GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 44 - July 2019

scape and has forced us to adapt or diversify in other sectors. International targeting has since come out as a new challenge, as users from each country or region have their spec- ificities and particular needs and languages. Then compliance and regulations, and even advertising bans, have further made the chal- lengemuchmore complex. This is something I am addressing strongly in my new project. The current phase of mergers, acquisitions and bigmedia companies arising is certainly important. Aside from these considerations, online casino features for users have evolved a lot: frommulti-software casinos to live games, as well as mobile gaming, cryptocurrency casinos and more, there’s a lot to consider these days when addressing users’ needs. For my part, I’ve been impacted. But first, I’ve had and maintained strong relation- ships with affiliate programs, which has proven to be valuable in the long term, and second, I have also diversified to other sectors to avoid being exposed to only one sector. I also had a previous online business, which was bringing me royalties and recur- ring revenues, so that helped me stay afloat. On amore general plan, social networks – and with less importance, blogs – have favored the emergence of casual mainstream entertain- ment, which has attracted themasses. Social media has inspired specific codes, be it froma user point of view (i.e., it has created specific needs for users), or from a technical point of view, with specific interfaces and strong technical structures, fromwhich people were getting accustomed to performance. Web- sites from every sector have also been forced to adapt. The users’ valuable time spent on the web has been vastly captured by these networks, so it is still a challenge to offset the difference and capitalize on their exits from these networks. And lastly, the advent of applications, smartphones and multiple devices per person has also created a frag- mentation of visits: the cookie “grace” period we knew before has ended abruptly. This has created new challenges to track and map people from within websites, and has surely created an important disruption in affiliate program tracking. Now I develop my own tracking solutions in-house to get the last word on my data from users, and I overlay specific services to either better manage the data or to complement my tracking. This is also becoming complex nowwith ad-blockers, mainstream privacy features, and specific regulations like the GDPR. Between 2010 to 2015, you suffered from some severe health problems. How did this affect your personal and professional life? It was just a complete nightmare. It was a specific problem, as my main health specialist had made important errors in a treatment for a cancer I had in 2005. At first it worked for several years, but then he changed the treatment and it is prov- en now that he had not mastered what he was doing, despite showing strong determi- nation and assurance. I suffered from severe health problems and endured two near-death events, and the whole medical sector here is at fault of lack of investigation. Then we finally spotted the specialist’s mistreatment and took advice from other specialists. Words from themhave been harsh; “murderer” has even been used. As a result I suffered from serious psychological problems, with severe PTSD and amnesia, as the problems lasted too long, and I have been left alone in this experience, not knowing what was happen- ing to me. I needed nearly three more years to fully recover, and 2018 was my year. All during that time I didmy best to continue working, and while some things were still achievable, the fact is that when, at the worst time, your psyche decouples from life and other people (as a survival reflex), it makes 51 G P W A t i m e s . o r g