GPWA Times Magaine - Issue 23 - February 2013

GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES keep the content up to date. There are no easy shortcuts to producing websites with good content – many people reproduce free news feeds or replicate content from elsewhere on the Web. This is bad for SEO and in today’s Internet world will be found out by the likes of Google and ranked down accordingly. If you have the time and the motivation I would always recom- mend putting together your own content. News is a new thing for us. I want to do a lot more in that area. Again it is one of those things that takes a lot of time and you start to think that it does not generate enough revenue or benefit to outweigh the cost of doing it. However, good content is invaluable and although one news story in isolation may not generate the revenue that outweighs the cost of writing it, the side benefits of having that news story on a website compound over time. With regards to the predictions, while working on my Master’s degree I ob- tained a PhD-level background in sta- tistical analysis through choosing all the really tough statistics classes (!), so that really helps on the predictions. I knew there would be a use for it one day! We have therefore built up tens of thousands of lines of code over the years. This en- ables us to automate a lot of the content in that respect although the predictions model itself does require manual tweak- ing and input to get the very best out of it. You have a pretty impressive compila- tion of statistics. Where do you get the information? And how do you manage it? We pay for a small amount of base data (fixtures and results) from a sports data provider. Everything else you see on the sites is calculated and produced by us. Many people pay for feeds of this type of information, but if you have a good coder in your business and someone who under- stands a little about statistical analysis then you can produce it yourself. We probably have double the amount of statistical analy- sis you see on the websites hidden away be- hind the scenes and ready to be used once we have made it user friendly. There is no point in displaying data that users do not use and quite often anything you display on a website is best done right the first time, rather than putting something up that is in- efficient and then corrected at a later date. We know from experience that manag- ing a forum is hard work. What do you like most about managing your forum? What do you like least? And how much time does it take you to manage it daily? Our forum has a large number of users, but it is not as important as Face- book or Twitter. I am starting to think that forums are a thing of the past now, and I am not sure that Google and other search engines are not starting to look down on some low-value content that is produced via forums or published using content management software such as Joomla! or WordPress. Do not get me wrong, these methods of producing Web content can provide some excellent websites too, but in my experience a lot of what is written on forums is low-value content, badly writ- ten, incorrect and misleading, difficult to navigate and sometimes uncontrolled, not moderated and ultimately spammy. The thing I dislike about running a fo- rum, or any form of user interaction with a website, is that it opens you up to spam, and spam means more work for you. If you are going to run a forum, make sure you have a good administration page that shows you all the posts that are being made. This will allow you to quickly mod- erate anything you do not like. Forums, or any method of user interaction (for ex- ample, the ability to comment on content and the ability to communicate with other users), open you up to spam and initially you may spend half of your time just ban- ning the spammers who post trying to sell fake handbags, advertise their own web- sites, and the multitude of other types of spam. Get some good forum software, or write your own code to detect spam by keywords and phrases or outward links. Ban the users and their IP addresses. Take a hard line on spammers because if some- one is going to spam or be abusive to other forum posters then they are just going to cause you trouble, and effort, in the fu- ture. I have seen websites completely ban all IP addresses from certain countries because those countries generate the most scammers (projecthoneypot.org is a great resource). If you do not make any money from that country, and website users from that country cause you more work than it is worth, then this may be a viable option. There are probably better ways these days of building a community or communal feel on a website if that is your objective for a forum. How important is the sense of commu- nity you’ve developed to the success of your sites? In my opinion a sense of “community” equates to visitor loyalty, trust, feeling of belonging or member- ship, familiarity and ultimately all the things that lead to visitors coming back to your websites. For sure, you can run a website without this, but if you do you will face a constant battle (and probably some quite large advertising costs) to try to gain new visitors if you do not attract a good amount of repeat customers. Seventy-five percent of our traffic is return customers, and every day if just a few of those people tell their friends about our websites then they will grow. The more people trust and value your website the more likely they are to tell their friends about it. When people talk about “community” I do not think of it as all of my users getting along together like one big happy family. Again, I think of it more in terms of trust, loyalty and familiarity – a “communal” feel. For example, people might go to the same pub every weekend for years, not because they know all the people in the pub, but per- haps because they like the sense of famil- iarity and know what they are getting. Both of your sites do a good job in featuring matches that are being live streamed online. Why did you choose to emphasize this? And has it been a successful strategy for you? Live streaming is important these days – but expensive for bookmakers to obtain the licensing for; hence only a few bookmak- ers have really monetized this well. Some- thing like 40 percent of all betting is now done in-play. Not many operators offer live streaming, and for those that do it is difficult for the affiliate to target this information to the correct visitors who can actually view those live streamed games because not all games are available to watch in every country due to licensing rights. However, live streaming is a useful addition to our content. The problemI expect a lot of operators have is competing with the likes of the illegal streaming sites. One downside to advertis- ing live streaming is that youmight find the majority of your website users disappear at 3p.m. ona Saturday to gowatch90minutes of football! Also, compared to other types of links to advertiser websites, live stream- ing advertising is more difficult to convert into revenue – most bookmaker sites have only a small requirement for customers GPWA Affiliate Interview Series