’m sure you will all hear about as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Affiliate Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.