Sega Casino shut down?

[arthurm]

Bloody typical! I've spent months getting my review site www.sega-casino.co.uk onto page 1, then the the ****ing casino shuts down.
Very frustrating.
Anyone have more details of what happened to them?

Arthur

[RayUK]

Discussion thread over at CasinoMeister:

http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/...o-closing.html

[AmCan]

i always found it interesting that wouldn't give me a list of countries where they accepted players from, since it seems it would be shorter than the banned countries list. I guess now i assume they never wanted to admit they accepted bets from any jurisdiction.

[universal4]

Anyone want to summarize what happened?

I don't have the time to go to Meisters to read about it...

Rick
Universal4

[hakank]

Anyone want to summarize what happened?

I don't have the time to go to Meisters to read about it...

Rick
Universal4

Nothing of importance really, here's what a SEGA Rep posted:

Heya!

We appreciate your patronage of our Casino. We would like to thank everyone who has been part of making this experience as fun as possible. To address all of the players' concerns, we guarantee that all remaining players' balances will be refunded back to them. We apologize for we cannot accept players from all other jurisdictions for now.

And a speculation of a misuse on the SEGA brand.


/Hakan

[SlotsAff]

What a pity - great brand and great potential

[alexpratt]

Could have been huge! Gutted as I had a few Sega related domains ready

Just odd as the Sega CEO told me they were here for the long term and that they wern't all about getting big profits now but will grow as regulation grows etc etc. There must have been a decision made higher up that they didn't want Sega to be associated with gambling anymore???? No idea

[CCJ]

Hi All,

Sent Sega Partners an email and got this back from Sasha Manuel:

Thank you for your interest in doing business with SEGA. However, we are in the process of terminating the affiliate program and, after September, it will be discontinued altogether.

For further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at affiliatemanagers@segapartners.com

Have a great weekend!

Kind Regards,

SEGA Games

[casinogod]

That is a shame, but there is a moral here. Don't rush to promote ANY NEW casino no matter what brand is behind it.

I got saved from this one simply because when the Sega rep approached me I did my usual checks and then requested an advertising fee, all of a sudden they lost interest, saying 'maybe at a later date but currently their policy is not to pay advertising'. So you have a new casino with NO marketing budget (alarm bells should ring right there).

Not that it mattered to me, I limit the number I add so was in no hurry anyway and left it. Now I see they are closing.

Which leads me to think how many players did they actually get? I suspect not many. I dont see any affiliates here saying hey I was sending sega casino 50 players per month or 30, or 20 or 10 or even 2 players per month!

So being curious I took the time to snoop a little and by my best guess their site segacasino.com peaked at 3000ish unique visitors in a month in Nov 2009, its next biggest month was Oct 2009 with around 2500 unique visitors and every other month got less than 1000 unique visitors! Infact from my research it seems they got less than 10,000 unique visitors in the entire period of time they where open for business!

Come on how viable is an online casino with hardly any traffic like that?

Now lets give them the benefit of the doubt and assume (pretend more like) that all of that traffic was from regions they do accept players from (eg non of it is from USA yeah right).

Now assuming it was all top quality traffic lets say they managed to convert 1 real depositing player for every 100 unquie clicks, that would equate to a grand total of 100 depositing players in total! Now bear in mind some of these players may only have deposited once.

So the question then comes to me how many players per month does a casino need to be viable?

Sega Casino was open for business for what about 10 months? and getting around 10 players per month in total! Hardly an earth shattering success eh?

Of course they had to close it down either that or they would have to advertise! How many Salaries can they really pay on just 10 players per month?

My intention with this post is not to bad mouth Sega. I actually started my first business when I was just 10 because I wanted to buy a Sega Master System (remember those), and my Mum would'nt just buy me one telling me if I wanted one I'd better earn some money and buy one myself.

The reason I have posted these figures is to make two points.

1. Affiliates can and should protect themselves by being very careful about who they promote and should not be afraid to ask for an advertising fee. Even if you only run a relatively small site you can still do this simply by asking for a small fee, if you know that your top banner spot usually brings you in just $100 per month, then why not request $300 to add the casino in question and give them that spot for 3 months. You will soon see how well they convert and you are not risking anything. If they convert well you increase their exposure and if they dont you reduce their exposure and have at least made a small sum for your efforts (or at least you have not lost anything from the time you gave them that space instead of a casino that converts).

2. Casinos need to hit a certain level of turn over to be viable and if they are not willing to advertise they will not get to that critical mass traffic / player volume that they need. Does anyone know what that critical mass level is??

[FictionNet]

Very interesting post, Andy - thank you.

I spoke to their aff manager (Sophie) a couple of times and recently, it did look like something was going on. It wasn't easy to get any precise info though.

When I met up with Sophie at CAP London earlier this year, she did seem rather dropped in at the deep end. She seems like a really nice, genuine person but I don't think she got much in the way of support. At least, that's how it seemed to me.

I'm glad I didn't push this brand. It's a shame - the potential was huge and a big name like SEGA could only add to the reputation of our industry. At least, that was my thinking before it closed up shop.

[greedygirl]

When we were approached by SEGA (back in January), I figured this was a no-brainer. Not surprisingly, they were very professional, but the one thing that I found continually unnerving was the number of people being copied on our email correspondance. In every email, there would be at least 4 - 5 people at SEGA being copied. Along with that, I never really knew who to expect a response from--hell, until 3 months ago, I didn't really know who was my aff manager!

I just ran through my email box to count how many employees I'd either had direct contact with or had been copied on email correspondance with at SEGA...18 employees! I can't understand why so many people would need to be involved in a simple affiliate campaign.

I realized fairly early on that the team working on the online gaming stuff knew plenty about marketing, but nothing about the online gaming market.

Once I finally had a dedicated AM, we had a telephone chat...this was in July. My AM had no idea about what sites were important, but I remember so clearly something he said: "We simply want to work with a few carefully selected sites and build slowly and steadily." I couldn't help thinking that this was a strange way to conduct a business, particularly when they were not doing media buys.

I asked my AM if he was working with Casinomeister. He had absolutely no idea who/what Casinomeister was. It was just another moment that helped to bolster my belief that SEGA was in over their heads. I should add that following our talk, my AM did contact CM, but he had to run this by his 'upper-staff.'

It's so disappointing that SEGA couldn't get it together. With a name like SEGA, they could have/SHOULD have been huge. Instead, it's ending in embarrassment and could possibly prevent other big names from taking a chance in this industry.

[OPSR]

This is why you don't waste time building sites focused on one brand.