In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Liggero, Jason Prasad of PokerStars tells us the pains and rewards of diversifying their products.
To stay afloat the tumultous global economic condition and avoid stronger headwinds in front of them, many businessmen had taken risk of building new product and exploring new markets.
Many investors find business diversification as a tool to reach long-range financial goals while minimizing risk during a slow economic activity. Some diversify by adapting while other businesses diversify by finding a related product researching its potential, and making an entry into that new market.
In the case of PokerStars, the company has launched its online casino and sport betting platform to the affiliate channel as part of the big changes it has made. Jason Prasad of PokerStars admitted that they have experienced many challenges when they entered the online casino and sports betting market.
He said that the biggest obstacle they are trying to overcome is its affiliate platform, which has become “a bit dated.”
“With our poker affiliates, because they’ve been with us for so long, they are used to our affiliate platform, whereas casino and sports betting ones aren’t. So, for example, we are not able to walk our affiliates’ dynamic parameters,” he told CalvinAyre.com “We are in the process of speaking with third party platform – which ones we’ve finished signing the contract – we’ll make a big announcement.”
The first thing they did, according to Prasad, was they went to their poker affiliate if they can accommodate PokerStars’ sports betting and casino arm. But for most parts, Prasad said they reached out to sports betting and casino-only type affiliates.
“I mean one of the first thing we did was we went to our poker affiliate and say look, if you have any casinos and sports betting tracker. That’s the quickest way. You go to what you know, and they are already working for us and so we got some of our poker affiliates who are pushing it,” Prasad explained. “But for the most part, we are going out there and grabbing the casino-only type affiliates and the sports betting type of affiliates, who have never really pushed and sent us traffic because we don’t have those particular verticals.”
Citing the company’s own experience, he said that not many companies can come to new verticals like what they did.
“We still have the pain. But we are working through them, and the affiliates that stay with us, they are going to reap the benefits in the end,” Prasad said. “For sports, there’s a lot of good things in the pipeline, I can’t obviously to you, but they got a lot of good. The marketing is doing a lot of great things, which obviously the more we do above the line, the more we spend in sports, the affiliates will benefit from that.”
At present, Prasad said that they are signing on with some of the bigger gaming software brands in the next two to three months, which will help its affiliates.
“It’s working out really well, we got to go through the pain as every growing company does but because we got the Pokerstars behind us, we got a great team already,” he said.
