Is "poker" a saturated market?

[khalid]

From seeing the success of Tyler and John Diver, I was inspired to investigate making money from the online world of gambling, particularly poker (I'll tell you why in a second)

I found that there are literally hundreds of affiliate schemes and thousands of poker sites.

There are one or two sites I've seen popup for sale in the past month or so, some with potential. One site is a poker blog hoster/community and the other was a single page poker affiliate site.

Do you think the market is saturated?

Is there room for newbies?

What knowledge do you require, i.e. a high level of poker knowledge? Anyone can put a few affiliate links on a page and hope for the best...

[Tyler]

First off, I don't think you'll ever be able to purchase a poker site for the simple fact that any half-decent site (or even quarter-decent!) poker site has no reason to sell as it'll be making a fair bit of money. If they do sell, they'd want decent coin for it. Thus, it's easier to just start one rather than buy one unless you have a lot of dough.

Of course, you will see poker sites for sale that are cheap, but they aren't making anything (obviously) and so you might as well start your own, ya dig?

As for being saturated - hah, that's the understatement of the year :) Yes, poker and gambling is EXTREMELY saturated. I get around 20 e-mails a day just asking for link exchanges from new sites all the time. There's no question that it's saturated.

As for there being room? Well, I like to think that there's always room, no matter what industry, no matter how saturated. There's always room. It may be a hell of a lot harder to get anything done, but there's always room. It just takes more work.

I'm going to have to say that the more poker knowledge you have, the better. Not only knowing how to play, but playing at a half-decent level, and most importantly, playing at many various sites, is priceless. You need to know this information not only for how you manifest content for your site, but also so you can pick out the best poker rooms to affiliate, understand which affiliate deals are good or bad, as well as to gain collegues, friends, and contacts in the industry.

Hope that helps.

[moojj]

I would say the poker industry is definitely saturated. As Tyler pointed out, people won't sell you the 'make money right now' solution, they will typically hold onto it. If you want to generate revenue in the publisher industry you really need to work hard at it.

If you enjoy what you do then you are on the right track.

[aloksingh]

If you are starting out in any industry, first spend one or two months getting to know more about it. Once you become knowledgeable, then you can start your website. Also, there is another way of doing it. Just start a blog as a poker newbie and start posting your experiences etc.