Our affiliate network is our key success factor. They are our retailers. They drive most of our new players. They interact with their/our players. They know what their players are looking for and they know a lot about the poker business. Most of them are also excellent players.
We ought to keep excellent relationship with our affiliates and we want to keep them happy, well, actually very happy. When our affiliate makes money - we (usually) make money. This is "almost" a win-win situation, unless an affiliates tries to over-exploit his power. As an affiliate manager, I need to manouver within this fine line.
The experienced affiliates understand where we are coming from, know our challenges and are looking for long term relationships. Ad-hoc deals are not interesting. There is no point in spending a lot of time inking a short-term deal for a couple of players. My goal is to build close personal relationship with my affiliates, listen to their concerns, try helping them when needed, and help them help me.
The better affiliates prefer to get a slightly lower deal from me, in comparison to our competitors (the other poker rooms), while knowing that they get prompt and honset replies to any problem that they face (and there are always such problems).
Dealing with new affiliates requires higher alert from the Affiliate Manager. We do not know the new affiliate. We have to assure that he is not trying to exploit the operator. "Interesting" cases happen here and there - I will write about some of these cases in the future. But since this is only the beginning of the blog - I am ~still~ nice to everyone... ;-)
Poker is not all in (my) life. I had a rather disappointing weekend seeing Argentina, England and Brazil all losing in the quarter finals of the World Cup. Oh well...
On the positive side, DNDN (Dendreon), my favorite company in NASDAQ, had another great announcement last Friday. I will mention DNDN quite often, and if one has a stocks portfolio, he may want to consider a small investment in DNDN. It is a risky investment, but has a pretty good potential to become a monster. Newbies to DNDN may want to check the links here: http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&board=1600905258&tid=dndn&sid=1600905258&action=m&mid=200000
In (very) short, DNDN is on the verge of introducing the first ever cancer vaccine ever (for prostate cancer). All clinical trials have been completed and the results are out (and stunning). A very very slight miss in the primary endpoint (p=0.052 vs the bar of p=0.05) of TTP (Time To Prrogression), which is only a surrogate to survival, versus a HUGE survival benefit - which is considered the unltimate target in cancer treatments -- using a NON-chemotherapy vaccine (barely no side effects). In very short, DNDN's vaccine is being prepared using the patient's own white-cell blood, "educating" it to attack ONLY the cancer cells. DNDN's Provenge (the name of the vaccine) has merely no side effects, whereas over 50f today's prostate cancer patients refuse to take Taxotere - today's only approved drug.
The market potential for Provenge is estimated at way over $1 billion (per year) in the US. Typical biotech companies are traded at 8-12x annual revenues. Today's market cap of DNDN is around $300 million -- so go figure what will happen when/if the FDA approves DNDN (decision is expected early next year).
Tons of stories about the market manipulation of DNDN by large hedge funds ... but I will stop here - check the link above and ... think... comments about DNDN are also welcomed.