As many of you know, I co-owned a previous website, before leaving last year and starting PFA in March, 2012.

That website at one point had affiliate deals. We did not manage our own affiliate deals, but rather utilized a turnkey, third-party solution called PokerAffiliateSolutions, which basically does all of the work and you are basically just providing them with the users to sign up.

Simply put, we were an affiliate of an affiliate.

The whole thing appeared transparent to the user, as it appeared they were getting rakeback directly from us.

PokerAffiliateSolutions was very reliable up until Black Friday, but then I noticed they were starting to really struggle. This became most apparent when I left my previous website, and as part of the terms of the sale, I was to get the entire balance of our PokerAffiliateSolutions account, which was near $700.

I tried to cash out, and it sat "processing" forever. I kept submitting support tickets over this, and I was being mostly ignored, and occasionally was answered with a "we're working on it" sort of response. After a lot of pressure, and a lot of waiting, I got my cashout. It took about 3 months, if I remember correctly. This was a little more than a year ago.

Despite that, I had been considering offering rakeback through PokerAffiliateSolutions, but wanted a sign that they had gotten their shit together. I was not confident enough that they had righted the ship, so I never did it.

Tonight, I went to research them again, as I hadn't checked on their situation in a long time. I came across this 2+2 thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/51...s-pas-1239107/

The thread is 2 months old (and last had activity a month ago), but in my opinion, the situation looks pretty dire.

They acknowledge that they currently have slow cashouts, but are supposedly working on the problem. I don't completely buy that.

I think one or more of the following things is going on there:

1) They are understaffed, because revenue is now a fraction of what it was prior to Black Friday. There is now a huge backlog of cashout and support requests.

2) They have lost one or more payment processors, and lack the ability to pay people.

3) They are having cashflow problems, and can't pay people. This could partially be due to mismanagement of the company, and might also have to do with the poker sites themselves slow-paying (or outright screwing) PokerAffiliateSolutions.

In any case, I would suggest AVOIDING PokerAffiliateSolutions at this time, as it looks like it will be hell ever getting paid, if ever. Furthermore, you will be doing your users a disservice, because they also will suffer the same payout woes.

It's too bad, because PokerAffiliateSolutions was a great model for smaller websites that didn't have time (or enough influence) to establish their own affiliate deals.