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What do you do? Give the same programs toppositions everywhere, so that your income will be clustered and you won't get bothered by a few bucks at program 1, few bucks at program 2.... few bucks at program 156 or even be sub threshold here and there.
Or do you spread the risks a bit, so that you won't depend on the solvability and behaviour of just one program or the possibility that for example you see your income for that month gone, because some player wins a lot of money.
In my experience it seems that the bulk of the income naturally "clusters" at the best programs.
The 80/20 rule (80% of value in 20% of customers/products) is common place in business.
So we've focused on the best-of-class programs and only promote a couple of dozen programs in total across the 3 channels (12 sports / 6 casino / 6 poker). There is no option for us to be making "a few bucks" from #25 or #30 or #156.
But even within our group of 24 - the 80/20 rule applies with the top 4 programs bringing in 80% of the total income.
Clustering is a fact of nearly all business endeavors.
Gooner is absolutely correct.
However, you need to spread the risk a little and if the question is do I have 1 or 2 programs running on a new site of perhaps, 12 as in Gooners example, I'd definitely go for the 12.
You will experience the clustering effect, however, as you'll see if you read the forums here, sometimes the programs change Ts & Cs - and not in favour of the affiliate. You need to have at least some income from a number of programs so even if you get screwed over big time by one or two of your higher paying programs, you don't go bust.
Our top 5 made 68% of our money in 2015 ,we only work with 17 program now.
Triple7, thanks for your question. We are going to feature it as the question of the week in today's GPWA Times newsletter, so I have added a poll to go along with the question.
Thanks,
Michael
It is tough to spread the risk when there are very little reputable companies to work with. It would be great to give more brands exposure but that cant happen with horrible reputations or new sites. My two cents.
I have a few partners that I give the top spots, because they our from my experience reliable and convert well. But I also keep some room to test new brands and expand my circle of thrusted partners. I would say 75% from thrusted and 25% to discover new brands.
The reality is, clustering is what works for most webmasters. 80/20 rule is often the norm as Gooner pointed out. We promote a few in key positions (Bet365, Winner, etc).
I tend to favour my top 3-4 programs a lot, they pay the most, convert the most and generally are affiliate-friendly the most in giving me better deals and reasons to promote them. I still bother with other programs but only as an additional income.
There's a balance I think, putting all your eggs in one basket could mean some very lean months as you work through the peaks and troughs of this industry whereas having a handful of strong programs mitigates your own risk to a certain degree.
Similar to some of the other comments I favour a small number of programs that over time have produced strong conversion, revenues and have a decent enough repeat usage rate.