Several sites on the unregulated US-facing Merge Gaming Network have announced that they will no longer pay commissions for new players signing up through affiliate links. Merge’s flagship site, Carbon Poker, announced the new policy in an email sent to its marketing partners earlier this month.

While the change is set take place on June 1, the site assured affiliates that it will continue to pay commissions as normal for players who signed up before that date. “All existing players will remain tracked to your affiliate accounts and [Carbon] will continue to pay out on all existing revenue earned,” the company stated on its website. “You will be able to track player progress and reporting as you always have through your existing [Carbon] affiliate account.”

A few weeks later, Merge skins Sportsbook, SuperBook, and PlayersOnlyannounced they too would be dropping their poker affiliate program via a change in their terms and conditions. That announcement was made on May 20, just one day before the change was set to take effect.

In an email to affiliates, Sportsbook.com stated that it would focus its efforts “exclusively on sports, casino, and horseracing traffic going forward.” It added that commission plans for those three programs would remain unaffected.

Like Carbon Poker, the sportsbook-related skins promised to continue paying affiliates for players signed up before the cutoff date of May 21.

Merge isn’t the only one attempting to cut its costs through a restructuring of its affiliate program. Earlier in the month, PokerStars sent a notice saying that affiliates would receive commissions for new players for a period of just two years.

The policy change at Merge sites comes on the heels of large-scale delays on player cashouts at the network. In the past, Carbon Poker users had received their cashouts in three to five weeks. But since around the time of this year’s Super Bowl, payouts have been delayed by up to several months for some players.

In other cases, Carbon players had received checks that were heavily scrutinized by bank officials or had bounced altogether. Since we published our piece on the situation, however, players have noticed an uptick in withdrawal success rates. Read Part 1and Part 2 of our series on Merge cashouts.

But the fact that Merge sites will no longer incentivize affiliates to bring traffic does not bode well for poker on the network. While affiliates sometimes receive large commissions for referring players, they can be vital to bringing in new users to smaller sites. Without the backing of affiliates, the player pool at Merge skins could be in danger of drying up.

The new measure taken by Merge is only one of many that the network has implemented in the past two years in an attempt to shore up expenses. In 2013, Carbon stopped paying rakebackand transferred all users to a VIP rewards program. A year later, the site stopped offering VIP perks as well.

As always, PocketFives does not recommend depositing on non-regulated US-facing sites like those on Merge, as your funds could be at risk.

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