GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 37 - February 2017

This former bonus hunter decided to spread the wealth; now he runs five sites with a three-person team Florian - Freakspin When did you launch your first site? How long did it take for it to start pro- ducing revenue? I launched my first site, freakspin.com , in 2011. The first countable revenue was generated after more than two years. You run five sites, each with a different focus. Which came first? How did you decidewhat to focus on? The first onewas freakspin.com , then freespins-aktuell.com . The main focus was to promote free spins in German-speaking casinos. Before my affiliate career, I was a player and free spin hunter. With these sites I wanted to share my daily free spins collections. At times I also offered sports and poker offers, but I realized that this is not my business and stopped it. Now I’m only focused on casino offers. Merkurcasinos.com is administrated by a colleague. It’s all about Merkur slots. How did you get into iGaming affili- ate marketing? Are you a full-time or part-time affiliate? Sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time. During the holidays like Christmas or for most of December, it is a full-time job because of the many promotions you find in several casinos. But I actually do this in addition to my everyday life. Do you have employees, or is your affiliate business a solo operation? It’s not a one-man show anymore. We are three now in the team, each with a different focus: administration, author, IT and design. How has the iGaming industry changed since you first joined? The most visible change is that in a short time, so many casinos and multi-gaming sites started to get online. I think standalone casinos were rare – at least in Germany or Europe. Now you can place bets in online live casinos or bet on sports events. Freakspin.com leads to some of your other sites. Is this the main portal by which other people find your sites, or do you mostly market the other sites sep- arately? How much traffic does each site get ? Freakspin.comw as my first and for a long time my only site with a lot of content, daily articles, casino, sports and some poker offers. It was a lot of work, every day. I had less and less time to do this permanently. So I had to go another way. And this was when I started to run a short blog with the daily free spin of- fers; just two to three sentences, no big pictures or banners: just “click here, get this.” I started freespins-aktuell.com and daily-freespins.com and it worked. I had less to do and more visitors. Then I decided to stop freakspin.com . But I guess and hope it’s not forever. I like this domain! How do you decide which casinos and sportsbooks to promote? First of all, I always need a free spin offer for my sites. So just a casino with a bonus is nothing for me. When they have free spins – with or without a deposit – I try to test the casino myself. Then I put them on my sites. Your currently have sites in English and German. Do you have plans to add addi- tional languages at any point? If I could I would love to do that, but my foreign language skills are not the best. Maybe I will find someone – for example, someone from the Scandinavian countries – who can work with and for me. Germany’s online gaming laws have changed a lot in the past few years, and some of them were deemed un- constitutional by the EU earlier this year. Has the legal landscape of online gaming in Germany impacted your business? If so, how? No, not really. Here in Germany we know the current, and past, situation of the gaming law and that the law changes every several years. Or at least they try to change the law, but every time it gets revoked. I don’t think Germans take the situation very seriously. AGE fact sheet Hometown Living in Favorite Food sites 31 Berlin Berlin Everything with gratin cheese freakspin.com daily-freespins.com freespins-aktuell.com merkurcasinos.com daily-casinobonus.com GPWA Affiliate Interview Series 50 w w w . g p w a t i m e s . o r g