Affiliate Advertising

It seems that online poker affiliates have caught a break of sorts – if you live in the UK. Google is allowing gambling affiliates to advertise for their sites as long as they target a UK audience. I don’t understand why then, you have to live in the UK to advertise to just gamblers there. If you use adwords, you can target a specific audience. So even if you live in the U.S., your ads will only go out to UK residents.
Still, Google says that if you live outside of the UK, you can still advertise there if you obtain a license to do so. So I guess it’s not all that bad. In fact, this will open up a new door for online poker players, because now we will be able to search for affiliate websites that provide honest reviews of internet poker rooms. And that is a very handy tool to have.
There are officials in the UK that chastise Google for allowing this, under the assumption that it will contribute to problem gambling in young people. I don’t agree with this, nor the hoopla that advertising for gambling has caused.
If you get an online poker advertisement on Google, it means you were searching for it in the first place. These ads don’t pop up when you’re looking for a good cookie recipe, they relate to the original search. So it would seem that the youth are looking to gamble before the affiliates poison their young minds.
Not to mention, there’s a parental control setting that will ban gambling advertisements from being viewed, so what’s the big deal? Kids search for way more detrimental content on the internet – pornography, firearms, etc. None of this content gets anywhere near the attention that gambling does.
The taboo connotations that have been placed on internet poker are really inaccurate. If you can’t handle monitoring your child’s internet activity, don’t blame the gambling site. One of the arguments is that the financial crisis is going to drive people to gamble. I think anyone in financial ruin at this time has a little bit higher priorities.