FEATURE
The overall trend is to go for a very
bright palette and to reuse game provider
assets, because they don’t have any
copyright issues and the look immediately
tells a customer it’s a casino.
As an affiliate who knows what
converts, you’ll have an intuitive feel
for what a brand should look like. The
only stopper is finding a good designer.
However, a good white label provider
will have their own design team you can
work with.
Bonusing
A year ago I thought bonusing was a big
deal and today I still do. It’s our single
greatest expenditure and writing this,
I feel pain thinking about the vast sums
we’ve given away to customers.
Because the igaming ecosystem is
conditioned around bonusing, you must
give money away. The more money you
give away, the more customers you are
going to get, assuming good customer
services, etc.
So how do you break out of the cycle?
It’s something I thought about a lot and
more recently I’ve concluded that for
Oshi to prosper in the future, we’ve got
to find a way around the bonus problem.
For us it’s building relationships with
customers and always getting them to
want a little more. This is where comp
points, tournaments and prizes are
so important. These features create
engagement and therefore retention and
therefore longer-term profitability.
I’ve learned to my detriment that some
customers will never join your casino. I’m
thinking about free spins customers from
low GDP countries. They are the only
ones who are economically motivated to
get every free spin going in the hope they
could make three or four days’ wages by
gambling online.
If I had my time again, I would be
very targeted against no deposit free
spins. That money would be much better
used on affiliate placements or more
product improvements.
on average if I gamble €100, I should
expect to get €97 back. That means as an
operator I have €3 to pay affiliates, game
provider fees, white label provider fees,
bonusing and operating overheads.
If you go to an online store, you
typically get a discount of, for example,
30% off RRP. Or go to a supermarket and
you might be able to get ‘3 for the price
of 2’. In other words, the amount a
retailer will give back is enormous
compared to what you can give back
as an operator.
For that €100 bet, you might be able
to give bonuses worth 1% (33% of your
margin) leaving you with the other €2.00
for everything else.
In other words, bonuses in igaming
are not worth very much. If your wager
requirements are somewhere around
35-40 times rollover, you should be able
to get your bonus money back. However,
people win and you still must pay game
provider fees for turnover, so bonuses do
cost, even though they are more or less
an ‘empty customer benefit’.
“If you’re an affiliate thinking about becoming an operator,
you should be asking yourself: ‘Have I got the spare time,
the traffic and connections to pull this off?’”
For a white label to be viable,
assuming you’re going to be doing some
active marketing, etc, you’re going to
need at least €1m bet turnover a month
to make it a decent earner. That would
translate into 200-300 monthly active
customers and actual profit of perhaps
€10,000 a month.
However, as an affiliate there’s
an opportunity cost. If you channel
traffic into your white label, you’re
not channelling it into other brands.
Therefore, you have a choice:
● get your 35% revenue share from
other brands
● get your 55% revenue share from
your own brand.
Why be an operator?
Economics
On average the return to player for us
is around 3%. To put that in perspective,
seeing the emergence of bitcoin and
having the right people and connections
to make this happen. I was also very
fortunate with SoftSwiss, which has been
very supportive in this journey.
I was motivated by thinking “I could
do it better”. Then, just like jumping
into the deep end of a pool, I got very
motivated about staying afloat.
Honestly, I was also motivated by
greed, thinking here’s a scalable business
in a growing niche, i.e., bitcoin. But,
I have come to appreciate the greed
doesn’t help you think clearly enough
to make good decisions.
If you’re an affiliate thinking about
becoming an operator, you should be
asking yourself: “Have I got the spare
time, the traffic and connections to
pull this off ?”
If you’re wondering if I would
do it all again, the answer is... I don’t
know. Getting off the ground has been
much more arduous process than I
had envisaged. If I had spent all that
start-up money on bitcoin and gone on
Thinking back to when it all began for
me, I think it was a mixture of having
the money to experiment with new ideas,
an 18 month holiday, I would be
richer today. But then, you can’t predict
the future.
In many ways were still in start-up
mode, so if I’m around to give you an
update in a year’s time then I can tell
you if it was worth it.
Finally, my best advice is to look
at what you’ve already got and ask
yourself whether becoming an ope rator
is a sufficiently small, low-risk jump for
you. If the risks are manageable, then
give it a go.
NICK GARNER founded
the successful SEO agency
90 Digital and subsequently
founded Oshi bitcoin casino:
oshi.io.
iGB Affiliate Issue 63 JUN/JUL 2017
51