GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 15 - January 2011
Always on the lookout An in-depth interview with Affiliate Guard Dog’s Andy Mueller By Aaron Todd How long have you been in the iGaming industry? What made you decide to start AffiliateGuardDog.com? I started in the industry in April 2005 with my very first Web site after seeing TONS of Golden Palace banners and dreams of my own business. It took a good six months and a downtime period, when I felt I would not make any money, before I got my first player (at the now-defunct Acropolis Ca- sino no less). This success got me excited enough to renew my enthusiasm and fur- ther develop my Web site. AGD started in late 2006 due to a strong need in the industry to automatically recognize changes to terms and condi- tions. During that time, a trend of chang- ing terms to lower affiliate commissions and set inactivity rules began. I chatted in private with a number of affiliates to see if it made sense to create a service for this. Everyone agreed the need was there and I began coding the very first AGD Terms Spider. I am now on Revision 6 of the Spider and it has moved from a php, single-tiered application to an asp.net multi-tiered architecture. The Spider is ever-evolving. AGD started off monitoring changes in terms and conditions. But you’ve branched out into other business lines as well, like translations and an affiliate pay- ments calendar. Why did you create each of those products? Do you feel like those services have accomplished what you set out to do? Monitoring terms and con- ditions is our main focus, but I felt that AGD needed to offer affiliates some more information regarding affiliate programs. The affiliate payments calendar allows affiliates to anonymously enter their af- filiate payments and track them without monetary numbers associated. Instead of posting that you were paid within fo- rums, this allows anonymous posting and anonymous tracking. In addition, it feeds payment information to the participat- ing forums so that af- filiates can know which programs pay on time consistently and which programs are consis- tently late on payments. It provides affiliates with specific knowledge about payments and allows them to pick af- filiate programs based upon this information. Our translation service addresses yet another need. During a time when affiliates, casinos and affiliate programs need to branch out into other markets to stay competitive, we began developing a transla- tion service that uses live translators. Our unique system has a set of project managers who oversee trans- lations to ensure that each translation is 100 percent accurate and geared toward our industry. Since gaming has its own unique language needs, this is important to us and our customers. The payments calendar is very mature and has gone through several revisions. I believe that this offering has accom- plished its end goal. As more forums and Web sites adopt its use, it will become an even better gauge of affiliate payments. Currently the usage is very high and the data is solid – in part, I believe, because the Web interface is simple and very user-friendly. The translation service is relatively new, but has a solid foundation. We have an overall translation manager who over- sees all project managers to ensure a second verification. On top of that, I oversee each translation as well. It may be overkill, but it serves the purpose of validation that is necessary for 100 per- cent accuracy. The Web interface still leaves something to be desired, but the next version will bring a much cleaner interface for translations. In the mean- time, we do a lot of manual quoting to make things simpler for clients. Under AGD Services on your site, I see that “Link Marketplace” and “Web Site/ Domain Marketplace” are not active yet. Are those new services you plan on of- fering? And if so, what’s the timetable on those services? Link Marketplace will be coming to AGD in 2011. We felt the ever- popular “Link Post” has bogged down our forums at AGD. The problem with those posts, many have found, is that the links are often extremely poor and often “no follow” or even taken down shortly thereafter. It helps the link posters to get one-way links (very unethically) in some cases and can even hurt your Web site if the link is from a bad neighborhood. Be- cause of this, AGD is working on a place where links can be found that are both relevant and valuable. It is a tough task, but we hope to launch that in the first quarter of 2011. 48 Always on the lookout
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