Partnerships have always been the backbone, but now even more so given the challenges from Google
Dan Gallagher
Partnership headache
According to Pilkington, building partnerships with operators can be a daunting task for smaller affiliates, as operators tend to favour bigger players and often lack affiliation experience.
“ The only way to get partnerships in the US is to do sub-affiliation and then slowly work on building up a relationship, which is against my core principle of having strong partnerships from day one, but it is a long-term strategy,” says Pilkington.
In the European iGaming market, revenue share is generally preferred over cost-per-acquisition( CPA) for its long-term sustainability. In the US, however, operators favour CPA deals. Windsor explains that working on a revenue share basis is a privilege reserved for only a handful of bigger affiliates who can afford the costly licensing process and feed part of the problem.
“ You have to do a lot of legal work that involves solicitors to obtain a revenue share licence,” Windsor says.“ When you get it, there’ s no guarantee that the operator will want to work with you, so you can spend all of this money obtaining a licence for nothing. As a small affiliate, if you are not sending a lot of players, you don’ t really have the cards to deal with them.”
Travis Geiger, co-founder of sports bets trading platform WagerWire, remains sceptical of the desire for revenue share,
arguing that the associated focus on lifetime value( LTV) is“ inherently problematic”. He believes CPA remains the better approach for US affiliates through fostering longterm trust with bettors.
“ As an affiliate, you should try to elevate bettors’ experience so that they know you are on their side. If you tell a community of people you love them but then make money every time they lose, you should question if you’ re a responsible betting site,” Geiger explains.
Are media deals dust?
In addition to the frequent algorithm updates, one of the major changes Google dropped last year was the Site Reputation Abuse( SRA) policy, which forbids sites
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