OK, so here are the results of my experiment. It's not what I was hoping for, but after a month, I have the following data to share about OurgamePoker and my experiment to see how many people like to "live dangerously"
On a website that I am associated with (I can't post any links, sorry) we posted a very negative review of O.P. At the very bottom of this review, there were two buttons. A green button leading players to US poker sites and a red button leading to O.P. The red button was *gasp* an affiliate link! A few people on 2+2 and other forums didn't understand why we would place an affiliate link at the bottom of such a negative review, but there were a number of reasons for this. But first, here were the choices:
Now, here are the results of the button click test:
Clicks on the red button over a sample of 33 days: 108
Clicks on the green button over the same sample: 283
Now, we must take into account that some of these clicks will be from search engine bots crawling the web page. Given the two links are directly next to each other, they should have been crawled an equal number of times. So let us remove say 28 of the links from the sample. This leaves us with a ratio of 80 dangerous:255 safe clicks, which reduces down to 1:3.2.
What can we ascertain from this data? Well, generally speaking, we can assume that most people weren't interested. But around 2 and a half people a day did seek more information by visiting their website. Lets take a look shall we?
Of those 80 people who visited O.P, we had the following account data:
Account creations: 5
Account depositors: 1
Total deposits: $75
Total affiliate earnings: $0.85
Now, why did we use an affiliate account to do our testing?:
1) Without one, we can't track the clicks properly.
2) We were actually hoping that we could meet the minimum payout threshold for affiliates, $50, to see if they would pay affiliates. This would have provided a (debateably valuable) data point for their legitimacy, insofar as actually seeing if they paid it out. Unfortunately, due to the fact that we were so good at discouraging people from signing up, we did not get that opportunity.
3) We have much experience working with affiliate managers. One contacted us before 2+2 began advertising O.P. We were curious to see if that person, or someone else from their company, as they undoubtedly have our contact information since they reached out to us in the first place, would contact us regarding this "negative review." No such contact was ever made.
4) Furthermore, we told the contact at O.P. about many of the flaws in their poker room that ultimately ended up in our negative review article. When they didn't understand some of them, we offered to be of assistance. Would they fly a representative of our company (me) out to their London offices to consult on their fledgling poker room? They were smashingly silent. We were hoping that we could light a fire under their asses with a negative article that ranked top 3 in Google (which we achieved). However, not a peep of contact was made.
So what can we conclude?
Well, much of the evidence is circumstantial, but it doesn't look all that good for O.P.
The overwhelming majority of people who read our highly negative review were deterred and did not create accounts at O.P. To the one guy who did, get in touch with us and prove who you are, and we'll take care of you.
Other Information
We reached out to 4 poker news outlets offering to provide them with our information. Only one of them responded and after one email, they never bothered to reply back. To our knowledge they did not run any stories. Another outlet did run a story, but for subscribers only and thus, very few people read it (hell, I haven't even seen a copy).
The fact of the matter is, no one cares enough to try to protect you. Not the people who sell advertising, not the affiliates who sign up players, and not the news outlets who are supposed to report stories of interest.
If you want to play at O.P, well, I have two words of advice...
Caveat emptor.
--
Kahn
P.S. To the haters and trolls. Maybe, just maybe... there are some people who have more intricate knowledge and plans than you can conceive. And maybe, just maybe... you should take a chill pill and realize that the world isn't a giant shilly/scumbaggy conspiracy.
Last edited by kahntrutahn; 05-27-2016 at 11:17 PM.
Reason: post script