November 14, 2005

Poker & Fantasy Football - Lessons on Finding Affiliate Partnerships

Last week I spoke at the European i-Gaming conference in Nice and in preparing my presentation I came across an interesting opportunity for poker websites - fantasy football. The link between gambling and fantasy football may seem obvious but there is very little traffic moving among the two categories. I made my case at the conference drawing on two data points in Hitwise: clickstream and search term volume.

Clickstream and Affiliate Opportunities:

www.pacificpoker.com gets about 13 times more visits than www.32redpoker.com. One way that 32 Red Poker can close this gap is by learning from and emulating Pacific Poker's successful affiliate relationships. Using Hitwise Answers, I did a clickstream gap analysis between ww.32redpoker.com and www.pacificpoker.com. I noticed that Pacific Poker was getting a far larger share of visits from sports websites than 32 Red Poker. Pacific Poker gets 9.10% of its visits from websites in the Hitwise Sports category while Sports websites only account for 7.95% of visits to 32 Red Poker.

I mentioned that Pacific Poker attracts a much larger share of visits, so looking at the two sites' proportion of upstream visits from Sports sites doesn't tell the full story. Looking downstream from Sports websites, the gap is much larger, with the Sports category sending 15 times more visits to Pacific Poker compared with 32 Red Poker in the week ending 29 October 2005. The top two Hitwise Sports sub-categories sending visits to Pacific Poker that week were Fantasy and Football. 32 Red Poker didn't receive visits from either of these sub-categories in the week ending 29 October 2005.

32 Red Poker is not alone in missing the fantasy sports opportunity. Websites in the Hitwise Sports - Fantasy category sent only 1.75% of their visits to Gambling sites in the week ending 29 October 2005 with Sport Betting the top downstream Gambling sub-category followed by Casinos.

Consumer Search Behaviour

I charted searches for "football" and for "poker" and found an almost perfect butterfly effect. (Bill Tancer introduced the idea HERE a few weeks ago). This chart could be telling us that UK internet users consider the activities of poker and football to be competitive substitutes. In other words, in football season punters may be captivated by the game, while in the off-season, poker becomes a more tempting pass-time. The business application is that poker sites can fill a seasonal lull by partnering with Sports - Fantasy sites.

Identifying sites and categories that are sending visits to your competitors can be a ripe source for opportunities for affiliate partnerships. Also, understanding competitive substitutes for your product or service can help you to identify ways to reach your audience in your off-season.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:23 AM

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