At this past Casino Affiliate Convention in Amsterdam, a hot topic of conversation was the shift in focus away from the online poker affiliate programs within the industry due in great part to the increasingly large presence of popular mainstream branding in the industry. Such powerhouse brands like Yahoo! and World Poker Tour are consuming a larger and larger portion of the poker player base, which was once much more accessible to the smaller unknown start-up poker sites at the height of the online poker craze. Even established poker brands such as Bodog, Party Poker, Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker are feeling the pinch as more mainstream brands begin to move in on a market almost exclusively their own.

However, some online casinos with attached poker rooms are decidedly less outwardly concerned even after Yahoo! spokesperson CJ Stanley threw out some pretty inflammatory statements along the lines of 'everybody ought to be real scared'. Calvin Ayre of Bodog feels that this is far from the time for his company to panic, but rather, is business as usual.

Ayre's company is currently focusing on bringing to the public a unique, specialized online entertainment portal. He also emphasizes that he predicted this big brand to ride their wake right out of the shadowy online casino realm and into the mainstream, where his highly developed poker and online entertainment brand will surely prosper.

The majority of the power being thrust forth by these big brands is coming in the form of the already structured and catalogued customer base they enjoy, which brings us back full swing to the declining need of affiliates to traffic players to online poker sites. Instead of plugging in the intensive man-hours and financial investment needed to build a formidable online casino or poker site from the ground up, Yahoo! and World Poker Tour have simply brought their committed customer base to an already thriving, yet smaller online gambling network.