Poker affiliates might want to think twice about working with PokerStars Partners, the poker affiliate program for PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. It seems that since Amaya Gaming bought PokerStars for $4.9 billion that people wondered what would happen to the site itself and how it would affect affiliates. Well it seems the program doesn’t care about the affiliates that helped it to become the #1 poker site online.
Last week’s trimming of what have been termed as “unproductive” affiliates drew significant industry attention connected to the nature of the “lifetime” affiliate deals that have long been the standard of the industry, which turn out to be anything but.
According to a PokerStars representative:
“PokerStars has agreements with thousands of third-party websites (‘affiliates’) to market our services to new players and encourage them to play at PokerStars. PokerStars routinely reviews its agreements with these affiliates to ensure that they are productive for the company. Earlier this week, PokerStars ended the agreements with a very small number of affiliates who were not recruiting many new players, and who were doing little active promotion of our services.”
The brief statement confirms the culling while reaffirming one of the conjectured statements in the original piece; namely, that PokerStars, as with most online-gambling sites, expects partnering affiliates to be active in perpetually promoting and growing the market.
Martin Sanermo, the Swedish-based affiliate and owner of the largely UK-facing poker.org, which was among the sites directed to remove its promotional materials for PokerStars, continued his attack on the company on the PokerAffiliateListings (PAL) boards.
Martin Sanermo chastised PokerStars for continuing to attend new industry conferences and purportedly seeking to sign up new affiliates while at the same time getting rid of some of those already onboard. Martin Sanermo named two Amaya Group Ltd. representatives who are allegedly attending the late-October Barcelona Affiliate Conference, a major industry gathering.
