Spotlight - PokerTableRatings.com

[Jeremy]

Poker Affiliates,

Please join me in welcoming the PokerTableRatings.com Affiliate Program to PAL.

As many of you know, the use of poker tools by high value players has significantly increased over the past few years. PokerTableRatings is the largest poker tracking site on the net, and now you have to chance to share in the profits of this site.

As an affiliate of PTR, you can take advantage of displaying many of their widgets on your site. This will increase the "stickiness" of your site, as well as allow you to make some incremental revenue through the PTR affiliate program that you may not have made otherwise. You will make 20% commissions on all sales and recurring sales though PTR.

I have invited their affiliate manager Sam to PAL and this thread to answer any questions you may have. Please feel free to throw them out there.

You can get signed up and access their program by following this link.

[doovde]

Hey Sam,

What I'd really like to know is currently what percentage of your users actually spend money on hand histories and what the average sale amount is?

At first glance looking at the PTR program it seems like affiliates get 20% of not very much and then you hope to cash in on players at a later date by signing them up to a poker room.

Are hand histories the only thing affiliates get paid for?

Thanks and welcome to the forum,

Dave

[MJ]

Hi Sam, forgive me in advance but I need to ask the sticky question first:

How can the average affiliate earn when rakeback signups seem to be a big part of your appeal? Are you paying us a portion of rake for those signups? Assuming so, how can our players be tracked with instructions to delete cookies on every page?

This question keeps coming up with brands that offer supplemental services and also use rakeback as acquisition, I never really have understood there to be a clear answer, but I'm still curious as I do enjoy setting up various backdoor revenue streams like this - I only wish to know that I'm paid for the traffic I send.

Look forward to your response, and welcome to PAL - you guys have the most innovative product I've seen in ages.

[Beanie]

I think they are actually paying you for the data they pirate, is that correct?

[Jeremy]

Hey guys, I have invited Sam here, I'm sure he'll post and get your questions answered within the next day or so.

[PTR]

Hi All,

I'd like to start off my first post by thanking Jeremy and all of the PAL members in welcoming us to your fine community. We look forward to building some great business alliances, partners, and friends.

Now let's dive into all of your great questions:


doovde:
Our stats for the last 9 months (which is when we began offering products for purchase on our site) show that roughly 1 in every 12 free user accounts end up purchasing hand histories. The average sale amount is $53.50. You will also notice that during our sales process, we offer the buyers, upon order completion, a free trial upsale to subscribe to a monthly feed. About 10% of all completed orders also stay and pay for a monthly subscription with an avg sale amount of $45.79. To clarify, we pay our affiliates for all orders and recurring subscriptions thereafter. We began offering this monthly subscription upsale in Sept, so I don't yet have retention stats to provide, but it has been a huge success thus far.

Currently sales of hand histories are the only thing we pay affiliates for. However, there are some new high end value products that will be made available as a pay service in the very near future and will yield even further commission to our affiliates.

MJ Thank you for the warm welcome, and no worries at all about "sticky" questions, it's very important to us that all cards are face up on the table, since we welcome your generous traffic and have to make sure you are happy with the partnership.

Currently there is no rakeback tracking for our affiliates. Our rakeback program is with rakebrain, and we are in discussions with them to accommodate this feature in the near future.

I would like to point out, however, Rakeback makes up a small percentage of our revenues compared to hand history sales, and will play an even smaller role once additional paid services are available. Further, if you are familiar with our old home page design, you will notice that much of the prominent spots where we were promoting rakeback have now been replaced with more exposure for hand history sales, and there are plans to further diminish the exposure of rakeback exposure.

I would also like to say this: We would be open to discussing any possible solution to accommodate whatever hurdles stand in your way to promote our affiliate program. Some ideas are:
1. As mentioned above, we're working on a way to track and share for rakeback, and a lot of that depends on the technical logistics with our rakeback provider.
2. If tracking isn't possible, we can allocate a % of the rakeback income as bonuses to our affiliates distributed by % sales volume generated, or some kind of model that makes sense and is lucrative to our affiliates.
3. We could look into auto removing rakeback offers for any visitor who who is tagged to an affiliate tracker. Or better yet, for our very best affiliates, we could possibly figure out a way to show YOUR poker room offers with your trackers right on PTR to all visitors who came from you.

Again, I'm just throwing this out there and obviously I would need to make sure this is something we can do, but I hope this demonstrates our open minded and flexible mentality to work with serious affiliates to achieve common goals.

Keep those questions and suggestions coming!

Sam
PokerTableRatings.com

[doovde]

Thanks for the reply Sam and it's good to see you are looking at trying to pay affiliates propperly for their traffic. I'm surprised that 1 in 12 of your sign ups earns you on average $53. I thought it'd be a lot lower.

Personally I'm not sure which way you should go when it comes to accomodating affiliates into your rakeback offers but I do know I won't promte PTR until that happens in some form.

[Beanie]

Sam why don't you guys allow people to opt out, especially since you are charging for data you are essentially stealing?

[MJ]

It's great that you are looking at this with eyes wide open, a lot of poker training sites have made perfect examples of how it's difficult to use rakeback to help acquisition and also try to build relationships with affiliates.

I've always maintained it's an easy bridge to fix, sounds like it's already on your agenda. Thanks for the replies Sam.

[PTR]

doovde
As I mentioned in my last post, I'd be happy to accommodate your needs. Feel free to PM or email me to discuss a plan of action.

MJ:
Which of the options I presented would you be most interested in? I'd like to show you that we are serious about accommodating, and together we can showcase an example solution in hopes that other sites will follow.

Sam