GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 41 - July 2018

This issue, we check in with some veteran affiliates who have seen the industry through plenty of ups and downs. They weigh in on changes to the regulatory climate, the importance of responsible gaming, the mendacity of politicians across parties, and what they’d do if they won $10 million. All three are active in the GPWA forums, where they’re happy to advise and get advice from other webmasters. Here, we get to know these valuable members of the community a little better. * Due to space constraints, we could not print the interviews in their entirety. The complete text will be posted on the GPWA forums. GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES Mouse and cards photo by Stokkete/Shutterstock Chris Trenka - allfreechips Before you got into iGaming, you were a LotusNotes Domino admin- istrator for a Fortune 500 company. Are there any skills or experiences from your previous jobs that you think have helped you as an affili- ate? Working for a large corporation or two in a slightly stressful environment where 30,000+ users depend on your systems running around the world has to be good for something! I enjoyed the technical aspect of managing large groups of servers on multiple platforms, as there was always something new to learn at each new stage. Learning early on that you cannot stress about things you can- not control is the largest lesson learned, though, I think. A big affiliate closing the doors that you counted on month after month, or Google no longer loving your site, are all things that getting upset about won’t do any good. How and when did you make the transition into iGaming? In 2004, a coworker came to me and said that 1&1 is a brand-new webhost as registrar offering a free domain name and web hosting for one year for signing up. This was their way of advertising by word of mouth, so I joined. At the time, I was playing no-deposit casinos online and thought if I made a website talking about them, maybe I would get some more free money to play with. I had no idea what an affiliate was at this point, but I registered Allfreechips.com and started to learn what HTML was. Tell us about your first site. When did you launch it? How long did it take for it to start making money? 2004, when I launched my free domain, I was reading about advertising for ca- sinos at Zodiac Casino. I was shocked that I could actually be paid, so I made a table of casinos and was off and running. I found it simple to just go ahead and sign up for each and add them – we only had three main softwares at the time: RTG, Microgaming and Playtech. As far as getting players, I started posting on gambling forums about Allfreechips and linking back. This was a learning curve as well, as one got real mad that I was posting I had these great no deposit bonuses, etc., in their bonus section. But all this aside, after one month I through the ups and This affiliate keeps his cool downs of the industry W W W . G P W A T I M E S . O R G 50