Bet365 Affiliates Review

The Bet365 affiliate program has come under fire over this past year due to a drastic change in the company's Terms & Conditions. Throughout the past two decades, Bet365 has received mostly favorable reviews, but the Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom, for which the company is based, has begun cracking down on company and affiliate marketing tactics. As a result, Bet365 started ending relationships with some of their affiliates while requiring others to include scripting copy for their review pages.

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The Pros and Cons of the Bet365 Affiliate Program

AskGambers is a popular online gambling review site that also looks at various affiliate programs including Bet365.  They offer the pros and cons below.

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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.

Early Warning Signs

Even before Bet365 decided to alter its T&Cs, there were signs of instability for online gambling affiliates coming down the road.

AskGamblers features an unresolved complaint on its site.

I was affiliate for one year. I had delivered a lot of new customers. Provisions have been paid regularly, as agreed. Customers won a bets occasionally. I have earned provision 7200€ on April. But, during money withdraw attempt I found out my account is blocked (I could not login anymore). I have contacted support service. They claimed I had violated the rules. Bet365 didn’t even bothered to contacted me about issuer.After few useless emails with support service I decided to contact Gaming Authority and License company – IBAS and Gibraltar Gaming Comissioner. IBAS did not responded. GGC said my issue is not in their competence, it is business relationship between me and Bet365.This is how Bet365 threat affiliate partners. As a player I have always been satisfied. So, I have propagated them with goodwill. I wanted recommend good products and services. With my active propagation I have made them thousands of euros. But, sadly my reward had never come. I have strong feeling of frustration, because I have done my part of deal (delivered new customers), but Bet365 didn’t paid my reward.

- Gilbert Horowitz, Gambling911.com