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Keep your eyes open for a mailing from Referback regarding upcoming commission changes.
Kamiel will be posting a news release here shortly outlining the new structure and reasons for the modifications.
Prof.
Do you know if these changes will take affect this month, or at the beginning of June?
Hi there,
Fourth Tier added to Casino Commission Model
On Thursday, 1 July 12pm EST, ReferBack.com will launch its newly revised Commission Tier and New Active Player requirements. Changes have been aimed to encourage new and less experienced Affiliates to actively market our suite of casino clients on a regular basis.
This new development will not affect Affiliates who market the casinos over and above the minimum new Active Player and minimum Positive Net Win requirement shown in the table below.
As this model only comes into effect as from 1 July 2004, your June 2004 commissions will not be affected.
Commission Tier %: 20%
Minimum New Active Player Requirement: 0
Minimum Positive Net Win Generated: $0Commission Tier %: 25%
Minimum New Active Player Requirement: 1
Minimum Positive Net Win Generated: $0Commission Tier %: 30%
Minimum New Active Player Requirement: 1
Minimum Positive Net Win Generated: $15001Commission Tier %: 35%
Minimum New Active Player Requirement: 1
Minimum Positive Net Win Generated: $30001If an Affiliate meets both the minimum New Active Player and minimum Positive Net Win requirements, they will receive the commission tier applicable.
Positive Net Win explained:
With ReferBack.com, your commission is calculated on each individual casino so not to affect your marketing efforts on the other suite of client casinos. For example, if you are marketing 2 casinos for June. Your Net Win for Casino “A” is in negative at the end of the month due to player winnings, and Casino “B” is in positive due to favourable player losses, the negative number for Casino “A” is set to zero thus not affecting your other Net Win amounts from Casino “B”.Please feel free to contact your personal Affiliate Relationship Manager with any questions, comments or concerns regarding this new commission structure. We will do our best to answer all your questions.
Kind regards,
Kamiel Mahomed
Affiliate Relationship ManagerHmmm….
I don’t understand what has changed besides that your taking 5% off affiliates that don’t market your casinos.
Basically people living off “past glory” – i.e: they used to have plenty of traffic, now they have none but are still being creditied with the players – are taking a 5% pay cut. All other affiliates are not affected.
Please correct me if my above translation is wrong, but if I am reading this right RB is simply aiming to make higher profits.
Also, how does this fourth tier help new affiliates?
I am extremely sorry if I am wrong, and disregard my revenue raising comment if I am. But if I am right… I won’t say over the net.
Hi Stephen,
Thank you for the feedback and your questions.
Basically people living off “past glory” – i.e: they used to have plenty of traffic, now they have none but are still being creditied with the players – are taking a 5% pay cut. All other affiliates are not affected.
You are correct in your summary as above. Most affiliates who actively market ReferBack will not be affected. The total number of affiliates who fall within the affected group is very minimal, and if you look at the basic requirement of 1 new active player each month, I am sure you will agree that most affiliates generate at least 1 new player each month without even making any attempt to do so.
This decision was made not out of a purely financial need, but more to motivate the newer and inactive affiliates to make some attempt at increasing acquisition of new players to the casinos. I agree that 5% may not be a large chunk of cash, but if it means a 5% extra in commissions just for getting 1 new player through the door each month, I am sure that some affiliates may be motivated to increase their marketing efforts.
I hope that I have covered all your questions. Please let me know if you need any more information.
Kind regards,
Kamiel Mahomed
Affiliate Relationship ManagerI have to admit that I’m dissapointed. A new affiliate model is usualy a good thing for affiliates. Instead this turned out to be a money grab.
In most circles this would be called a negative reinforcement. In other words if affiliates dont perform and keep sending new players you are going to penalize them and reduce commission to a level below what was initially agreed upon.
If you wanted to actually makes affiliates happy, maybe you should have introduced a positive reinforcement. Whereby the commission stays at 25%, unless you send 1 or more new active players in a month and you then move up to 30% irregardless of how much commission has been made.
Seriously when I initially heard rumors about this commission change, i expected a 5% increase. For affiliates that are at the 25% commission level referback is one of the lowest paying affiliate programs out there. Take a look around I’m not making this up. My first impression when I got your email was to delete it and to then go out and delete all of your casinos and poker rooms from my websites. Instead I’ll just wait until my scheduled website updates and slowly remove a casino here and there. I cant afford to send traffic to casinos that might reduce my commission when i have a few bad months.
This reminds me of a stunt a pharmacy pulled off just lately. If you didn’t send them enough new orders in a month, they would steal your refill commissions. In my opinion this is the same thing but on a smaller scale.
This is especially dissapointing considering all the positive changes at referback lately, such as improved communication & conversions.
Antoine
Hmmmm 25% is the lowest.
Did you guys know that Referspot is giving 40% of the gross win for this month?
Their default commission structure starts at 25% of the gross win.
The GROSS win, not the NET win!! That makes it among the highest commission structures in the industry for the month of June, and even back at the defaut rate, 25% of the gross is significantly higher than the usual NET win commissions.
Referspot represents Microgaming Casinos.
http://www.referspot.com/signup.asp?affid=5947
Please pardon the spam. :rolleyes:
Did you also know that Casino Rewards offers 35% flat commission at all times on microgaming casinos?
Also, with 90% of the other casino affiliate networks, if you move up to a higher commission scale due to a good month than you stay at that higher commission forever, no matter how badly you perform the months thereafter.
Unlike 3 years ago referback isn’t one of only a handful of affiliate networks to promote. There’s dozens upon dozens, and I for one dont like the idea of my commission being held hostage in an effort to claim better exposure.
Antoine
Kamiel –
I’m afraid I have to agree with Antoine. Furthermore, our agreement with you was to receive 25%+ for the life of the player – and thus you would be in breach if you were to cut commissions on existing players to 20% if for some reason we cannot or do not send a player that month.
Accordingly, I hereby ask you to withdraw your plan until such time as you can find a way to apply this policy only to players signed up after the policy takes effect. Alternately, consider moving all the percentages up 5% so that you will remain within the scope of the contract you signed with affiliates up until this point.
Kamiel
I think RB is simply increasing profits. If you really wanted to provide motivation to actively market your casinos you would either:
a) Increase percentage payouts
b) Provide more tools to help affiliates
c) Add more casinos to your program
d) Try to improve player retention/conversion percentages
I’m sure there are many other improvements you could make, and asking your affiliates would give you more ideas than you could handle.B&D would cost nothing but time. C would eventually help both affiliates and RB.
Decreasing the percentage on the off event that nobody signs up is not very inviting. If nobody new signs up, we not only suffer financial losses of having no new players, but then you go ahead and take an extra 5% off us!
what are you guys thinking?
I’m having some positive months with RB, have just started to put your banners back up;
and now I find out that you’re going to steal 5% commission from us by not honoring the original agreement that was there when I signed up?
a terrible business decision.
Whoever is in charge of this stuff needs to do some rethinking before they totally shoot RB’s resurgence out of the sky.
A good general rule of thumb is to ask yourself; if I were them, would I think I was being treated fairly with this policy change?
Seriously, how could anybody have thought that we’d be pleased with this?
What’s so frustrating is that it seems like every time I find a program that seems to be starting to take off; the program will do something that is so totally unacceptable that they basically leave me no choice but to stop promoting them.
This is upsetting to say the least.
Crap!
and you know what? its not the loss of the 5% that is so upsetting, but rather the fact that if you do this to me now: how do I know that 6 months from now there won’t be another policy change?
Next time they want 2 new players, maybe after that they’ll want 3 new players every month.
And you say, “well we won’t do that; take our word for it”.
Well I took your word for it when I signed up at the 25% rate.
And the reason this bothers me so much; is because I WAS planning on switching out SunVegas for an RB casino.
Now I’ve got to find a different casino to replace them. And in one hand, Lucky Nugget has been doing well for me of late and I’d like nothing more than to replace SunVegas with a casino that has already proven to make money, but I cannot risk doing so with a casino that may shave my commission again at any time.
I truly cannot help but shake my head in bewilderment at some of the ideas that are implimented.
I can understand one person coming up with a bad idea; but for it to get past all the intelligent minds that I figure must be aware of it before it gets made public…..
unbelievable
I read over the reasoning behind the change, and I have to say that it’s pretty bogus. If your goal is to encourage inactive affiliates to become more active, incentives for new player signups is going to be a lot more effective than punishing people by paying them lower percentages if they don’t send new sign-ups.
And as Spear said, you need to live up to the terms of your original agreement.
I haven’t marketed Referback yet, but this change in policy hasn’t motivated me to send them any players or sign up with them in the least.
Quote:and you know what? its not the loss of the 5% that is so upsetting, but rather the fact that if you do this to me now: how do I know that 6 months from now there won’t be another policy change?That’s exactly the reason I am bothered. But it’s not the amount of new sign up’s that I am concerned about, it’s the possibility that RB (or any other program) will decide to reduce all comissions – irrespective of new players and sales – by 5% to “motivate affiliates” to market their casinos more to get into the higher band.
The more I think of it, a better idea would be to put a fourth tier after the 35% mark. So if we generate say 50k in sales for a month, we get put up to a 50% comission or something like that.
Hi there,
I would like to let you know that we have taken into account all your comments and suggestions, and would like to thank you all for taking the time to raise them with us.
I will be posting a reply soon, which should address all matters raised.
Kind regards,
Kamiel Mahomed
Affiliate Relationship ManagerI just had a chat with Simone about my constant complaints
She seems very nice, thought I would of enjoyed talking much much more without the lag though…Anyway, the general idea of the conversation was on my comments about alternate motivation methods for affiliates – after all this is why they introduced the 4th tier in the first place.
She asked me to expand on my comments, and to contribute any more ideas I can think of. I couldn’t think of any on the phone. I think my brain temporarily went numb from the shock of being called. While i’m thinking of ideas, if anyone else has time to kill do have a think what would motivate you more, and e-mail your ideas to either Simone or your aff manager. They do seem very concerned with our less-than-happy reaction.
