Update: We were approved on Yahoo today after removing dollar signs from our balance totals.

I thought today I’d blog about one of the biggest issues I face in running Poker Underworld - negative connotations with gambling. Since I first started trying to promote Poker Underworld in February, I’ve faced adversity with every advertising channel I’ve attempted to use. Every company has seen the word Poker and (at least initially) denied our application to advertise on their network.

Poker Underworld is a free Poker game. No wagers take place here. We do not accept memberships for enhanced features or paid entry into tournaments - we don’t even accept donations. We do not run advertisements for pay-for-play Poker games, even though that would logically be a profitable upsell to our customers. In fact, the original concept behind Poker Underworld has always been to stand as an alternative to online gambling, and to use a mixture of web 2.0 style social networking features, and a community based competition, to create an alternative that is fun to play and challenging without the need for real wagering.

The latest company that has begun to decline our advertisements is Yahoo Search Marketing. Since we signed up with them, they have been our best source of traffic and have allowed us to grow while not increasing my marketing costs so high above our advertising revenue that I go bankrupt. Poker Underworld is not currently profitable, so any marketing I do is out of my pocket. At first they approved our ads and we ran for over a month, but recently they have started declining every ad that I have submitted to them.

At first I was very confused, I could not figure out what content could be promoting online gambling across our pages. I wrote to Yahoo (overture) support and they have always tried to be very helpful. At first, they informed me about a link exchange I had tried to do with another Poker game a few months ago that was accepting wagers. I promptly removed the reciprocal link (they hadn’t linked back to me anyways) as well as any others that may have been offensive as at that time I had been focusing on swapping links for SEO with high ranking websites - not on what links could be gambling related or not.

We were promptly declined again after that, this time because our registration page invited players to “beat our leaders”, whose balances were presented with dollar signs. Our leaders have over 2 million “fake” dollars in their balances, and our registration page makes no reference to gambling, or shows any of the typical credit card logos or bonuses associated with gambling websites.

I have thought a lot about the different sides to this argument and yet I feel that whether or not using a dollar sign promotes gambling is merely a matter of opinion. Our goal is to be a free poker game - not to promote gambling, therefor anything we do that is promoting gambling goes against our business plan. For this reason, I have chosen to remove all dollar signs from Poker Underworld and instead show only numbers for balances. As I believe that there is a market for a free poker game with the atmosphere and kinds of features Poker Underworld offers, I need to do anything I can that it is clear that we have no connection to online gambling (unless companies like Yahoo force us to retreat into gambling by making it impossible for us to advertise legitimately).

In trying to get our ads approved, I have checked out the websites that Yahoo does allow to run, and found some of them to be guilty of what I would deem to be worse offenses than using dollar signs.

• player9.com invites you to enter your email and then drops you into a website called betzip.com. betzip.com claims to be a free online wagering game where you can win cash, but you have to pay a monthly membership fee to qualify - which is against Yahoo’s policy
• fulltiltpoker.org is obviously owned by Full Tilt Poker, one of the largest gambling Poker websites. all one has to do is type .com instead of .org and they are invited to register and log in to play for cash
• www-absolute-poker.net is an affiliate portal sending traffic to absolute-poker.net. who knows how much money they made off of the affiliate links scattered all over their website. I can’t believe they got declined while I didn’t.

I’m not writing this article to complain about Yahoo - in fact they have attempted to be very helpful and I’m sure their editor feels they have reason for declining us - however if this blog is to be a record of the challenges we’ve faced in building Poker Underworld, our biggest challenge of all needs to be a topic. I will update on it as we progress.

Ryan
Poker Underworld