A week on from online poker’s Black Friday we are starting to see the industry resettle and as the situation becomes less, and less, murky there are some clear-cut winners and losers coming to light. In this article I want to take a look at one of the hardest hit parts of the online poker industry, excluding the three poker sites themselves of course!

One look at the major poker media pages and affiliates pretty much tells the story: instead of Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars advertising occupying prime advertising real estate we are seeing ads like “New Full Tilt Poker sites” and “Poker sites still accepting US players” in their place. This is why I feel the older online poker affiliates will be one of the hardest hit entities after Black Friday.

Basically, the US crackdown has not only put smaller online poker rooms on somewhat equal footing with the big boys, but it has done the same for affiliates. Longstanding affiliates –most of which focused on the US market– will no longer have the revenue from their bread and butter sites of Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars to draw on. Imagine being the affiliate that signed up Randy “nanonoko” Lew, Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt or any of the high-volume mid-stakes grinders who were likely generating hundreds of thousand of dollars in rake by themselves.

Now affiliates that once had the revenue to buy up their own advertising will be taken down a notch, which might allow newer, smaller, affiliates the chance to gain a solid foothold in the market.

Tags: Advertising, Big Boys, Black Friday, Bread And Butter, Entities, Equal Footing, Foothold, Full tilt Poker, Grinders, High Volume, Lew, Notch, Online Poker, Poker Affiliates, Poker Rooms, Poker Sites, PokerStars, Rake, Us Crackdown, Winners And Losers

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 6:49 am and is filed under Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.