Sports betting affiliate newbie - A few questions

[smartuner]

Hey everyone,
I have not posted too much yet here but will do so in the near future. Anyway I am in the gambling affiliate business for a two years now but I have only done casino affiliation so far. However I am so tired of writing casino and slot reviews that I want to start a sports betting website. I am really passionate about US sports so I want to build a website with the longer term focus on the NFL season 2015/16. Being new to sports betting I have a few questions and I hope I can get some answers from people here:

Images

When it comes to images which you use for your game previews. Are you just taking images from around the web or you are using a provider like Getty Images? The reason I ask is I am a bit worried about copyright violations if I just copy images from other websites.

Casino conversion

I will also promote online casinos on my website. Question here how likely is it that people who sign up for a bookie convert into a casino player?

Earnings
If you have done casino and sports betting. What is the rough earning ratio. How much more or less do you make from punters?

Traffic

If you are depending on organic traffic is the majority of the traffic coming from articles you post based on a match preview? For example if I post an article with the title “Cleveland Browns vs. San Francisco 49ers preview” would this article rank straight away and are lots of users coming to the website through these articles? And what is the best time to post these previews? In the morning before the games or already a few days in advance?


I am aware that some of these questions might be really newbie questions but again I have not done any sports betting promotion yet so please excuse me if some of these questions are sounding a bit stupid.
Thanks everyone!

[DanHorvat]

Images - people usually take an image they like, give credit to the original author, and hope for the best. Very rarely will someone complain. Taking images from Getty is a bad idea as they file a lawsuit without previous notice.

Casino - highly unlikely. Just like all cross-selling it's a shot in the dark. You'd have a better shot appealing to what the user is obviously interested in, for example football jerseys or beer mugs.

Earnings - not that high in sports betting. Especially in the US as I'm sure you're aware betting is illegal in the land of the free.

Traffic - an article will rank straight away on a quality site that was built properly, but this is hard to do. There is no reason to post articles before game day as people just don't search it in Google before it actually comes up.

I'm also building something for the upcoming NFL season, let's see who does a better job

[Rostick]

Images - From around the web. Ideally the source should be specified in some form, but usually you can`t find the original source.

Casino - I reckon it is a decent chance. I have some players that try out casino and I am completely detached from casinos, never promoted them, nothing on my website about them. If you do cross selling smart, I think you could be ok, but hard to say for sure.

Earnings - Possibly the niche where earnings come the hardest. Most people just want to read previews. Many will register and not play, many will win! This could be a shock for you, to see your players winning regularly, I guess it doesn`t happen in casinos. Registration/click ratio can be way below 1%. Personally I think I would rather advertise with adsense if I could.

Traffic - the good part with sportsbetting is that if you do things right, traffic comes pretty easy (or at least easier than other niches), especially for tips and previews. Most of my search traffic comes from "x - y betting tips / preview" and I can rank as high as 1st on many games - and I`m a rather average website, it`s not like I`m generally Top 5 or Top 10 in the betting niche yet. However, with US sports it might be more difficult.

[smartuner]

Hey both

Thanks a lot for your replies. Great point with monetizing via Adsense. The only thing which would worry be that if I am putting Adsense on my website would I still be okay in also promoting bookies or would Adsense ban me in that case?

[ifonly]

Taking images from Getty is a bad idea as they file a lawsuit without previous notice

That is not true. One of my friend was using images from Getty. They contacted him and just asked to remove it.
Might be because his site was very new, probably not worth to file a lawsuit.

[Rostick]

If you have gambling content you will probably get rejected by Adsense and if you promote bookies you will 99,9% get rejected / banned.

[wonderpunter]

If you have gambling content you will probably get rejected by Adsense and if you promote bookies you will 99,9% get rejected / banned.

Adsense allow you to promote if gambling is legal in your jurisdiction where ad sense account is registered, Though earnings are paltry compared to sportsbetting,

[Rostick]

Adsense allow you to promote if gambling is legal in your jurisdiction where ad sense account is registered, Though earnings are paltry compared to sportsbetting,

Are you sure? I won`t say you are wrong because I did not do extensive research, but from what I know it`s forbidden no matter what.

[wonderpunter]

Are you sure? I won`t say you are wrong because I did not do extensive research, but from what I know it`s forbidden no matter what.

They opened it up a while back, unless you are in a restricted country, If your site and adsense account is based in the uk "for example" you can run ads.. and although the keyword planner shows big money, reality is the space is best kept for affiliate banners, here is a snippet from their t&c's .. you can activate gambling ads in the sensitve section

AdSense restricts the placement of ads on gambling sites and gambling-related content. We have different policies for gambling content, based on the country in which a publisher is located. Publishers outside a limited group of countries are not allowed to place ads on any gambling content or on any pages with links to gambling content. This includes any content that allows users to place bets or play games in exchange for an opportunity to earn money or other prizes.

Publishers who have been selected and approved for gambling content, and are located in one of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden or the United Kingdom:

from https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/48182?hl=en-GB

[Rostick]

Publishers who have been selected and approved for gambling content, and are located in one of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden or the United Kingdom:

Interesting. That is exactly what I knew, but I applied 3 times as a Romanian in the last 6-12 months and got rejected every time because of gambling related content. So either the guidelines are not updated, or the conditions are extremely strict (or random). Good to know about the low rates.

[wonderpunter]

Interesting. That is exactly what I knew, but I applied 3 times as a Romanian in the last 6-12 months and got rejected every time because of gambling related content. So either the guidelines are not updated, or the conditions are extremely strict (or random). Good to know about the low rates.

Just looked at your site, I can't be sure as im no expert on adsense but your site is pure 100% gambling, and my site is more mixed, So when there are no gambling ads filled they use other ads.. Not sure but seems the most logical explanation?

[Rostick]

Just looked at your site, I can't be sure as im no expert on adsense but your site is pure 100% gambling, and my site is more mixed, So when there are no gambling ads filled they use other ads.. Not sure but seems the most logical explanation?

Yes, it`s a betting tips website, so it`s about gambling - even though the content is more like news and previews - like. I don`t know what to say. It`s possible that they accept you (as long as you are in the permitted country list) if you do not promote bookies and stuff.

[baldidiot]

Bit of an old thread but I've been off on hols and wanted to add my 2c:

Images

When it comes to images which you use for your game previews. Are you just taking images from around the web or you are using a provider like Getty Images? The reason I ask is I am a bit worried about copyright violations if I just copy images from other websites.

- If you take an image from the web, even if you give credit, you may still be violating copyright - especially with rights managed images such as sports. And just because one site has an image doesn't mean they own the rights to it, or even have the rights to use it.

The better sports licences are expensive though - getty is around $30 an image I think for a one off. You can get the price down but you need to be licensing a largeish number before it becomes even vaguely reasonable (eg: in the hundreds per month).

Cheaper stock image sites such as shutterstock or big stock can be an option where you don't need a specific image (eg: if an image of a player in general will work, rather than them from a specific game) - one offs are around $2 I think off the top of my head, or you can get monthly licenses to bring the cost down.

Whether you want to risk taking them without permission is up to you... plenty of affs do it, but we don't - all of our photos are either licensed or creative commons.




Casino conversion

I will also promote online casinos on my website. Question here how likely is it that people who sign up for a bookie convert into a casino player?

- From my experience it's pretty common for a sports player to convert across to casino once they've signed up, although it may depend on your target market/demographic/traffic sources/bookies. We have plenty of big casino players who started off signing up for a free bet in the sportsbook, and for our market (UK) there are quite a few bookies that are quite good at cross converting.

On the flip side we haven't had much success promoting casino offers to sports traffic, so it seems as though any cross conversion happens after registration.



Earnings
If you have done casino and sports betting. What is the rough earning ratio. How much more or less do you make from punters?

- The average casino player is worth more than the average sports player, but it's difficult to say by how much.


Traffic

If you are depending on organic traffic is the majority of the traffic coming from articles you post based on a match preview? For example if I post an article with the title “Cleveland Browns vs. San Francisco 49ers preview” would this article rank straight away and are lots of users coming to the website through these articles? And what is the best time to post these previews? In the morning before the games or already a few days in advance?

- On an aged healthy regularly updated site tips articles can get indexed in a couple of minutes, on a new one it'll take longer. You can always give google a nudge by using the 'fetch as googlebot' option in GWT if your site is slow to be index. Ranking is going to depend on the site and how much competition there is.

Tips traffic generally doesn't convert directly very well though, so don't be surprised if you only get one sign up for every thousand visitors. For better converting keywords/traffic this can be as high as one RMP for every 5 - 10 visitors.

[snrumph]

Regarding images, I am also a stickler about copyright violations. I buy some images for my sites from places like Shutterstock, but first I check these resources:

- Google image search using the usage rights option set to "labeled for reuse". You can find this setting in the "search tools" setting on google images
- Wikipedia: All images are Creative Commons licensed or public domain.
- Flickr: You can do an advanced search for images that the users have labelled as "Creative Commons" licensed, though most users maintain copyright.
- Take your own photo.

There is a fairly well known story about an $8000 copyright infringement penalty levied against someone using a copyrighted website image which motivated me to reign in my image use. Not common, but can happen. I can't post links yet, but google "copyright image 8000" and you'll find the story.

Hope this helps.

[baldidiot]

- Google image search using the usage rights option set to "labeled for reuse". You can find this setting in the "search tools" setting on google images

Careful with this one as we've found images labelled for reuse by someone that didn't have the rights to do it (eg: I could grab a getty image then add it to my site and label it for reuse).

Wiki and Flikr are good suggestions though!

[pariurisportive]

See here the category of Free Stock Photography
http://growth.supply/free/all
Or the meta-search engine at
http://search.creativecommons.org/

[bettinganalyst]

We too got refused from Adsense. They told us we needed a betting license, they clearly understand little about the concept of a betting-information portal. We could have taken it to the stage of arranging ``legal opinion''. But we didn't because we were not convinced of it's viability.

[JackTenSuited]

Why would you want to use adsense over bookie revshare anyway? if an advertiser is paying to advertise on your site then they see enough value in the traffic to pay the large costs involved and make a profit.
Surely at best you will break even with adsense, unless your traffic is poor quality ofcourse.

[MrBinaryAff]

Hey smartuner, have you actually started building your website?

Don't know anything about betting or casino affiliate programs, but about images I can say, that I buy banners and images from themeforest.net, also find some good ones from Flickr, and there are good creative images from Behance, but you have to check if you can use the image or not. Usually you can, unless it is stated otherwise.

[smartuner]

Hey MrBinary

Thanks for the link. Yes I have started building the site. I am still a bit undecided about the images. The general images are fine what worries me is the images for the game previews because these would be boring without images.
So I am still undecided what to do but if Bayern is playing Barcelona like tonight you want an article with a picture of Messi and Suarez in it. And that is where it is getting tricky in terms of copyrights.