The Future of online poker in the US Part 2

Now that the much ballyhooed online gambling bill introduced by Harry Reid is all but officially dead I thought I would take a look at the future of online poker in the United States, and where we as poker players, the industry as a whole, and legislative efforts go from here.

The next aspect I will examine will be the changes to the industry in the coming months.

Poker rooms aside, there is an entire industry that has sprung up around online poker that includes everything from poker forums, to poker news sites, to rakeback affiliates, to poker training sites. The problem with this secondary industry is that for the most part these businesses rely on online poker rooms to make money -through affiliate programs. Yes there are some advertising dollars at stake, but even these “ads” are all inter-related to the affiliate industry.

Since UIGEA legislation took shape in 2006 this has been one of the hardest hit factions in the online poker industry. With the lack of a constant stream of new players (mainly from the US) previously popular forums have dried up, affiliates are seeing fewer and fewer new depositors, and the poker media has shrunk as a whole.

The poker industry is seeing monopolies take shape, with only the largest forums -2+2, Cardschat, PocketFives-surviving, serious poker journalists out of work and replaced by random poker fans who are willing to work for peanuts, and affiliates are seeing their rakeback totals decrease.

Had the Reid bill passed we would likely have seen a resurgence in all three of these categories, because online poker is driven by just a single factor: New players! New players bring in revenue for affiliates, which leads to heavily populated poker forums, which leads to the need for a larger and better media. The cycle continues as a strong poker media brings more players to the tables -Imagine every major newspaper employing a poker writer and selling advertising to online poker rooms, which necessitates the need for QUALITY writers.

You can see this downturn with the huge swath of quality writers who have been let go, or decided that a cut in pay was not feasible for them, by sites like CardPlayer, PokerNews, and PokerNewsDaily. While there are still quality writers scattered throughout these sites it is nothing like it was just four or five years ago.

Without online poker legislation in the near future it’s likely the affiliate industry will continue to dry up in the US, which pulls down the rest of the online poker industry with it -picture the movie scene where two people fall off a roof and one grabs hold of the leg of the other.