News
Exclusive Q&A with Ian McDonnell CEO at Blexr
Reading Time: 5 minutes
First up, tell us about yourself. It’s always great to hear successful entrepreneurs speak about themselves.
Mine is the classic affiliate story: in my final year of college in 2004, I started getting seriously into poker after winning €450 in a home game. Having been broke my entire student life, winning that amount of money in a night piqued my interest. I started to read a lot about poker, immersing myself in books, forums, and any other poker-related content I could find.
Soon after, I graduated from university and started my first job with a telecoms company, working in their web content department. At this point, I was playing online poker almost every day. After some initial struggles, I was earning more playing poker in the evenings than I was in my day job.
I was keen to travel while I was still young. Having saved up some money, I decided to quit my job to seek adventures overseas. At this point, I had enough of a bankroll to play poker full-time and sufficient money left in the bank for a return ticket, in case poker didn’t work out. I headed off to Asia with some friends and started my professional poker-playing journey.
The next three years went brilliantly. By 2008, I had travelled across Asia and moved from low-stakes to high-stakes games.
I was also getting an amazing rakeback deal from the poker site I played on. The manager signed me up to their affiliate programme and told me to offer the same deal to my poker network. Not long after, I had 20-30 of my poker friends on the same deal and got a 5% cut of their action.
Most of my poker network were professional players, so 5% of their rake added up to a pretty significant amount. That then got me interested in the business side of poker, and it was from there that I found affiliation and immersed myself in online marketing in the same way I had previously done with poker.
I had very strong links with several members of the close-knit Irish poker community and regularly chatted with a gentleman who went by the name of “roadsweeper”. After we got talking about building a website together, we decided to try our hands at the online marketing game.
When roadsweeper (or Paudie, as he’s better known these days) and I started working together, affiliation went from a part-time hobby to a full-time job. Our first site was dedicated to our shared passion – poker – and we had immediate success, reaching four-figure earnings in our first few months. Soon after, we made our first foray into casino, and sports betting followed not long after that.
While I’m wearing the hat of CEO, Blexr is very much a partnership. Our success to date would not have been possible without Paudie’s positive energy, work ethic, and sense of humour, as well as his superhuman ability to put up with my pig-headedness. He was also the driving force behind the eventual creation of Blexr in 2015.
It has been four years since Blexr started. What were the ideas and circumstances behind founding it?
At the start of 2015, I was in China and Paudie was in Ireland. We were running 10-20 websites, and had freelancers spread across the world managing everything from design to dev to content.
Back then, we assumed every affiliate was running a similar operation to our own, and that everybody was running a “two guys in a garage” type of setup. On receiving an invite to a private affiliate event in Punta Cana, our eyes were opened when we learned that several of the super affiliates in attendance ran “real” companies with offices, staff, and the rest of the things you’d expect in a normal business.
That led to discussions on centralising operations. We went on to do some research on the various gaming hubs around the world and finally settled on Malta as the home for Blexr.
The company is going great, judging from the awards you get. What is the secret of maintaining freshness and motivation even after four years?
That’s a great question. While Blexr opened its doors four years ago, we’ve actually been working together since 2008.
Our motivations have changed a lot over the years. Initially, the main motivation was money. When you have bills to pay, you need to have a viable business that can cover your living costs. Luckily, things went well from the very beginning, so we never had financial worries.
Once you reach a certain level of financial success, money becomes much less of a motivating factor. Nowadays, there are other aspects of running a company that are far more important to us.
The first is our focus on building great products, something that is part of Blexr’s mission. Being part of a team that works on products users love is highly motivating.
Secondly, developing and growing a company culture is both fun and challenging. It can be an emotional rollercoaster at times, but ultimately it’s very rewarding.
Blexr has reputably earned a standing in the lead generation, especially in the gaming and casino verticals. Tell us about some of your innovations in the digital marketing arena.
All of Blexr’s success is a result of the hard work and dedication of the 100 or so individuals that make up our team of teams. Our growth and constant evolution and innovation is a result of their creativity, dedication, and commitment. Malta often gets a bad reputation when it comes to the quality of talent on the island; we’re fortunate to be blessed with some of the smartest and hardest-working people in the industry.
When it comes to innovation, at the moment we’re putting a lot of focus on big data. We’re working on a number of different projects that aim to provide a personalised gaming experience for our users. We’re also exploring different ways to discover what users want to then tailor our products to their needs.
Since you are into the business of bringing customers to the gaming and gambling websites, you must be in a great position to judge what customers really need. Could you specify a couple of things that customers really need or want, but not available at present in the gambling industry?
I think the big thing that customers in gaming want is trust and transparency, which is often lacking in the industry. Transparency is something we really care about at Blexr. It’s one of the core values of the company, and it’s also part of our mission statement when it comes to how we approach our products and our users.
The digital marketing space keeps on evolving. There was once Google’s near monopoly. Then Facebook arrived. Now, a host of new social media upstarts threaten to disrupt the digital marketing space every other day. How do you keep calm and generate leads amidst such fast-paced evolution?
The affiliate industry and SEO have changed a lot over the past ten years. The methods we used to rank websites a decade ago would have your website penalised for life if you tried them today.
It’s always important to look towards the future. What way is SEO going? What sites are ranking well these days and why? What other channels can be used to generate leads apart from SEO? We try to keep one eye on the future at all times, to ensure that we’re building sites and products that will stand the test of time.
You bring leads from all over the world. What are the steps that you take to ensure legal compliance, as the rules on gambling practically change from country to country – even from state to state in many countries?
We have fantastic commercial and content teams with dedicated people managing compliance across our network of sites. We are in regular contact with all our partners to ensure our sites are always up to date and aligned with current regulations.
Now you have an office in Barcelona as well, apart from the headquarters in Malta. Any plans to expand further, especially to the USA and Asia?
Right now, we’re focused on our two offices in Malta and Barcelona. As the regulatory landscape changes in the US, Asia, and other markets, we may look to strategically set up offices in those locations. However, for now, our priorities are Malta and Barcelona.
Source: European Gaming Media
This is a Syndicated News piece. Photo credits or photo sources can be found on the source article: Exclusive Q&A with Ian McDonnell CEO at Blexr
A partnership between game developer Turbo Games and iGaming solution provider and aggregator Slotegrator began in November 2022 via the APIgrator game integration solution. Since then, the collaboration has been developing successfully — and now it’s time to analyze what made it successful.
Turbo Games has noticed how the new technologies spreading throughout the industry can work for the good of brand transparency and player loyalty: “We can already see how blockchain technology has made it possible to make betting checks more accessible to players. All you need is a blockchain-hash and a decoder service. We think we will continue to move in this direction. Many traditional online casinos do not offer the possibility to check the bet. Sooner or later we all have to come to this. Perhaps the development of artificial intelligence will help here, because we are already seeing its involvement in all spheres of human life.”
Turbo Games specializes in provably fair games. Provable fairness is a concept where players can verify their wins or losses using blockchain technology — the outcome of the game is dictated by a smart contract and is absolutely random, barring the possibility of any human involvement. Using cryptographic hashing algorithms, the gambling site and the player’s device both generate seeds (random strings of numbers). Players receive a key that allows them to check the results; if the results are the same as the game round they witnessed, it proves that there was no foul play.
According to statistics from Turbo Games, the audience for provably fair games is mostly between 18 and 25 years old. However, there are also players aged 35-40 who prefer traditional games but would like to try something new, and have turned their attention to provably fair games.
There are good odds that the technology of provably fair games will become more popular, if not even commonplace, because it gives players a feeling of transparency and proves that the business is trustworthy without the need to search through dozens of reviews. Whereas many innovations in iGaming simply add entertainment, provable fairness addresses security concerns and reassures players that they’re not being exploited, which is invaluable.
Provably fair games are beneficial for both players and online casinos. Vadim Potapenko, Head of Sales at Turbo Games, comments: “It often happens that the users are not satisfied with the result, because gambling is not only about big wins, but also possible losses. By allowing them to check the fairness of a bet, we make life easier for platforms and players. Of course, this allows us to communicate with partners and users that we work honestly and that’s why they should trust our games.”
Ayvar Gabidullin, Business Development Manager at Slotegrator, adds that “this type of game is now becoming more and more popular and has great potential for both players and game providers in the future. On the part of the player, the advantage is that the player can always be sure that his game is fair and he can independently check any of his bets. And for the game provider, this also simplifies the process of implementing casino games, since now it will not be necessary to obtain the appropriate certificates from independent laboratories before launching new games, they can immediately enter the market with these games and where anyone can check the result and make sure that that there is no cheating with players. Many game providers are starting to look towards this type of game. And as far as I see, many operators are starting to think about adding these games.”
What do players in 2023 need? The iGaming industry is all about reputation and trust. Players have a huge number of platforms to choose from, making them pickier and pickier. There’s an abundance of forums where players leave reviews, so if players view a brand as untrustworthy, there are plenty of places they can share their opinion. Provable fairness not only stops that from happening, it provides evidence to the contrary, giving players something else to talk about.
Slotegrator also recommends investing time and effort into localization and creating an effective and detailed marketing strategy — before trying provably fair technology players need to get to the platform, and there is no acquisition without marketing.
ABOUT SLOTEGRATOR
Since 2012, Slotegrator has been one of the iGaming industry’s leading software and business solution providers for online casino and sportsbook operators.
The company’s main focus is software development and support for online casino platforms, as well as the integration of game content and payment systems.
The company works with licensed game developers and offers a vast portfolio of casino content: slots, live casino games, poker, virtual sports, table games, lotteries, casual games, and data feeds for betting.
Slotegrator also provides consulting services in gambling license acquisition and business incorporation.
More information: https://slotegrator.pro/
ABOUT TURBO GAMES
Turbo Games — a provably fair games provider that belongs to Turbo Stars company — has an ambitious goal to establish widespread recognition throughout the iGaming world. Even though it is young, the company consists of professionals who have been working on the brand for over five years and are even planning to introduce a new brand for a wider audience soon.
Turbo Games also works in Europe, India, and South Africa, where the company sees the most potential and expects the same “hype” as in Brazil.
The portfolio of Turbo Games consists of 21 titles, including well-known games like Mines, Crash X, DoubleRoll, Hi-Lo, and Plinko. The studio releases a game every month. However, not all games are developed from scratch. Wicket Blast and Spin Strike, the last two releases, are based on cricket and the Indian Premier League. Crash X remains the most popular fast game in the Turbo Games portfolio, and the studio reports that crash games enjoy stable levels of popularity. Overall, the main focus of the brand is provably fair games.
More information: https://turbogames.io/
Looking to take your career to the next level in the games industry? Then, Nordic Game Talents is the place to be! Games Factory Talents has teamed up with Nordic Game to bring you Nordic Game Talents.
From Oct 27-29, the online and interactive event is dedicated to recruitment and career building in the creative & games industry within the Nordic region. The event empowers participants to be part of a bigger community and motivates them to explore new paths in achieving their career goals.
Hiring creative & games studios – Supercell, Funcom, Panzerdog, Tactile Games, Gamecan, Fingersoft, Dazzle Rocks, Redhill Games to name a few from the Nordic region will be participating in the event. These studios will share information on their latest projects, work culture and what it takes to be part of their team. The individual games associations from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Estonia will share insights through live sessions on the booming games industry in their respective countries. Career development topics pertinent to job seekers like – How to have a successful first interview, Creative Portfolio reviews will also be discussed.
Experienced game industry professionals and individuals beginning their careers from around the world are welcome to join the event. One-to-one interviews with the hiring studios can be scheduled through the event platform. A great opportunity to get to know the studios and network with game professionals from around the world.
Participating in the event
As a job seeker attending Nordic Game Talents, take a few minutes to fill out a simple registration form. After filling the registration form you will receive a link to the online event platform – PINE, to join the event on 27th October. Participants joining Nordic Game Talents will also receive a free-of-charge pass to the Nordic Game Conference.
To view the complete agenda, please click here and to learn more about the event please visit Games Job Fair
About Games Factory Talents
A Helsinki-based talent attraction agency dedicated to the games & creative industry. Our services include direct recruitment, organizing game job fairs and managing a community of game industry professionals through our GameDev Talent Board.
To learn more about Games Factory Talents visit – Games Factory Talents
810 THE SPREAD
Cumulus Media Launches 810 THE SPREAD, the Bay Area’s First Sports Station Focused on Sports Betting
Cumulus Media (NASDAQ: CMLS) announces that it has launched the Bay Area’s first Sports radio station focused on sports betting, 810 THE SPREAD. The new station brings sports and sports betting news, information, and insights to the burgeoning and underserved sports betting audience in San Francisco. 810 THE SPREAD will deliver behind-the-book perspectives from experts in a highly entertaining and engaging format. 810 THE SPREAD goes live today on the legendary 810am frequency that has been the 80-year home of historic Talk Radio KGO-AM. Cumulus San Francisco also launched the station’s new website at www.810thespread.com. Kevin Graham, Program Director of Cumulus’ sister sports stations KNBR 680AM/104.5FM and 1050 KTCT, adds Program Director duties for 810 THE SPREAD.
Larry Blumhagen, Vice President/Market Manager, Cumulus San Francisco, said: “810 THE SPREAD joins our sports brands KNBR 680AM/104.5FM and 1050 KTCT for a trifecta of dynamic sports content across four signals and streaming everywhere. We are excited about this new chapter and look forward to serving the Bay Area’s passionate sports fans in an incomparable way.”
Blumhagen added: “This is a bittersweet day for us, as it’s hard to say goodbye to the legendary KGO, which has been a part of listeners’ lives for so many years. We want to thank all the people who have been a part of KGO’s historic run these many years – and the listeners who loyally tuned in to the station. Times change, and we must change with them.”
Kevin Graham, Program Director, 810 THE SPREAD, said: “810 THE SPREAD will be the Bay Area’s best bet for sports fans and sports betting enthusiasts, and we are pleased to introduce sports-betting radio to our community. The station will feature a lineup of expert personalities that deliver unique sports talk and sports betting insights that entertain, inform, and engage, along with Cal Football and Basketball as well as select professional and college sports play-by-play events. While 810 THE SPREAD will feature specific gambling information, we believe our entertaining presentation will make it a favorite for all Bay area sports fans and a perfect complement to the legendary KNBR and KTCT. With its addition, it truly shows Cumulus’ commitment to the Bay area as ‘The Sports Leader’!”
The weekday programming lineup for 810 THE SPREAD includes:
6am-9am – Bet QL Daily – The must-consume show for sports fans and betting fans alike. Hosted by Joe Ostrowski, Joe Giglio, and Erin Hawksworth.
9am-12pm – Jim Rome - Aggressive, informed sports opinions, rapid-fire dialogue, and plenty of sports smack. As one of the most prolific sports talk hosts in America, Rome draws massive tune-in with legions of fans known as clones, who live for Rome’s take on the day’s largest issues in sports.
12pm-4pm – You Better You Bet – Nick Kostos and Ken Barkley have you covered for the best bets on the biggest matchups, the latest line movement and updates in the futures market. We’ll have up-to-the-minute coverage of backdoor covers and bad beats, and the cheers and tears that come with them. It’s sports betting conversation like you’ve never heard before.
4pm-8pm – Bet MGM Tonight – Live sports betting updates for all the night’s games as they happen – plus live “look-ins” for Major League Baseball games in progress. Get the latest scores, sides, totals, props, parlays, futures, and much more with hosts Quinton Mayo, Trysta Krick, and Ryan Horvat.
8pm-12 Midnight – CBS Sports Radio
BetQL Network programming is provided by Cumulus Media’s Westwood One through a partnership with Audacy.
For more information or to stream 810 THE SPREAD, visit: http://www.810thespread.com.
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