My Week So Far
Well, the week has gone by so fast I don’t even know where it went. Today is Friday and I haven’t played poker since Sunday. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been working though…
As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent most of Monday dealing with the video intros and outros with my brother, but since then my PC has been going non stop for 60 hours… converting ONLY 13 videos from wmv to flash. Given that Grinderschool has over 200 videos and if I split the work evenly with JGB, then I’m still looking at running that PC for a month straight to finish all the conversions. This is rather disappointing news.
From Tuesday through Thursday I’ve been dealing with Poker Affiliates for the upcoming Grinderschool redesign. Apparently when you sign up for an affiliate they don’t give you the ‘best’ deal, for us or our subscribers. I had to email all 25 of the separate poker accounts that we will have affiliate relationships with in order to confirm that they did, in fact, give us the rakeback account. It is true, of the majority of the sites that offer rakeback, they did not give us the rakeback affiliate account (I’d say 90% were like this).
I wont say any names, but even when confronted and asked directly: does my affiliate account offer rakeback they either tried to walk around the question or just said no. My point to this that of the 10 or so sites that offer rakeback, only one came out and said we had the best deal and another 1 came out and offered us the best deal when asked.
That leaves a remarkable 8/10 (I’m exaggerating a little because I don’t have the exact number, but its around there) that, even when asked, still didn’t offer us the best deal. Here’s the typical email chain for each site:
Me: Hey, does my affiliate account allow rakeback? (obviously more polite and formal)
Them: No
Me: Is that because your site does not allow it or because you haven’t authorized our account?
Them: Because you haven’t been authorized.
Me: Could you please authorize our account?
Them: Ok, we’ll have to negotiate rates. Please sign up again.
Each of the above conversations were separate emails back and forth, and although my replies were instantaneous it wasn’t always the case with them. A lot of the times they would take 30 minutes or more to respond, which wasn’t exactly all that bad given the fact I had to do this OVER AND OVER for all the poker sites. There were about 20 separate email chains to different affiliates going over such simple and mundane questions; it was quite frustrating.
That was pretty much my schedule from Tuesday-Thursday, but I’m happy to say I’ve finally gotten that taken care of. We’re still in talks with Bodog, which happens to be the only poker site who seemingly HATES traffic because they are such a b**ch to deal with. They are vetting our site and intentions more than McCain did Palin (too easy of a zing, that I won’t mention it); at some point you have to hold your ground and say:
Fuck you! How about YOU give me your best rates and we can talk about a deal?
I knew they are hard to deal with because I’ve tried to work with them in the past with no success. It seems like they don’t like free advertising; what morons. Also, they’re support team is so informal it feels like I’m talking to a group of Frat jag-offs. I’ve had affiliates literally call me from AUSTRALIA so they can give us the best deal; and they’re part of networks much more trustworthy and larger than that of Bodog. I’ve also talked with a couple reps via instant messenger (apparently MSN is the medium of choice in the poker industry) and these people have given me their real names and personal email address. Those are people that care.
Not Bodog. My response email from them came from “Bodog Affiliate Team.” Not an individual person. No Mark, Steve, Neri, Bob, or Dorothy (actual affiliate support names). Its like I’m emailing the entire department, not an individual person. Fuck that, I’ve got 25 other sites I can send players and frankly, we don’t need Bodog that bad anyway.
That was yesterday; I’ve yet to receive a response after I sent them an email back (obv I was a little more courteous and cordial). I have no idea if they’re actually going to approve us but after a while I just don’t care.
And now we’re on Friday, Halloween. What am I going to do? I have no idea.
