High On Poker

Around the blogosphere, several bloggers (too many to link) have reacted to an advertising offer sent by PokerStars. These bloggers, nearest I can tell, all have the same reaction. The offer is for a $22 SCOOP tournament entry in exchange for five or six links posted in separate posts. Generally, the blogosphere has determined that this is almost an insulting offer. I generally agree.

Websites often buy links because it will help them appear higher on search engines. So, if Poker Site A offers you $5 for a sidebar link to their site with the anchor text as Online Poker, then Poker Site A will get a bump in their site’s ranking in various search engines. This isn’t just a matter of doing work for Stars. It’s about Stars buying promotion on your website. The fact that the offer apparently required shilling beyond the simple link with additional money (up to a $109 ticket to SCOOP) for posts they like, merely incentivizes ass kissing. Finally, the fact that the offer only lays out the first of the 5 links is another indication that Stars may be taking everyone for a ride.

I’d like to start this next section by stating that we here at High on Poker believe that every individual blogger has the right to operate his or her blog as he or she chooses. This extends to advertising. I may not enjoy or read your blog anymore if every post is a shill post and there is no warning allowing me to skip it in Google Reader, but you have a right to do as you deem fit, since it is your blog.

All that said, you may or may not have noticed that I had taken issue with PokerStars advertising offers from the getgo. In fact, for the last three years at least, I have boycotted the PokerStars blogger tournament because the value of the tournament is not worth it to me. Even though there are some huge prizes, they are relatively few and the amount of time necessary to navigate the big fields make it an unattractive proposition for me. I believe this year, the times for the freerolls was also less than agreeable, not that I even got that far.

This was the first year, though, that I intended to skip the announcement of my boycott. I already made my points in the past, and I like the bloggers who work for or with PokerStars, so out of respect for them and given my previous rants, I kept quiet. Past tense, since this post brings it up, but only in an incidental way.

I have to agree wholeheartedly with the bloggers who think the new deal is a poor one. If its 5 posts for $22 SCOOP ticket, that’s barely over $4 per link. That’s pretty poor. Now, if you just started a blog or are only blogging for freebies or are broke and really want to play a SCOOP event, then maybe it makes slightly more sense. This is where I am all for individual decisions without judgment.  But for the people who agree that it is a poor deal, I wonder why they think the PokerStars Blogger Freerolls were any better. That, too, required a link that helps PokerStars build its page rank via your incoming link. Some websites are willing to pay good money for that link. For big sites, the amount they can receive is well over $100/month. For lesser sites, $50 or even $25 per month is doable if you get lucky (getting ads can be as much about luck as it is reputation of a site, particularly if you are not a site that is well known therough the poker community). Instead, PokerStars offered a freeroll with huge fields at bad times with few prizes that were not merely freerolls into other PokerStars tournaments, similar to the SCOOP offer.

In total, the prizes awarded in this year’s Blogger Freeroll was approximately $62,693, not including prizes for writing the best blog post, which technically is a separate offer that requires more Stars promotion. $62k sounds good. Over 2,000 players made it to the finals, which means as a conservative estimate, 4,000 people entered the tournaments and advertised for PokerStars. One of those preliminary events took over 6 hours (I don’t have info on all the events, so I’m using this as an example). The final took over 10 hours. That’s a lot of time commitment.

But let’s go back to that conservative estimate. If there are 4,000 people playing for a prize pool worth approximately $62,700 (technically, this too should be discounted, because all prizes were merely entries into other PokerStars tournaments, and therefore not worth actually $62,700 to either Stars or to the winners who may or may not make any real cash with their SCOOP entries). 4,000 people sharing $62,700 bucks works out to $15.68 per person. If there were 6,000 players in the Blogger Freerolls, it is reduced to $10.45. And your link is probably still in your blog, so Stars effectively paid $11 for permanent advertising on your blog.

Ultimately, Stars has been great for poker bloggers, specifically with the extra money they offered to the WPBT for the most recent live WPBT tournament in Vegas in December. Even the offers I just slammed are still a sign that they are considering bloggers. But in the end, the math does not make sense. I don’t want $11 and a 16 hour+ commitment to play a freeroll in exchange for advertising on my blog. And so, I don’t accept it.

For the record, here is a link to a December 2008 post that I wrote that said the same thing.

Until next time, make mine poker!