2009 Kicks Off With Changes in the Poker Affiliate Industry

It is still 2008 and already we know of major changes in the poker affiliate business coming in 2009. The biggest news came from Microgaming last week. Microgaming announced that skins on their network can no longer appear on any poker affiliate site that promotes rakeback. This was quite a blow to many rakeback affiliates that did quite well promoting Microgaming skins such as Eurolinx. Microgaming allows their skins to pay players up to 30% rakeback but it can only be used to retain players, not to market players. Up until now rakeback sites were allowed to advertise Microgaming skins as a bonus or VIP offer.

Also iPoker will be parting ways with NoiQ Poker and Carlos Poker. The poker forums have the opinion that this has to do with the fact that NoiQ and Carlos are top heavy with winning players due to promotions that are very beneficial to high volume players. NoiQ had the following to say:

“NoiQ have been on iPoker network since early 2007. This partnership is about to end January 24th. NoiQ and iPoker don’t look at things the same way and it has been hard to understand each other.”

While NoiQ has announced they will move to Entraction while Carlos Poker has yet to announce where their new home will be. Prior to moving to iPoker both rooms were a member of the Tain Network. Tain was once a standalone network which eventually moved to Tribeca Tables. Tribeca Tables moved to iPoker two years ago.