[Music] hi daniel thanks for joining us today hey hi tim uh it's a pleasure to have you on and uh today we're going to speak about affiliates communities and things like this to start off with i thought it'd be great if you could tell us about casino guru's community of users which as i understand just surpassed uh 34 000 users yeah actually i checked the statistics two days ago so we already have over 43 000 registered users uh what's even more important that over 20 000 of them came back to our website after they registered so it's not just about the people who registered and never came back but it's it's more about the people who come back and since april 2020 uh when we launched the forum the community forum we have over 8 hundred new posts uh from one thousand seven hundred unique users uh the situation for now is quite steady we have over 600 posts per month uh in march it's been 800 but it's usually over 600 per month so i believe it's uh growing pretty well sure uh a focus on kind of retention and as you say keeping users coming back there um how important is that given you know in this industry there is a lot of focus on new customers new deposited customers new acquisitions that kind of thing no it's it's it's i believe it's one of the most important uh part of the business for us uh to make sure that the people come back because uh you know that it's it's quite it's quite expensive to get uh the customer or the visitor to the website to the forum uh it's uh it's even uh it's even like more expensive to make sure that the player registers it's not about paying them but it's about paying the designers uh doing the user experience tests and to make sure that the players feel comfortable on our website that they find everything they need it's not too complicated for them so to make sure that they come back and maybe they even recommend us to their friends or anyone uh it's i believe the most important part of the business for sure yeah when we look at the uh kind of communities and forums in general and also specifically yours how important or beneficial is it to have a form of users when it comes to reviewing operators and giving kind of a full honest picture because it's the players giving their opinion who've actually experienced the operator rather than someone perhaps promoting them hasn't maybe used the product yeah you know there are benefits that are visible immediately uh now i'm talking about the cases where a player comes to our website the forum and they say they discovered some information we have wrong on the website or they found a bonus that doesn't work or there's something missing and you know i'm glad i can honestly claim that sending these types of feedback to us makes sense and it's worth it because we deal with every single feedback we get from the players we send our testers to test anything they describe and we realized that most of the time the players are correct we have something wrong on the website we can't be correct in 100 of cases because i believe that we almost have 4 000 casinos in our database so whenever the player finds something that's that's wrong we just fix it as soon as possible but there are benefits that aren't clearly visible and i'm talking about the cases where a player comes to complain to the forum they're angry because they didn't get paid the winnings got voided they say the casino is a scam and so on and sometimes they're right the casino is a scam but sometimes we manage to clarify the situation for the player and we advise them what to do what what to follow and eventually when the player gets paid they get a much better image about your website about the community and i'm sure that whenever the player comes back to our website they will trust the list uh whatever we recommend uh the casinos the best casinos for the certain country uh where the players from uh i believe they'll follow it because he will knew okay they helped me uh i got the money because they gave me good advice uh so uh that's that's that's another benefit we we have for the players but uh i just want to highlight that whenever the players come and they say uh the casino is bad the casino is a scam uh we don't say okay then the casino is a clear scam because the player told us it's it's the fact but we always have to investigate everything they say and i can tell you honestly i get about 15 maybe 20 feedbacks or messages every day claiming that a casino a certain casino is a scam and we have to go through all of it because sometimes the players don't provide any details they just say the casino is a scam it's a rip off don't come back but sometimes they say like they they're a scam because they don't react to my messages they don't reply to the live chat and it's something we can deal with it's we can usually contact the casino we can try to contact the live chat on our own and sometimes we just realize that maybe the issue is on the player's side or sometimes we realize that the casino uh simply had some issues with payment providers or some technical issues with the live chat and it doesn't mean the casino is bad like they they just had some issues and they're working on it and they fix it eventually but whenever we get some feedback from the players about casinos we send our testers there as i already mentioned or if it's something something easier that i can check on my own i just take a look and so i can react to the player directly within a few minutes i can tell him okay i didn't manage to contact the live chat even it shows it's online so then we try other resources and we try to contact the casino representatives and ask about the situation are there any extra challenges brought about by kind of having a larger community you mentioned they're kind of sort of angry users and uh it's a 15 20 times a day is this the kind of a problem that affiliates wouldn't have if they didn't have such a big forum uh yes of course having the forum and having having the possibility uh to write uh user reviews that's something we've implemented about three weeks ago uh it gives you space to write anything you want it gives you space uh to contact us directly and it gives you space to contact us in publicly so they they know that when whenever they write something about the casino it's visible to anyone so of course if we only had uh a general email email address uh in our contact details uh no forum no community no user reviews uh we wouldn't get these types of messages so often that's that's clear um so i understand you you've also implemented a ranking system um can you tell us more about this yeah it's uh the ranking system is a very simple tool uh that helps us to measure your activity on the forum you get points for creating threats writing posts when you get like from another user you get a point you even get points for writing the casino reviews your own casino reviews and you even get points uh when you create a complaint against a casino but the complaint needs to be approved so it doesn't mean that you just create 30 complaints that don't make any sense and you get a lot of points to get higher in the ranking system it doesn't work this way uh it's also something we'd like to improve in the future um i'm thinking about having deals with our partners with the casinos uh that when you reach certain rank you could get some bonus free spins uh whatever maybe some merchandise we we often get merchandise from the casino so that's something we could give away to the players uh but honestly it's not on the top of the priority list because i still believe uh we have a lot of space for improvement uh regarding design regarding user experience um actually it's been a week since i started working on a new concept of the home page of the photo home page i'd like to have uh the the recent user reviews uh displayed on the home page i'd like to have some recent videos from the youtube uh the competitions we have on the forum so it's it's something i i'd like to implement on the forum as soon as possible so the ranking system we have for now is just about collecting points uh getting reputation among the players but i'd like to work with it in the future even even more and maybe prepare some achievements for the players something you could you could collect uh yeah yeah so it's a ranking system that incentivizes users but there's uh are there any plans for kind of the users can rank operators maybe sorry what was the last um are there any kind of plans to have a ranking system for brands and and operations for brands yeah uh no it's really not really i don't think that the brands would be interested in getting rating uh when you when you talk uh to the to the casino representatives uh they're so busy that uh they're happy when you tell them hey your brand has been mentioned on the forum if you want to take a look and maybe if they have time they come and they try to react to the messages but i don't think that the casino brands or the representatives would be interested in collecting points on the forum they they simply don't have time for it that's that's how the business works yeah no i'm sure that that makes sense um it's funny you mentioned time i think it's a good segue to the next question because um the form is available in uh in 16 different languages unless i'm mistaken um obviously so that that might sound simple to a user that kind of it's in one language another but localization and translation that's quite a time consuming process so just wondering kind of how do you guys go about this what's your process and how difficult is that no speaking just about the forum it's it's very simple i'm not a developer it would be a bad question for them but uh basically we use the tools that are given uh by the google translate uh so the automated uh translation is implemented on the website so we don't have to translate anything manually that wouldn't be possible of course we even added some tools that help us to minimize the bronx translations for example when we see that the algorithm isn't sure about if your post is written in german or english because you write it in german but you use some english terms like slots free spins jackpot we ask you if this is the correct language that we detected and if it's wrong you can you can simply change it it doesn't occur very often but if the sentence is very short and you use some let's say you write it in spanish and you use some english terms it can happen so we just wanted to minimize uh the the the cases where the translation is wrong because it didn't detect the language correctly it's also important to note that whenever you register to our forum we ask you which language which languages you speak which languages you understand so if you're native if you're native english speaker but you speak and understand spanish there's no reason to translate spanish posts for you because it's always better to uh read it read the original post because you know sometimes the translation isn't uh 100 correct uh so that's that's even something we ask you at the beginning but you can change it later uh if you if you feel like okay maybe i thought i understand spanish but actually i realize i don't so you can you can change it in the future or if there's a post and you think it's not translated correctly you can click just one button and show the original uh so that's how we work with the translations on the forum speaking generally about the website it's a it's a difficult process but uh we have over i believe uh 60 testers around the world so that's how we uh how we make sure that the casinos that we display uh for certain countries are in fact available we we check it a few times per year the same applies to bonuses game providers uh payment methods so the testers are very important part of the process sure so so i guess overall you're saying it's it it's uh it can be quite simple for the forum translation but there's there's i guess some subtleties to it here and there yeah yeah that's that's that's that's how it is and uh i remember uh we have uh the forum in about 16 languages but we realized that for some reason there are french people who come to the forum even though the website isn't in french there are people who write in romanian so we even added these two languages into the automated translations and i'm quite sure that the next one will be indonesian because we became quite popular in indonesia we have a lot of visitors not just on the forum but generally on the website and our social media so we need to implement the automated translation for indonesian language as well sure yeah um something we discussed with you with your colleague shimon the other day on affiliate con um the the topic of kind of i mentioned this earlier kind of kind of honest and in the honesty of player reviews um how does that affect the relationship between say casino guru and and your partners because obviously um when you write a review of a casino you know it's kind of that balance you want to be honest but ultimately you are you're promoting your partner so you know how does that having a community of thousands of users may be saying negative things here and there some positive and how does that affect the relationship yeah i have to say that i say we have quite a unique approach in our company regarding this and it's based on the beliefs that our founders carry with themselves since uh they launched the casino guru project if we see a casino there is that is bad the casino isn't fair towards the players uh they try to find stupid excuses just to avoid the winnings we are not afraid of throwing the whole relationship we built with the casino over the board and decrease the rating or remove the fair batch we have on the website of course we do this only after very long discussions with the casino with the casino representatives we try to explain our opposition we try to explain the situation but in some cases it's just impossible because the casino simply doesn't understand that our main aim is to recommend casinos that are fair and where the player can feel safe some still believe that our aim should be to earn as much money as possible uh on commissions and they just don't understand that the business and the point of view can be very different i'd say we never ask for a special treatment regarding players who complain on our website we just simply ask the casino to use common sense uh i can give you an example that's something we dealt with a few times when a player took a bonus uh he played with the bonus money he lost the money uh he had maybe 11 cents on the account he played a game a game a slot where the minimum bet was let's say 20 cents so he he couldn't use it he couldn't use the 11 cents so he made a deposit so he could carry on playing and he played with his own money and when he won a few thousands let's say the casino said yeah but uh the player had an active bonus on the account and uh the winnings are avoided and we're gonna pay only let's say 100 from 10 000. and we say yeah but he had only 11 cents on the account and we couldn't he couldn't even use the money to to bet it and they say yeah but uh uh he could contact us on the live chat and then we realized that the live wasn't even available and they say okay so he could send an email and he could ask us to cancel the 11 cents on the account and probably next day we would cancel the bonus and he could carry on playing and we say okay but he didn't get any advantage of having 11 cents bonus money on the account because he made a deposit he played with his own money and they say yeah but terms and conditions it's written here so i'm sorry the winnings are avoided so in these cases i mean everyone can understand what's going on here and it's it's something we just we just can't ignore we can't just say okay it's written in the terms and conditions the casino is right uh that's what actually some of the licensing authorities would say they would say okay but it's in the terms and conditions uh yeah but common sense that's that's what we try to use most of the time yeah for sure and in in a case like that uh i guess there's having a community of users help and make it easier to actually find these things out as opposed to if you were kind of just writing casino guru in-house writing your own reviews of the site no of course it's very important and sometimes we suddenly start getting negative feedbacks to one certain casino so the players start talking together that we realize that they have the same kind of issues uh so sometimes we try to contact the casino directly and immediately to find out what's going on and sometimes we realize that they just have some uh issues that are temporary they're working on it so uh we can contact the community and tell them guys don't worry it's it's it's gonna be fine the casino is prepared to pay your winnings they just have some issues but sometimes we realize that the casino uh is probably closed in inactive for some reason and then in that case it's it's it's good to warn the other players so the others won't register in the casino maybe the casino has a decent rating on our website so it's time to decrease the rating and uh to make sure that nobody's going to register there when they become closed or inactive say we could we call them zombie these kind of customers yeah absolutely not but plenty plenty of interesting stuff there plenty of good analysis so far and i just have one final question for you daniel and that would be um what advice would you give to an affiliate that that either doesn't have a community of users and isn't really thinking about this kind of approach or one who's actually doesn't have one but looking to maybe start one up okay uh i say having a community is the best way to build trust with your visitors on the website it's it also provides you uh it's a good tool for feedback from the visitors of your website so maybe there's something you never thought about and they just come up with it and you say okay it didn't come to my mind but uh it's it's true that the play is right and we had this stupid thing on the website it made it just makes things more difficult from the players and it shouldn't even be there but you have many testers you have you have employees and they just don't see it and then just someone comes to the website and you realize okay it's a great feedback and you get it for free you just need to build the community the forum and then you get a really valuable feedback for free on the other hand if you think that you can just create some forum based on some free template and just watch the community growing it doesn't work this way you need to be there 24 7. i can honestly tell you that when i wake up the first thing i do is to check the forum and when i go to sleep which is usually around 2 a.m 3 a.m i check the forum as well and then suddenly when i come there i i'm already too tired i want to go to sleep and i realize that there are 15 posts and maybe something i should react to so i just start writing the replies and sometimes and you need to be prepared for it you realize that there's a spammer or link builder making mess on the forum and you don't want to leave it like that you you want to clean it so uh it's something we deal with i wouldn't say every day but let's say every single day we have some fake passports and ids sellers on the website we have people who try to sell some chemicals on the website or if you want to make sure that someone will fall will fall in love with you you can buy a spell from someone on the website uh and that's that's something we have to deal with and it's it's annoying so better be prepared for it and try to make sure that you have some anti-spam tools prepared for the website or for the forum until it's too late so it's it's also the part of the job you need to deal with and you know it's it's really annoying we work on improving the tools every day uh i'd say it's much better than what we had when we started or when we launched the forum a year ago but yeah that's uh that's also like something you should keep in mind that it's not just about uh replying to messages from players and that's it yeah sure plenty of practical advice there i'm sure the affiliates will appreciate that but daniel really interesting to talk to talk through affiliates and forums with you and thank you very much for your time and your answers thank you for inviting me and have a good day you too thank you very much you