GPWA Times - Issue 21 - May 2012

Follow your dreams – and chase some cats! Our star webmasters this time around come to us from five countries on three continents. They include two cat lovers and one cat chaser. They raise some interesting questions and have strong opinions about what’s wrong with our industry and what should be done to make it better. In responding to our questions, these guys dug deep into their own experiences to provide us with some useful insights and solid advice – and they took time out of their busy schedules to do it. Special thanks go out to dfiocch, who despite having to travel back and forth to a hospital for treatment following a car accident, managed to meet our deadline – mille grazie ! *Due to space constraints, we could not print the interviews in their entirety. The complete text will be posted at gpwa.org. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES JEM Muppet Bonuses, blacklists and boiling blood! How did you become involved in the industry? I used to work on comfortable, well-paid and completely boring and pointless corporate IT projects. A friend of mine was having some early success as a gambling affiliate and kept telling me about it. In the end my dislike of corporate bureaucracy and the desire to see my newborn daughter more won me over to work- ing from home. When did you launch your site? I acquired the domain in July 2007 after someone had let it expire, so the site would have launched a little while after that. How long did it take for you to start earning money? A couple of months. In fact we earned a whole 10 cents in September 2007! To what do you attribute the notable success of your site relative to sites offering similar content? I couldn’t say that there is one single thing – it’s the whole package. I work by a “no BS” motto. So we try really hard to look at things from the per- spective of a player and focus on getting people to stick around, explore the site and come back for more later, as opposed to shut- tling them off to a casino as quickly as possible. We ask ourselves questions like what information does a player find useful? Does the site look professional and feel trustworthy? Would I revisit a site that sent me to an ordinary casino after telling me that it was wonderful? We try to present factual and authoritative informa- tion and we aren’t afraid to call out a bad casino. Where we do offer something similar to other sites, we strive to do it better. One of the longest running and most successful threads in your forum is a thread where people post screenshots of their big wins. How important is it, from an affiliate perspec- tive, to get players excited about their wins? I don’t think we need to get players excited about winning. Everyone is already excited when they win! It’s more about people sharing their wins and excitement with their friends. It’s great for players to see oth- ers winning, especially if it’s someone they have talked to on the forum who has hit a jackpot or something. From an affiliate per- spective it can help show others that yes you can win at an online casino and you’ll be paid. Your forums are also full of posts about how you have helped players receive payment from casinos. How much time do you spend helping players resolve cashout is- sues? How important is that role for affiliates, as some- one who can communicate to both players and the online casinos? I spend quite a few hours each week on this sort of thing. I really wish I didn’t have to but the nature of the indus- try at the moment dictates it, especially for players in the USA who are often dealing with either shady operators or honest ones that still have trouble paying them. The frustrating thing is that the majority of complaints are made by players who are playing at a casino that we have either blacklisted or rated poorly. If only I had a dollar for every person who has told us, “I wish I had read the review first. . . .”