It looks like bwin is taking yet more heat for the changes they’ve made to their affiliate program. After seeing their Facebook page turn into a complaint forum now the Gambling Portal Webmasters Association has suspended them from their recommended sites.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for the GPWA was when they requested a copy of the old affiliate agreement so they could compare the old agreement with the new agreement. bwin responded:
“after discussing internally we will not give the old T&C to your community.”
That seems odd because if you agree to contract terms with someone and they change the terms they should make the old terms available to you. When my credit card company updates their privacy rules or some other conditions in the contract I’m sent a very detailed letter telling me exactly what has changed. I’m fairly sure that if I requested a copy of the old agreement they would have no problem supplying it.
The main beef many affiliates have seems to center around the retroactive nature of the changes. It’s one thing if you want to come in and change the terms going forward but to make a change to an agreement and then claim that it applies to all of the players you brought to them going back to your first player does seem rather self-serving.
Unfortunately, I think this is more likely to become a trend than a one-off. As I said many years ago, this model of high commissions for the lifetime of the player isn’t a sustainable model. That doesn’t make what they’re doing right (or even legal) but the bigger a poker room gets the less it relies on affiliates for new signups. And public poker rooms are increasingly under pressure as their numbers continue to slide every quarter. One of their biggest expenses is paying the affiliates. So if they can find a way to reduce their affiliate costs it translates into a huge bottom line savings that they can take back to investors to prove that they should hang in there.
However, I doubt that this will be enough. It’s simply a short-term measure. Just off the top of my head, I can’t remember a publicly traded poker room that hasn’t reported a double-digit drop in revenues recently. They’re losing the war against the big US-facing rooms like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker and many rooms are finding it easier to nickel and dime existing relationships than it is to either take on Stars and Tilt head-on or come up with a new game plan.
Short sighted, indeed.
Absolutely agreed; retroactive changes to an agreement surely must be more than bordering on legality. That quote from bwin appears rather unprofessional, while hinting at a certain level of obliviousness in management.
It seems to me that this type of behaviour does not help the reputation of the industry. It also highlights an intense focus on short term results: this is surely not the way to build relationships.