GPWA Times Magaine - Issue 23 - February 2013

to have funds in their account to allow them to watch live streaming. It does not necessarily lead to large conversion rates, playing players, or long player retention. What events do you find punters really enjoy betting on? What events do they least enjoy betting on? The big events are always popular – Champions League, FA Cup, English Premier League – but strangely enough a lot of our users come to our sites because we offer such vast coverage of worldwide football leagues. If you want analysis on the Iranian Pre- mier League – we’ve got it! Many of our customers look way beyond the English Premier League and look for odds value in the lower leagues where the odds pric- ers may have had a little more difficulty in setting the right prices. People e-mail us or tweet us telling us about some eightfold accumulator they have won from follow- ing our Slovakian predictions! With regards to the least popular events, I think people tend to stay away from com- petitions such as the Europa League and the lesser cup competitions like the English LeagueCup.Withgoodreason,too–itisdif- ficult to predict these games until you know the teamnews before kickoff asmany teams do not take the competitions seriously. How did you become involved in the industry, and what did you do prior to becoming involved in online gaming? I have always been interested in IT, but my background is quite varied. I have an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science, and a Master of Science in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management. I lived and studied in the USA for three years, but I finally found my way back to the U.K. to work for a large worldwide air- line. I worked my way up from a program- mer to a lead business analyst, facilitating multi-million-pound projects. In 2003 while still working as a programmer I took an interest in Web development, picked up a book on coding and started to knock together some ideas at home. I did not have any initial goals of setting up a huge worldwide website at the time – I was more interested in gaining the Web skills for my CV. As I was interested in football I started to put together Web pages based on my interests and it started to grow and grow. I then realized that you could make a bit of money from affiliation so I signed up to a couple of programs and at least made a small amount to cover my hosting costs, and it grew from there. As with most people you speak to who run a business, I had tried and failed with a number of other ideas before finding my way in football-related sites – I developed shopping- and travel-based websites and numerous other ideas. I quickly found that the business models were not going to work for various reasons and cut my losses and started on new ideas. I have at least three mothballed websites at the mo- ment that I am trying to work out what to do with. Some may evolve into new web- sites, and some may just become another idea that sits on the scrap heap. When did you launch your sites? Win- DrawWin.com in 2003 and PredictZ.com in 2009. How long did it take for the sites to start earning money? They made a little mon- ey within months. To be honest, though, working full time and managing a website meant that I neglected it a little at times. I was actually more focused on growing the content and the sites themselves than making money, which sounds bizarre but in turn worked out well. I suppose that is a result of having the luxury of an income while you are building a website – you do not have to worry on day one about where your next pay day is coming from; instead you can focus on building strong content and a good website that grows organically. It would be the same with setting up an offline business – I would always prefer to ease into that while maintaining other income sources if I had the choice. How have your sites changed, and how have your players changed, in the time that has passed since you launched the sites? Our sites have changed a num- ber of times and evolve every month. Take a look at the archive. Some of the design we were putting out back in 2003 kind of looks embarrassingly amateur now and old-fashioned, but then again take a look at photos of yourself wearing that knitted Christmas jumper and sporting a dubious hair style 10 years ago and you will prob- ably think the same! My point is, the Web (like fashion) moves on so quickly and you have to keep up with the latest devel- opments. It is difficult to keep up, but as long as you are doing something to evolve all the time then you are probably ahead of most of your competition. I would not claim our sites are the height of Web design at the moment or “bleed- ing edge,” but they work, and there is a place for well-structured content and sen- sible design that our users want to see and find easy to use. It is important to develop websites slowly and to not distract users, especially when you have a strong, loyal user base. In terms of our players or customers, the biggest change over time has been our global growth. At first our websites pri- marily focused on the English leagues and our previews were handwritten each week and mainly attracted U.K. visitors. We now cover more than 120 worldwide leagues and we get traffic from almost every country in the world. Take a look at our Alexa rankings – we are in the top 500, if not the top 100 websites in some countries. Some of this traffic is low value, but if you are going to develop a popular website with worldwide appeal then you are going to have to accept you will get traffic from all corners of the globe. What traits do you look for in an affili- ate manager? How about in an affiliate program? This is the most important question in this interview and the most im- portant thing for any affiliate to consider! In an affiliate manager, communication and a willingness to work with you are key to success. I do however acknowledge that affiliate managers do not have the time to work closely with every single affiliate as they are often managing thousands of af- filiates. I do have some sympathy for af- filiate managers because I know how hard they work and howmany people they try to keep happy all the time. So, when I see af- filiates complaining that their manager did not get back to them for a week when they e-mailed them, then I can sort of under- stand. But it is frustrating when you have a question and cannot get it resolved. In the spirit of the direction that SEO practices and Google are moving towards these days, perhaps each affiliate programneeds to run some sort of community or forum where affiliates can get issues and questions re- solved (even by affiliates talking to each other) rather than 40,000 affiliates all fir- ing e-mail to one or two affiliate managers. I have worked with a lot of really good affili- ate managers who, looking back, spent a lot of time working with me on getting things done. I have to therefore give big mentions to Adam Webber, formerly of bet365 and now Wagershare.com, who has exhibited the gold standard in affiliate management since I have worked with him. All the affili- 47 GPWA Affiliate Interview Series