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Hi all,
I thought it might be good to have a private discussion in here about Cpays. This seems like a better place to discuss / hash things out, instead of doing it on the public forums where there are significantly more eyes reading the posts.
Anyway — there seems to be two views on the situation. One view is that we should try to work with Cpays to fix the issues. The other view is that we have been trying to work with Cpays for a long time — but there isn’t any improvement.
I agree that it is better to work with a program to bring about change — of course that makes sense — but how much time should one spend on this before you say “enough is enough”?
Cpays has a long history of screwing people. Look at the CAP archives, and it’s plain as day. Remember how they screwed Ellen and Dean? (thread here)
Remember how they retroactively lowered CK44m’s commission to 20% because he wasn’t promoting them to their satisfaction? (thread here)
Then we have the negative carryover issue, which was never explained in the T&Cs until recently (complete thread here). Sure, it’s good that this we have it in writing — now — but why wasn’t this in place long ago? For those unfamiliar with this — Cpays will take away your negative carryover, but only if you take a 5% cut in your commission level. What kind of crap is that?
The SEO contest. Recipe for disaster.
As far as I know, Cpays never properly integrated Amber Coast once they took it over. If you had players there, I guess they’re gone.
Then we have this little nugget, which was “accidentally” sent to someone:
My name is xxxxx and I am your new account manager for xxx.casinopays.com. I have noticed a decrease in players coming from your sites in the past few months. Are you still involved in the industry? If not, please inform me otherwise we will close your account with CasinoPays.
However, if you are still involved let’s work together as I am sure we can make some good $$$!
Contact me ASAP.
Regards,Next issue — A lot of black hatters are promoting Cpays casinos. Why is that? Why don’t they promote CPS or Revenue Giants or someone else? I’ll tell you why — because Cpays has a lenient policy against this sort of activity. They can “write” all the policies they want — but if they don’t actually enforce them, they are meaningless. The spamdexing continues, the scraping continues, the blatant content theft continues… and I end up wasting hours of my day dealing with this $#^*.
All right, so at this point, I have laid out a few reasons why I don’t care for Cpays. There are other examples, but I think I have made my point.
Now, the issue becomes, what I am going to do about this?
Work with them to bring them to the path of righteousness? Ignore the problem and hope they don’t damage the industry too much, and hope my sites don’t get scraped into oblivion? Or am I going to bring out the guns and fight back?
Answer: I’m bringing out the big guns. Why? Because if you look back at the problems with Cpays, they go back for well over a year. I can’t help but wonder, do they really want to improve? Or is this just “how they are?” To me, it looks like this is just “how they are” — and I’ve had enough of it.
Affiliates like us should not have to police the internet and “turn in” spam and content theft to the affiliate programs. This was 888’s solution to the problem — set up a form for us to submit complaints to.
The problem here, is that a black hatter can spit out 1,000 sites in the time it takes me to track down and turn just a few of his sites. So, here he is, pumping out thousands of income-producing sites, and here I am, spending 2 or 3 hours a day turning in his crap to the 888 form (or to the Cpays team) instead of working on my own sites. How is that fair to me? Why should I do that?
Cpays should be taking a proactive approach here. But history has shown, time and time again, that they don’t do this. Instead, we have to hound them for weeks and weeks before any action is taken.
This isn’t the sign of a good affiliate program. This is the sign of a shitty program, one that doesn’t value their affiliates. One that could care less where the money comes from (be it white hat or black hat sites), just as long as money is coming in.
Now, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, you have Revenue Giants, CPS, Roxy Affiliates, 32Red, etc. All outstanding, reputable programs.
This post is getting a bit long, so I’ll try to wrap it up now —
As an affiliate who cares deeply about the future of the industry, I am not going to stand by and do nothing while trashy programs tarnish the reputation of the industry. I am going to promote the programs that do the right thing, and I am going to do whatever I can to prevent people from funding the unethical groups. This includes blacklisting.
I know it would be “nice” to work with Cpays to resolve the issues, but I honestly don’t think they will change their ways. I’ve seen the way they operate, and I don’t like it. I ask myself if the industry would be better off without Cpays, and I think the answer (to me, at least) is… “yes, probably.”
Anyway, that’s my opinion. Obviously not everyone will agree. But thankfully, CAP is a professional board, and we can discuss things like this here and then have a round of beers to settle our differences. :thumbsup:
Well put.
I am ALWAYS for discussion and resolution!
Sometimes progress cannot be made by normal contact and some pressure is needed.
The pressure is applied to encourage the discussion and resolution and in my experience always works.
Everyone who has come under scrutiny so far is alive and well on CAP today, and problems have been fixed or made lighter.
When I decided to look into this industry and consider developing websites, I had scoured the web… I can remember vividly that the casinos popping up most of the time (even if the search didn’t make any sense to me) was USA, New York, and Monoco Gold casinos.
Looking back at this, I realize that this was all BH tactics.
This means that it has been going on for at least 2 years.
We have certainly asked CPays to stop this mess. They do not care.
Heres the problem I have.
In a perfect world we could snap our fingers and there would be no black hat SEO assholes online anymore. We would all develop unique sites and the search engines would rank them based upon their ultimate worth to searchers. It would be an even playing field and everyone would have a fair shot at success.
Unfortunately that isnt what we have to deal with. We have hundreds of very active Black Hatters who have discovered that they can take the low road and earn shit pots of money online. They arent going to throw in the towel, they like what they do and have no conscience whatsoever so there is little hope to educating these fuckers. They will promote who ever pays them the most. They specialize in Playtech casinos and Cassava primarily because these operators pay a very high CPA rate.
CPA is what Blackhatters want, they dont want Rev Share. Why you ask? Because it’s in their nature to go for the quick buck. They dont want to build a business or develop relationships, thats their mindset. Make the money fast and when things go to shit move to the next scam. If you are a CPA affiliate you can pull up stakes AT ANY TIME and go to another program, you dont have to maintain the relationship with the casino. Therefore the casino has little sway over you. If they shut your affiliate account you dont really care, its not like you are losing a big recurring revenue stream, you just pull up stakes and find another operator who pays you a high CPA rate and you are back in business full bore without really missing a beat.
This presents a huge problem for the casino operator (yes, I know they created the problem, but that doesnt change things) and its the one that we are seeing now.
These playtech casinos took the easy route, they hired black hat affiliates because they could generate players fast, now they have a problem that keeps growing. The black hatters alienate the real affiliates by their actions, so real affiliates dry up and leave the program. Now the black hatters are generating an even LARGER percentage of incoming players and they are even MORE important for the survival of the casino. Its a viscous cycle. The more real affiliates leave the more emphasis and value is shifted over to the black hatters until eventually its impossible for the operator to drop the black hatters without going out of business. This is something they wont do and at that point the casino group is now locked into the black hat camp for life.
What I am trying to do is break the cycle BEFORE we reach that critical mass. Its a balancing act and I get a lot of lumps for it, but its what I believe we have to do to win.
My plan is this. We keep the avenue open for the operator to return to white hat affiliates by keeping the doors open and communications going. We work with them strongly to minimize their reliance on black hatters. The balancing act is we have to object strongly to bad practices, but we have to let them see that white hatters arent a lost cause. That they can work with us and we havent totally written them off. If they perceive that there is a chance to work with us they will continue to pursue us.
If they dont see this opportunity and instead decide that “no matter what we do the mainstream affiliate community wont work with us any more” then all they will have to work with is Black Hatters. They will work with them exclusively and we are dead meat. We will have NO influence over them whatsoever and there will be no stopping this problem.
The thing about Cpays is this they are greedy. Thats what got them in to this. Its what we can use to get them and us out of it. We can make them see that working white hat will earn them just as much money or maybe even more in the long run. But in order to do that we need to have their audience and interest. We HAVE to reward and praise the positive moves that they make.
We can continue to aggressively pursue and report spammers and again we praise them when they make a positive move to reduce the problem. Let them believe that we consider the bad affiliates the problem and that we want to work with CPays, to get rid of this plague so that we can BOTH earn more money.
If we take that tact rather then declaring war on them and blacklisting them and trying to hurt their casinos then we may be able to guilt them into doing the right thing. If we dont then we will have no leverage at all and the blackhatters will win the war.
I want to win the war MORE then I want to punish CasinoPays for being greedy and stupid.
I hope this makes sense.
I stated the exact thing at CM a while back about 888 (I believe). Yes, we do not want to close communications and force them to use BH’ers.
We do not want to continue ‘rolling over’ like we have for the last 2-4 months while waiting for them to do the right thing. They have continued business without any modifications because we did not take any action.
CPays NEEDS to do something. Their greed is taking over and at this point I do not believe they will let the BH dollers go without a fight. I don’t think they will let them go until they begin to see a decline in profit.
Ok Cpays just posted and to me it appears they are interested in working on a solution. Is that what you guys perceive or are we going to view this as too little/too late/we dont trust em so who care what they say…
Professor wrote:Ok Cpays just posted and to me it appears they are interested in working on a solution. Is that what you guys perceive or are we going to view this as too little/too late/we dont trust em so who care what they say…I believe it is positive. They are working in the same manner as 888 (which still sucks, but is our only avenue at this point).
Like I said in the CPays thread – I reserve judgement until the SERPS no longer contain CPays re-directs. It pains me to see that WE are responsable, once again, to clean up THEIR mess though
Uh guess what…
I hate to be depressing, but once we get Casino Pays cleaned up its extremely likely that our black hat friends will crop up at ANOTHER Playtech Program or anyone offering high CPA deals….
The reason we now see CP at 90% of the spam sites is because we chased a good number of them away from 888.
Like it or not this will be an ongoing project for as long as there are profits to be made in marketing online gaming.
It looks like they are taking this seriously… that is a good sign.
I don’t like the fact that we have to “report” spam to them, though. It’s good that they set this up, but I wonder how exactly they will use this tool. Will they ask the black hatter to remove only the pages that have been spotted, or will they ban him permanently from the program?
BTW Professor, your earlier (long) post was very good.
We can continue to aggressively pursue and report spammers and again we praise them when they make a positive move to reduce the problem. Let them believe that we consider the bad affiliates the problem and that we want to work with CPays, to get rid of this plague so that we can BOTH earn more money.
If we take that tact rather then declaring war on them and blacklisting them and trying to hurt their casinos then we may be able to guilt them into doing the right thing. If we dont then we will have no leverage at all and the blackhatters will win the war.
Ideally this would work… but I am more inclined to think that their bottom line needs to be affected before they will take any serious action.
Also, I don’t think I can ignore the other problems surrounding Cpays, which have nothing to do with black hatters. Even without the black hatters making them look bad, Cpays has done some things that shouldn’t be forgotten so quickly. They ripped off Ellen and Dean, they “accidentally” sent emails to people threatening to close their accounts, they “accidentally” retroactively lowered someone’s commission, and in general, the people that work there are pushy and rude when they communicate via email (e.g. to get you to promote their brands).
So, I think I am annoyed with Cpays for two reasons — one, because they have a long history of undesirable, shady behavior, and two, because they have been lenient with scrapers up until now.
Regarding the scenario where Cpays becomes a BH haven…. Do you think if there was a massive blacklisting by the white hats, that Cpays would be able to survive on BH traffic alone? We did this with 888, and they rather quickly decided that they should try to fix things with the white hats. Because of this, and because of the way Fortune, VPL, and RB reacted last summer to the massive blacklisting campaign, I believe that we do wield enormous power — more than any number of black hats.
Like it or not this will be an ongoing project for as long as there are profits to be made in marketing online gaming.
Hmm… 🙁
Well, maybe if we put a few of these guys out of business completely, the remaining companies will shape up and take this as seriously as we do? I do think we are “in charge” in a way…. In charge of where most of the traffic (and money) goes, at least.
Regarding the issue of carrying over negative balance, yes CPays was horrible in not making a clear policy. Now this new policy of taking a 5% cut in payout rate and eliminate any carryover is a fair policy. Remember a casino aff program does take a cost hit if they do not carry over negatives, so this is fair and the aff just needs to make a choice. (I myself am so far in the negative that i am unable to make this choice so that is why you will not see them on my sites)
The Black Hat issue and their SEO contests on the other hand I feel are serious issues. I do believe their SEO contest attracts black hatters and is intended to increase their database of BH affiliates. I think if they continue down this path then it is clear that they are not going to change their ways and we should all remove them from our sites as they are actively damaging our industry.
Their T&C’s imply they do not accept BH but they obviously do, once again this is not a hard item for them to identify and to enforce the blockage. Lou I understand your point that they have dug themselves a hole, but THEY dug it themselves. They need to take a look at their traffic and see if they can find a way to manage their traffic back to the good side.
My recommendation if the group is in agreement is to:
1. No more SEO contests unless they can run one which will stop the BH from using their tacticts or eliminate them from the contest.
2. Show that they do not support BH and will take action when this is pointed out to them.Lou the one point i think that is missing is they do have a large revenue flow coming in because of the amount of players they generated by allowing this greedy behavior to begin with, all those players can still be active and generating.
I say they need to quickly show they are going to run a clean program but there are soooooo many good programs out there we have no need or fear of loosing one that is not good. We should be rewarding the good ones.
Don’t close communication, but let them know in order to work with them we need to see some positive action. I myself have taken them down from the big winners i have had consistantly but even if I did not have this negative I would remove them till I saw they were making steps to put their house in order.
Just my thoughts,
BrianProfessor wrote:Uh guess what…I hate to be depressing, but once we get Casino Pays cleaned up its extremely likely that our black hat friends will crop up at ANOTHER Playtech Program or anyone offering high CPA deals….
The reason we now see CP at 90% of the spam sites is because we chased a good number of them away from 888.
Like it or not this will be an ongoing project for as long as there are profits to be made in marketing online gaming.
While this is true… What I hope to see is that other programs decide that it is not worth it to go into business with these BH’s. If that is the case, then we will hopefully see SERPS get a bit better.
Very optimistic, I know, but what else do we have?
Hey Everyone,
I agree with many points Lou has made in his post above. Still, I would not promote CP if it was a cold day in hell. They have always been pushy and I never did do well with revenue share there. One of the problems this industry faces is there is not many places to advertise. This has created the greed driven unethical methods to try to survive by some online casino programs. The scrapping and stealing of content has done damage to many good webmasters here at CAP. We must all stand together and continue to presure any and all affiliate programs that allow such tactics.Captain wrote:Hey Everyone,
I agree with many points Lou has made in his post above. Still, I would not promote CP if it was a cold day in hell. They have always been pushy and I never did do well with revenue share there. One of the problems this industry faces is there is not many places to advertise. This has created the greed driven unethical methods to try to survive by some online casino programs. The scrapping and stealing of content has done damage to many good webmasters here at CAP. We must all stand together and continue to presure any and all affiliate programs that allow such tactics.I agree cpays has started something malicious. Perhaps I should post the garbage and get some people really ticked off. greek39
You should… At least post it in this private forum.
Did you know with the contest came {entercasino.com} as a redirect. Can you say tradal and empire. Man am I freakin pissed, also take note how fast Janet showed up today. I am thinking about cancelling Vegas now, because in the end it makes no difference I am only a 39 man army. greek39
