Current or potential Website owners investigating affiliate programs will no doubt discover the huge and baffling variety of sites on offer. Incorporating a huge online industry is one of the most likely to produce financial results for an affiliate. One of the largest of these is the online gaming industry. This Internet success story has created a boom in both the online and real world gambling industries. One of the most prominent individual sectors within the gaming industry is Poker.

So how does poker affiliate marketing differ to the rest of the online gaming industry?

From an investment point of view poker is one of the few dead certs available in the online gambling craze. Players using casinos or sports betting accounts have the potential to win money from the house. The odds are against this eventuality but there is always the chance of players using sites, making some quick money and then leaving shortly afterwards. Therefore an affiliate and the site loses money from the new player. However in the online poker industry money is generated in a vastly different fashion.

Firstly in poker players play against other online players, therefore the house can't effectively lose. Poker sites ordinarily create their revenue through two very simple methods. Firstly on every significant hand played they take a rake. The rake is a small percentage of the pot taken at the end, there is usually a top end limit of around $5 per rake. Players barely notice this small cut taken from the pot so nobody is directly effected. But the house can soon experience large gains from even very small hands of poker. With dozens of tables filled 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year, it is not hard to see why even these small amounts can eventually create a rather substantial amount.

Poker sites also post hundreds of tournaments each week, in which hundreds of players compete for pots of various sizes. There are multi-table and single table events, which take place almost constantly. The multi-table are a little less frequent as they usually involve a huge number a players and therefore sites usually leave them open for entry for far longer so as to encourage more to enter. Small single table tournaments happen each and every time a table is filled up by players, meaning they can occur at any time with a range in regularity. The significance of the tournaments is not just in their regularity and participation but in a clever addition by poker sites. Tournaments range from $5 to hundreds, but no matter what size the poker company adds a percentage to the price, usually around 10%. So a tournament may appear to a player as something like $50+5 depending on the site. The player therefore has to pay $55 to enter, $50 goes into the competition pot and the $5 straight to the poker room. Therefore the more tournaments and entrants a poker site can create the more income it can generate, for themselves and their affiliate partners.

So unlike other gambling affiliate programs the fate of your finances is not strictly tied to the success or more pertinently the failure of the players that you have enticed to join. The money percentage you create in a poker affiliate marketing program is simply generated out of the overall value of the money a player creates, not by what he or she loses. So in many ways for this is one of the more ethical of the online gaming affiliate programs. It is also one of the safest and most profitable systems around, which inevitably also makes it one of the most popular with site owners.