GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 37 - February 2017

From DJ to webmaster, this affiliate has always made his own way Cat When did you launch your first site? When did it start producing revenue? I started my first gambling portal in 2001 with the name cyberspacegambling.com . “Online gambling” was not available any- more, so I chose “cyberspace gambling.”At that time people were talking more about surfing cyberspace – that word was more common. That was the first page and I’ve been working on it since, so for 15 years now. It took about one year before I re- ceived my first commission check. You run a number of sites. Which ones came first? How do you decide what to focus on? Which of your sites get the most traffic? The first websites were cyberspacegambling.com followed by cyberspacecasinos.com . My first Ger- man-language portal came a few years later. Onlineflashcasinos.com has the most traffic. I focused on casino games before poker and sports betting. How did you get into iGaming affiliate marketing? What did you do before? I didn’t want to study, so I decided to become a car mechanic. I finished the 3½ years of training, but after another half year I quit the job to go back to school. That was in 1999. The internet came up. One academy offeredweb design classes. I went there for nine months and did a two- month internship at a web design compa- ny. Then I founded my own business and have worked for myself full-time since. For iGaming specifically, I came across an online casino on the internet, clicked on the affiliate link, read the terms and conditions, and found that it could be something for me. So I signed up and started building pages. How has the iGaming industry changed since you started? Not a lot has changed, but it has become bigger, with more iGaming companies and more affiliates. There’s more advertising on other media than the internet, like on TV and in maga- zines. There is celebrity poker, and sports pros who are sponsored by iGaming en- terprises. In Germany, you can see more TV ads, especially for online sportsbooks on the sports channels. My work has not changed too much in the basics like SEO, links to your websites and good content. How do you decide which casinos to promote? I have been affiliated with most of the casinos I promote for sever- al years. I’ve met the affiliate manager of almost every program on my site in person. I am looking for different casino softwares on my pages – I don’t want to advertise too many casinos using the same software. I don’t want to have like 20 Microgaming casinos on my homep- age, or Playtech, or NetEnt. I like to have a good mixture. You currently have sites in English and German. Do you have plans to add ad- ditional languages? Onlineflashcasinos. com is my only page where the front page is translated into multiple languag- es. I don’t plan on adding more sites in other languages, since it is becoming too much. I believe I can be more successful with websites in a country where I speak the languages than in one where I don’t understand a word and have translated websites. I had French in school for a few years, but I don’t speak it very often, so I have forgotten most of it. Tell us about the German-speaking online gaming market. What types of games or marketing appeal to them? Germans like to play the classic casino games as well as online poker and sports betting. Most advertising is focused on poker. There was a big poker boom; online poker became big in themedia and celebri- ties started playing poker. They had poker tournaments on TV – but at this time, ads for sportsbooks are all over the place. On the sports channels there is a lot of sports betting advertising; they sponsor soccer teams. You can see those everywhere. And now there’s the first online casino that ac- tually has a license in Germany, one that’s not just licensed in Malta or somewhere else in the European Union, but has a Ger- man license. There’s only one. GPWA Affiliate Interview Series 46 w w w . g p w a t i m e s . o r g