Another Cup Of Ads?

Since the market is still very profitable, they have huge marketing budgets. This means ads all over the place. Sure, there are legal issues, as online gambling is still in the twilight zone — but on the Internet, this is not a big problem, and again with money your arguments have much more strength.

Besides, with affiliations, the rooms don’t completely control their promotions: it didn’t take long for some smart guys to resort to spam, pushing the nuisance envelope.

Don’t they realize this is a hassle, and that people get fed up with excessive ads? The thing is, it works, unfortunately. This is like soap operas’ canned laughter: almost everybody hates them, but for psychological reasons we find it funnier with them, and that’s a proven fact. Thus the production imposes it.

Viral Marketing

It works, but not as much as they would like. It often either remains unnoticed, as people are used to avoiding looking at ads, or it gets on people’s nerves. Nobody likes hustlers (with a lowercase H that is).

The ideal salesman would be an happy-looking customer, spreading the word that joepoker.com is fantastic. You can buy shills of course, but why bother if you can get real customers working for you, for free. That’s what viral marketing essentially offers.

How on Earth do you manage to make sane people freely promote online gambling for you? Well, human psychology is a fascinating topic; let’s just take a look at the Cognitive Dissonance article for now. Scarily enough, an unscrupulous person can make another person do weird things by pushing the right buttons.

The principle is to make customers emotionally bound to a product or service, far beyond its intrisic value (which does not mean it has no value). Apple is undoubtedly extremely proficient in this area. Once you have “over-loyal” customers, you need to give them some spiritual leaders, holy relics, better place promises, and other things that the world must know about.

So here comes the free tournaments with a real money prizepool (freerolls), the bonuses, the special offers, the celebrities, the packages for tropical islands, the “become a pro”… And the “tell a friend” programs.

This is both quite effective, fairly pernicious, and extremely frustrating for those who have to suffer the proselytism. The point is that they are well-meaning, and it is difficult to ask them to stop doing promotion without sounding hostile, since they believe they are being nice to you. Besides, you are likely to be quickly outnumbered. And last but not least, most subsequent discussions are pointless and tiresome most of the time, as it is often the case when people argue about values (like politics or religion).

Bottom line: viral marketing wins hands down.

Affiliations

For those who are not ready to promote for free, the good ol’ affiliation programs are available. This basically equivalent to selling cars; the more you sell, the more you earn, and some models pay more than others. All tricks allowed.

Unfortunately for the unwary, the companies who pay the most in affiliations are often those who need the most promotion — that is, the less attractive ones. A new competitor that doesn’t offer any added value compared to the existing services, or that suffer from one or several drawbacks, is going to be extremely aggressive, marketing-wise.

It is very easy to become an affiliate. Almost anyone with a poker-related website can sign up. For professional media, this is basically another kind of advertisement, with all the usual questions (how independent can you be when most of your revenue comes from a single advertiser). But for individuals, this brings out another type of problem.

Real people, like you and me, are usually not expected to have a financial interest when they recommend products or services; they are expected to give their true opinion. Consequently, they can gain more credit than they deserve, because visitors have not switched their “ads shield” on.

Besides, the relatively easy money can mean a lot to some people. Thus, they are going to play hardball to increase their ads revenue; they may delibarately exploit their ambiguous position (friendly advisor vs salesman), and fail to mention that they are sponsored.

User-Friendly Advertisement

However, marketing is not necessarily evil; like capitalism, it has many flaws, but point something better and we’ll comply.

In our opinion, there is a difference between presenting the products and services you like, and inducing visitors to go for something that will make you the most money. If you ask me about a good mp3 player, I may say brandX. If I were an enthusiast, I could make a website about mp3s and mp3 players, and recommend brandX. If they happened to have some program that pay for the customers I would bring to them, then sure, I would sign up.

Now, if joemp3.com, that makes so-so players, were offering more money for the advertisement, then I have the option to maximize my revenues, on my visitors expenses, or I can stay in line with my true opinions. This comes down to what the price of your legitimacy is. There is a price; if they were giving $10,000 per click, nobody could refuse that.

In addition, if I were to write reviews and products comparisons on my mp3 players site, I would have to make it clear who my sponsors are. Everybody knows how ads work, so “disclaimers” are required for banners and likes; but if it is mixed with non-promotional content, or if it looks like it, you again have the choice of being respectful of your readers, or not.

An important criteria for “un-evilness” could be:

Respect

Obviously, fooling your visitors is about as direspectful as it gets. But hammering them with ads is not good practice, either. We believe in the signal to ads ratio; that is, the amount of content compared to advertisement, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The more and the better your content, the more you are “entitled” to use some advertisement — because you still give good value to your visitors.

The nature of the ads also says much about how you treat your visitors. Pop-ups and splash screens are very intrusive; it’s like these loud commercials that grab our attention. Our attention should be won, not taken by force.

Love For Sale

While some industry and group of interests have the wherewithal to buy quite a lot of things, there are some topics that do not mix well. Whether fast food chains should be allowed to offer nutrition-related pedagogic material to primary school, is highly questionable, for instance.

Even more questionable is massive advertisement of potentially dangerous or harmful products and services, like alcohol, tobacco, guns — and gambling. Everybody should be allowed to make his own choices, granted. But there are limits; otherwise, cocaine would be legal.

A legitimate question could be: does it serve the community as a whole, or do some individuals benefit from it exclusively?

From this perspective, it is difficult to claim that cigarettes serve the community. As for alcohol and gambling, they are fun in reasonable quantities, but they are harmful if overindulged. Consequently, it is best, still from the community perspective, not to induce people to drink or gamble excessively. This is tough, since this is part of the goal of advertising.

Conclusion

The online poker market is worth a lot of money, and the major actors are pouring a lot of cash into it to fight for the best places. Everybody wants his share, from companies to individuals.

The objective, for everybody in the chain, is to turn visitors into players on the advertised rooms and casinos. In this context, the visitors’ best interest doesn’t always get enough consideration.

This is business, some may object, so it’s important not to be naive. Yet, we believe user-centric models are superior in many areas. Regarding poker, our position is that many rooms offer a worthwhile service for the poker players, and moderate advertisement is acceptable provided sponsors are clearly identified, and as long as enough value is provided to the readers.

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