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Back in October, Stoke-based Bet365.com began requiring that all of its affiliates begin complying with specified instructions on company “review” pages. Obviously, reviews are meant to be….well, neutral reviews.
Cookie Cutter Reviews That Will Take Months to Approve?
GPWA.com members were quick to point out the problem with requiring affiliates to adhere to generic scripted copy.
Member Trifonoff started off the conversation.
The ethical one: affiliate reviews are the core of the value added service our industry generates. Explaining to the customers the advantages and the disadvantages of a given operator is what makes us useful and what generates trust in our platforms. Changing a neutral review from us with their promotional texts would be misleading to our visitors and would be unfair competition to the other operators we work with.
The legal one: their promotional texts (I comment only on Bulgarian ones as I didn't check the other languages) do not pass the compliance guide from Bulgarian Gambling Commission. They have pushing expressions as "Open account today", "Earn more from your bets" and descriptions as "wonderful", "fantastic" and so on. My texts (and I believe it is a common standard in the industry) are strictly informational. Now they ask of me to either break our national compliance guide or theirs.
With every affiliate required to use the same text, this also results in duplicate content in search engines such as Google. Duplicate content, if it doesn’t result penalization of the affiliate site, will most certainly result in reduced search rankings.
Iso2009 writes:
They have 10-20 big sites which promote bet365 and are easy to review. I would even say 5 sites (just looking in google), but again I am not sure about the traffic of others. So, easy to approve, right? That's why the big guys don't even bother to change anything. They are already approved.
Because they send at least 80% of the best affiliate traffic to bet365.
If you're a small/medium affiliate, you'll have to wait. Which is ok with me, I would do the same if I was Bet365. Of course I don't like it, but I understand it.
Telling one affiliate to "pull the links" is something that you should not do. It means they don't really care (at this moment) about the others. A thing which I also understand. But it worries me.
We'll see if they will really start reviewing/approving other ads, texts or any other promo material or the small ones will be forced to use only their ads. If so, they will lose 20% of the affiliate traffic, in the worst case scenario. Big deal.
In the end, it's all about the numbers. It was simply too beautiful to go on forever.
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The Gooner’s Gambling Guide Bet365 review page in limbo
It Could Be Worse We Suppose
Bet365 is simply reacting to pressure from the United Kingdom government to come down on affiliates for promoting losers in an effort to share in player losses.
Back in September, Skybook shut down its affiliate program in response, and there was some concern that other online gambling operators would follow suit (Ladrokes being one, though they enjoyed a significant presence at this year’s SiGMA event).
Suspension
Now comes words that some affiliates are having their accounts suspended unless they comply.
TopBoss writes:
We have bet365 on so many sites and it would take months to be compliant as per their conditions and we are not prepared to compromise our integrity with the players by writing only what they tell us to write, so we are seriously considering pulling them completely off our sites.
We have no problem with complying with UK Regulations, but bet365 is beyond ridiculous with their requests.
We have also yet to get an email from them telling us what they want us to do, despite complying with all their previous emails, and they still suspended us.!
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
