iGB Affiliate 43 Feb/March 2014 | Page 53

INSIGHT by a community manager, this friendly group of real-money skill gamers can transform a transactional tournament website into a virtual community, increasing monetisation and retention over a long-term period. Finally, real money skill games offer affiliates a diversification strategy. Just like investing for retirement, it is smart and profitable to invest in a wide range of gaming categories to ‘hedge your bets’. As the future is uncertain, any changes to the iGaming regulatory or industry landscape could be detrimental for affiliate business. However, due to their differentiation, real money skill games are a viable and stable alternative to other gaming sectors. In summary, real money skill games provide a new traffic stream, offer significantly less competition than casino and replace oversaturated poker traffic. Most importantly, skill games deliver comparable affiliate commissions to poker traffic, demonstrating the equivalent value of real money skill gamers to poker players. Affiliates have the opportunity to be early adopters in the market, using real money skill games as a new, dedicated traffic source. These three major benefits of real money skill