Want to start a poker room or casino site? Here’s what NOT to do. Regardless, the industry is gigantic.
The online poker market is a $6 billion dollar a year industry. The top online poker rooms are profiting over $1 million dollars each and every day. The top poker affiliates (people who simply refer players to these sites) are making over $100,000 a month.
You decide to start researching on how to start your own online poker room. You hop onto the search engines and before you know it, you find two dozen or so companies claiming to be capable, able, and willing to help you. Naturally, you don’t get something for nothing and you realize their fees range from $5,000 up to a couple of million. You know that you generally get what you pay for, so you start weighing the pros and cons with pricing for these companies.
On the low end, you can get a website that is 95% canned, and you simply advertise it. When players sign up on your website you receive a percentage of the revenue that their gaming generates. In other words, you are a glorified affiliate with little or no control of anything else besides limited marketing with the business. (Due to duplicated website content).
On the high end, you can drop $1-$2 million dollars on fully created and customized gaming software. This will be created from scratch to match ALL of your likes/dislikes, and desires. So, you’re out $1-$2 million and 1-2 years have passed while you waited for the software to be completed. Now it’s complete and you have to start marketing. Once your marketing is ready to go, you need to hire 1,000 or so player props to play poker at your site so that when your first 5 poker player signups show up, they have someone to play poker against. This is the trickiest process when trying to reach and maintain the much needed player liquidity.
Option C is to join a poker network. Contact several of the larger successful poker networks and you will find that they are very selective. You must know what you are doing, have a good business background, and have a sound business plan for them to scrutinize. You will naturally pay them a small royalty percentage of all revenue that your players generate. They can have you set-up and running with customized gaming software in six to nine months. This means when your first 5 poker player signups show up at your site, they are pooled into the other players from all of the other poker rooms on the network. It typically costs about $500k to get started and the network will usually want to see a budget of $2million or more.
I took option D. I received a phone call out of the blue. It was from a representative of a poker network. I was given a professional and remarkable presentation. I be came impressed after verifying some of their claims and credentials. They claimed to be the one and only connection to the Poker Network. In other words, if you wanted to be a poker site on the Network, you had to go through them. They claimed to have been affiliated with the first poker website ever. They claimed to have a “unique relationship” with the network that offered a lowered startup cost. They proposed building me a custom website integrated into the network for $55,000. This would include access to their gaming license ($50,000 value) because I would be placed under their “umbrella”. There would also be a sliding royalty scale of roughly 8%-21%.