GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 33 - October 2015

in that country who can organize live events and who have personal relation- ships with so many of the players. It’s very, very difficult to be big all over the world these days. You have to, at times, pick your spots. What are your thoughts on PokerStars’ recent announcement that affiliates will only earn commission on players sent to the site for two years, rather than for life, including players who signed up on the site before that change in terms and conditions? On the one hand, I’m not surprised. It makes sense for them to not pay millions of dollars a year to af- filiates in 2015 who signed up a bunch of players in 2004 and hardly do anything anymore. On the other hand, I don’t see why any affiliate would work with them under these terms. Rev share deals are all about volume. You sign up hundreds of players in hopes that over time a few of them become high-volume grinders and make steady commissions for the affili- ate. A two-year cap takes away just about any incentive I can think of for someone to work on a rev share deal in this particu- lar industry. Speaking for us, unless we’re getting CPA or a flat marketing spend, we’re not going to promote anyone more than a token amount. We just don’t trust the sites (and didn’t before, either) to honor lifetime revenue sharing deals and to keep terms the same. We do, however, continue to have a positive relationship with PokerStars and work with them in certain capacities. Describe your work environment. Do you work from home or in an office? If you work from home, how often do you get to see and interact with other people in the industry? Right now I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Norcross, Georgia. I have a co-working space that I go to sometimes, and sometimes I work from home. That’s gotten harder since we started having kids a couple years ago, so I usually try to get out at least a few hours a day. I enjoy personal interaction very much, and I try to get to at least a few industry events per year. There are also people based locally in the Atlanta area who I sometimes meet for lunch or coffee. I do it as much as I can, given the limitations of my location. What traits do you look for in an affili- ate manager? How about in an affiliate program? The affiliate managers I really like are the ones who can see the bigger picture beyond their own department. These managers, and the corporate man- agers they work under, need to under- stand that there’s more to marketing than click-through traffic. We expect to be com- pensated, or at the very least helped out, when we invest our time, money and op- portunity cost on promoting something for an operator. If they’re completely put off by the idea of making any kind of in- vestment that isn’t directly related to real- money conversions, we’ll probably have a hard time working together. They need to be able to look at a website with reach and understand that there’s more value to promotion than simply converting new sign-ups. If their department heads or cor- porate management haven’t figured that out yet, they usually aren’t our partners. What’s your preferred method of com- munication with affiliate managers? I don’t deal with them directly for the most part, but generally we communicate via phone or e-mail. I enjoy it very much when we have the opportunity to get to- GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES Adam (left) with GPWA member and April 2014 AIS interviewee PokerTrip. GPWA Affiliate Interview Series 52