GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 33 - October 2015

only way to really navigate this kind of situation to a lasting resolution is to face the criticism head-on and try to win peo- ple over to your point of view. The big- ger and more diverse you get, the harder that becomes. PocketFives used to have a podcast that ran for more than six years, but hasn’t broadcast an episode in more than three years. What was the reason behind the decision to drop the podcast? Any plans to bring it back?What advice do you have for affiliates who are thinking about do- ing their own podcast? Our decision was more about numbers than anything else. There was a fair amount of cost to make the shows, and we just weren’t seeing either of the two key metrics that would make it worthwhile — revenue and traf- fic. The English-only podcast became an especially difficult business model in the post–Black Friday poker world. We will likely bring back audio or video content in regulated U.S. markets at some point. It can be great content if done correctly. Obviously the UIGEA and Black Friday had a huge impact on the online poker community, especially in the United States. How did PocketFives adapt to survive those two developments? The UIGEA was a wound that never fully healed for the offshore U.S. online poker industry. Black Friday, however, was the nail in the coffin. It’s important to differ- entiate between those two events, while also understanding the relationship be- tween them. The UIGEA left open a lot of opportunity for poker businesses in the U.S. Black Friday did not. Affiliates and industry-dependent sites that were U.S.- heavy before Black Friday saw their rev- enues obliterated overnight. My partners and I had actually sold the site years earlier and only reacquired it af- ter Black Friday, so we brought kind of a fresh perspective to running the site. We weren’t using high revenue numbers as our baseline like a lot of existing affiliates. Thus it wasn’t too hard a decision for us to turn away the potential for revenue from offshore U.S.-facing poker sites. In doing so, we gave up what would’ve been about half our revenues at the time and could’ve grown to a much higher percentage to- day. But our business feels stable and le- gitimate when we’re not connected to those sites, and I like our long-term pros- pects much better based on our choice. We’re positioned to do well in current and future regulated markets in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the meantime, we’ve just had to be careful about spending and do our best to stay afloat with non-U.S. reve- nue and revenue from the states that have legalized online poker. The online poker affiliate market has changed dramatically in the last decade, and not just in the United States. How hard has it been to survive those chang- es? It’s been tough. The biggest change, in my opinion, is the competition. Most of our major competitors now operate very intelligently compared to the early years. We can’t expect to be the only ones innovating in the space. Innovation is a requirement for survival these days. It’s particularly difficult to compete in, say, Finland, when there’s a Finland-based community that’s built in the Finnish lan- guage and run by people on the ground AGE 34 HOMETOWN Charleston, West Virginia LIVING IN Atlanta, Georgia FAVORITE FOOD Southern BBQ MUST-READ BOOK Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut SITE PocketFives.com Adam with his wife Lilly and their sons Alex (left) and Samuel. 51 GPWA Affiliate Interview Series