Yes, I expect the Sunday Million will be getting over 100 million players most weeks.

How come this hasn't been tried before? Great idea imo. Biggest problem would be getting enough players early on.

Are you guys just ****ing with me, or do you really believe a poker site could actually function from advertising revenue alone?

eeeeew

IDK Ad Man, I'm not really sure how much they would make from those ads. My guess would have been enough, but perhaps I'm wrong then.

How a about combination of decreased rake and ads then?

i'm gonna go ahead and ask a probably naive question:

couldn't someone set up a site that simply undercut stars and tilt by 30 or 40 or 50% and then market it that way?
the recreational player may not know much about it but they understand 50% off.

i remember someone making the point that world of warcraft is financed by a monthly subscription of $30 or something. i would have thought that WOW requires many more programmers than a poker website.
and maybe this could be combined with advertising

apologies if these points have been made before but i couldn't face trawling through this thread

Well, I'm not going to purport to be an expert on all things advertising, but I'd be pretty surprised if they could come anywhere near meeting expenses with advertising...especially a site that's trying to make a profit. If someone was to try to start up some kind of non-profit rake-free site and run it on a shoestring, then they might have a shot, but I don't think it would be enough even then.

Lower rake with ads? Maybe, but I just don't think the advertising would make a significant impact.

It wouldn't be the first time this has been tried. WSEX never got anywhere, and subscription sites haven't either. And it wouldn't surprise me if you could pay lower rake than on Stars and FT right now on other sites that give big amounts of the rake back via rakeback, VIP, etc. Yet Stars and FT remain the biggest.

It's hard to overcome the fact that to attract the fish, you need to spend money. And I've always felt that shiny objects (IE points stores, freerolls, other inducements) are better for attracting the fish then telling them they can pay lower rake.

There is something in this thread I find quite tilting. It is people checking their HEM and then saying things like "I payed $1500 in rake to play on Stars last month", or things along this line. I know your HEM might say that, but I really doubt you did pay that. Actually what happens is that winning players pay absolutely nothing to play on a poker site. If a player loses $1000 then they paid a proportion of that money to the winning players on the site and a proportion of it to the poker site. The winning players paid nothing to the site, the rake just determined what proportion of the losing players' money they got.

All rake does is split up the losers cash between the poker site and the winning players and turns breakeven or marginal winning players into losing players.

The only people who pay anything to the sites are those who deposit more than they withdraw. The money comes from the losers' bank account, not the winners' bank accounts. That is why the poker sites do not really care too much for the multi-tabling winning players - they pay nothing to the sites, only facilitate the transfer of the fishes money a little faster.

Like I said, it's not going to be an advertising model. It's going to be a model where you sell avatars, named tables, gold plated name tag, etc.
also just straight up donations as long as the site is going to be strictly non-profit

I give FTP thousands of dollars every month, I'm sure I could spare $100 for a free poker site

Your logic is just wrong. It may appear that way since the rake is taken before the pot is pushed to the winner.

Lets say the people in the hand contributed $100 into the pot. $3 is raked from the pot. You are then given $97. According to you the $3 came from the losing players but not from you. So you net $97 and the site gets $3. You never paid anything in this hand.

Lets say the same site changes its policy and decides to rake the $3 after the pot was awarded to the winner. You are given the $100 and then $3 is deducted from your stack. So you net $97 and the site gets $3.

Using your logic, the money came from the losers in the first case but from you in the second case. Despite both the site and you profiting the same amount in both cases.

I agree with this... but what can we do? Just all quit poker for a day?

Gonna use this

Losers put money into the online poker economy. This money gets split between the winners and the poker sites. The mechanism that determines the proportion shared between winning players and the proportion taken by the site is the rake. You can think about it like a black box, what actually happens in individual hands does not matter. Like most things in poker, individual hands do not matter, what matters is the long term - an in the long term all the poker sites' profits comes from players that deposit more money than they withdraw. It certainly can't come from palyers who withdraw more than they deposit....

A similar effect would be to have the poker sites keep a proportion of the money deposited or money withdrawn. The end effect would be the same - the net losing players would contribute all the money and the net winning players would contribute nothing.

Please can we drop the 'WSEX tried it' arguement every time!! It's like saying I tried competing with TESCO because I left my front door open and put a trolley on the drive. Obv sh** all marketing strategy, such a shame this example always deflates ideas on lowering rake.

Lowering rake probably won't increase profits, but bigger promo's that appeal to average joe poker players aswell as being specific on the RB% for the grinders would draw in players and compete well in this multi-billion dollar industry. Unfortunately, stars and tilt sh** all over the competition by clearly being the only competantly run sites, and it's speculation but as they aren't regulated I would be damn surprised if they haven't fixed prices.

Now I'm confused at the point you are trying to make. Your statement above is correct but what does it prove? If I'm a winner at a site that rakes 99% of the pot, rake should be irrelevant since I'm a net winner?

Rake comes from all players, both the winners and losers. Saying winning players pay no rake is just plain wrong.

I don't want to derail this thread since the OP brings up valuable points.

If you want to start another thread in the zoo that says "winning players pay absolutely nothing to play on a poker site" I'll be glad to debate it there.

If a site charged 99% rake then there would be no winners at the site and everyone would be paying the poker site money.

Ok, saying "winning players pay no rake" is technically wrong but the statement "winning players do not pay money in the long term to poker sites" is correct. 100% of the profits, both for the site and winning players, come from net depositers. All increasing the rake does is to increase the proportion of the "fish money" that the poker site keeps, and turns marginal winners or break even players into losers.

It is just the statement from a winning player that "I have paid $1500 in rake last month" implies that the player has somehow paid $1500 of their own money to the site. That is just wrong and it tilts me.

If you still don't understand, then think of a player who deposits $500, pays $2000 in rake over the period he plays but ends up losing all his money. He has obviously not lost $2000 - he has lost $500. His $500 deposit has been split between the poker site and the winning players on the site.

Right, and businesses pay no tax. They just work as a middleman between the customer and the government. How silly businesses are to want lower taxes or do crazy things like base themselves in tax havens when they're not actually paying any taxes.

no, he won $1500, but the site ripped him off

And +1 to dropping WSEX as an example of a failure of a rake free strategy. That site's failure had very little to do with their rake structure. Many of their failures were in fields that cost very little. Their software was horrible - unpaid hobbyists are now developing vastly superior software. Their inability to efficiently payout was inexcusable given they already operated a significantly sized sports book that also had to constantly deal with cashing out players. Etc. WSEX couldn't really have cared less about their poker room. It was supposed to be little more than a loss leader for their sports book which is likely already a flawed business plan since I don't imagine the ratio of online poker players : sports betting aficionados (or degens) is terribly high.

The only lesson to be learned from WSEX is that if you run a terrible poker room, it's going to fail. If you run a terrible poker room and don't charge rake, it's still going to fail.

i am honestly suprised the rooms havnt started putting stuff like budweiser bottles on the felt on stars. I mean the lobby has "240k players" (i know it doesnt but thats an e.g.) you are looking at the table constantly that is pretty premium advertising space.

also I always think it must be super tilting for like a 5k HU SNG player who pays $100 in rake to do the same thing as a $5 player who pays $0.25 or the free players for 0.

I understand the free players are a loss leader but the rake is absurdly high.

This, WSEX failed on all levels, nothing to do with rake.

It amazes me how badly run and lagging 90% of poker sites are in this multi-billion dollar industry, stars are clear winners but fm they get it so easy when it comes to competition that don't advertise, market, update standard software, have decent cashout options + time, ever listen to customers.

Just 1 well funded, advertised and researched company starting a poker site could easily take atleast 1/5 the market. But it just never happens, and have no idea why the natural course of business doesn't produce this level of competition.

How much is a tv advert, newspaper article + advert, sponsorship or a team of marketing genius' and software developers? Is it alot less than 1/5 of $6,700,000,000?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your last paragraph. You're not suggesting that you hope to get the same thing for $100 that you're now paying thousands for, are you?

I'm not sure who you're talking to, since no one's doing that. The only person to mention WSEX in this entire thread until now, other than you, was me when I mentioned it in a list of sites that have tried lower/no rake. I understand the 'WSEX tried it' argument annoys you, but you might want to wait until someone actually uses it to argue against it.

You do understand we're not playing against the house, right? We're wagering against one another, and the house gets a portion of it, it's really that simple. If you and I both deposit $3,000 and play HU against each other all day, and you leave with $0 and I end up with $3,200, did I pay no rake? If I tell you the site raked $1,400 of my money, are you really going to tell me that "No, you haven't paid $1,400 of your own money to the site"? And of course, one could argue the site ended up with $2,800 of my money, but I don't plan on getting into that argument again.

LOL, I love this one. So if the site spilt the player's $500 between themselves and the other players, who paid the remainder of the $2,000 rake?

This post really isn't much better than "WSEX failed entirely because of 100% RB", not that I think I've seen anyone make such a claim.

As is usually the case with two extreme arguments, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Yeah, WSEX had lots of problems and was not well run. Not all of them may of them required a lot of money to solve, but I'm sure some of them would have. And it's number one problem, lack of traffic, sure did.

I'm not even slightly surprised. They probably feel the small amount of extra money they would make isn't worth pissing off their players.

Sigh.

If it was that easy, you don't think someone would be doing it?

I think one of the biggest hurdles these days is the legal one. Who wants to invest a bunch of money in a poker site in a time of such extreme legal uncertainty?

We don't know because its never really been done. When the states start legalizing online poker, it is possible corporate sponsors will be able to legally run banner ads ingame. The demographic involved is VERY lucrative to advertisers and they essentially have eyeballs locked on multiple windows.

Ingame advertising could be far greater than rake in a legal environment.

The big sites have no incentive to lower rake.


Why don't we arrange a date to boycott Stars/FT and make them listen. If we got a few thousand people to all changed their Stars display pic to one of the anti rake avatars, then sit at 24 tables each and sit out, I'm sure they would pay attention.

That $2000 came from the net deposits of losing players. Think of the cash flow from fish bank account ---> poker site bank account ----> winning players bank account.

It is clear that the poker site does not get money from the winning players banks. Rake is just the mechanism for dividing up the fishes money between winning players and the site.

The $500 was lost slowly at a single table, and he was the only long-term losing player at the table. Now where did that $2,000 come from?

LOL, no. The wagers between players is the mechanism by which players win or lose money. The rake is just the vigorish on each wager that allows the poker room to pay for expenses and make some profit.

You just don't want to understand or admit that the current rake, taking into consideration the volume online poker allows and the diminished costs from what traditional Casinos bear, is just USURIOUS.