In profile: AskGamblers

AskGamblers CEO, Igor Salindrija, explains how the brand has become one of the most trusted in the online casino business

Since its debut in 2006, the AskGamblers team has worked tirelessly to create one of the most respected online casino review sites around. The award-winning egaming affiliate boasts a sleek in-house developed multi-channel website featuring thousands of product reviews, a community of avid readers and a trusted complaints system designed to ensure a more transparent customer experience for online casino players.

It’s this word ‘trust ‘ which is one of the portal’s most important core values and arguably its main USP. Indeed, the most trustworthy casinos reviewed on the site, among all listed ones, are recognised and certified by its very own Certificate of Trust. Unlike many other certificates issued by affiliates based on their personal relationships or opinions, AskGamblers uses the complaints data, combined with score rankings, and the opinion of its expanding community that it has collected over the past 10 years.

“We’re able to recognise the most trustworthy casinos automatically without our personal opinion being involved. This is something only AskGamblers can do,” the brand’s founder and CEO, Igor Salindrija, claims with conviction. “Our certification system also allows eligible online casinos to certify themselves without even the slightest bit of manual work from our side.”

EGR Digital Marketing spoke to Salindrija to find out more about how AskGamblers’ focus on fair play helped put the online gaming portal on the path to success and where he believes this path may lead in the future.

EGR Digital Marketing (EGR DM): How would you describe the AskGamblers strategy?
Igor Salindrija (IS): In the least number of words, our motto is “Get the truth. Then Play” – this sums up our whole philosophy and strategy. We put the word “trust” front and centre of whatever we do and it fits every feature and every decision perfectly. We’re committed to serving the community by providing world class player support and independent, unbiased casino information. This is something that we always stand for and it’s our main mission.

EGR DM: How important is the complaints system to your strategy?
IS: That is another thing that makes AskGamblers so unique. We developed and designed it from scratch two years after we had launched the first version of the website. Back then there were just one or two websites dealing with complaints on forums. I didn’t like the solution and wanted to offer a better one. And that’s exactly what we did. Today, our support centre deals with hundreds of cases every day and so far we’ve returned millions to players through our complaints system.

EGR DM: How does the complaints system actually work?
IS: We made a fully automated system that allows only two-way communication between the player and the casino. Each party has a limited amount of time of 96 hours to respond to the complaint; otherwise the case will be automatically closed. Even though we consider four days is enough time for a decent support response to the player’s issue, sometimes it takes longer to gather all necessary information, so we allow them to request reopening of the case up to three times.

Email, website and push notifications are sent whenever an action occurs and reminders notify them once a day to respond, so neither the casino nor the player should worry that they will miss the deadline. We’ve received over 9,000 complaints so far and returned $5.3m to the players through this system.

EGR DM: Which digital marketing channels is AskGamblers mostly focused on?
IS: We rely mostly on our website and our own marketing channels, such as our bi-monthly newsletter. Whenever we have a new feature or news that we want to announce to our players, we use our website to reach the wide audience and support it with some PR and social media. Due to legislation and lack of advertising options for gambling, we’re pretty limited in this area, but we’re lucky we have a powerful tool such as our own website to spread out the news.

EGR DM: How did you first get involved in egaming affiliation?
IS: I was only 20 years old, a student with some knowledge in web design, when I got a summer job as a barman in a local land-based casino. Soon aſter, I started bringing a laptop to work and doing some freelance web design, behind the bar. But instead of firing me, they asked me if I could make an online casino for them. Apparently, this was about to become a huge thing.

“What the heck is an online casino? How does it even work?” I asked myself. Still, I accepted the challenge and started reading and learning immediately. That’s when I encountered affiliate websites for the first time ever. Knowing neither what an affiliate is, nor how these websites make money, I just had a feeling they were doing pretty good. They all looked so poor and I was positive I could make one much better and earn a couple of bucks on top of my salary in the local casino.

EGR DM: Why did you decide to launch AskGamblers and what was the vision at the time?
IS: I started building a website in my spare time. As I didn’t know anything about the topic, it was only natural that I made some mistakes such as gathering land-based and online casinos in the same database. A few months later, AskGamblers was born and I was waiting for the first player.

Don’t forget, that was the time before social media and I didn’t have any money to fund my marketing campaigns, so I just worked on my website hoping that someone will eventually come. When you are a student in a country like Serbia, where I was born and raised, your biggest goal and vision is to make some money for yourself. I was lucky that I had some computer skills, opportunity to work for a land-based casino, and all the time in the world. The real vision came later, when I grew a bit older, became more familiar with the industry and got AskGamblers’ path clearly defined. But it all came organically; I didn’t push it, nor consider it a real business for the first three or four years.

EGR DM: What did the online casino affiliate sector look like when you launched and how has it changed since then?
IS: It looked like an overcrowded space to me, where email spam and pop-ups were everywhere, and something where it was easy to be recognised just by doing it better or differently. The biggest players have defined the industry, including AskGamblers. They set new rules and standards that new kids have to follow. Players and affiliates are getting more educated, tech savvy and conscious about what good and not so good behaviour is. However, I strongly believe the affiliate sector is still quite obsolete in comparison to the current situation in the industry, not to mention the tech sector.

Responsive: AskGamblers’ products are optimised for all devices

EGR DM: Have you considered branching out with new affiliate sites and into new verticals?
IS: We used to at the beginning, and that was one of those mistakes we made. We had seven gambling verticals and AskGamblers was translated into six languages, by translators who didn’t know anything about gambling. We wanted to be everywhere, but ended up being nowhere, or at least, being most recognised in the casino vertical with the English version of the website.

So, we decided to cut everything off and focused on this. It was one of the best decisions we made back then. We also had some notable websites in the poker and sports betting verticals that really stood out with their high quality content and design, but I decided to sell them all and fully commit to AskGamblers. And I’ve never regretted it.

EGR DM: How big is the operation at the company today?
IS: Our company numbers over 40 people right now and over 25 people are working on AskGamblers alone. Our product development team has designers and developers for mobile and website products. Then we have a content team, SEO/CRO, account management, support, finance, and HR. Besides AskGamblers, our company is working on a few other products related to technology and design.

EGR DM: Do you work with the majority of casino operators? How do you pick and choose which ones?
IS: We list everyone, regardless whether they’re a good casino or not. However, the casino’s performance will further establish their place on our website. If the casino is not so good, this will reflect through its rating, complaints, and we might put out a notice or warning to suggest to our players not to play there. In this way, we help players avoid trouble that rough casinos bring. We give everyone a chance, but we are transparent and provide unbiased casino reviews and player opinions.

EGR DM: What is the secret to a good relationship between affiliate and affiliate manager?
IS: Well, communication is always important, meeting face to face occasionally is also very significant. We’re lucky to have a great account management team, diligent and committed to building and maintaining the best possible relationships with our partners.

Every casino has its dedicated account manager in our team that takes care of its accounts 24/7. Together they ensure our players get a superb casino experience, because nothing matters if you fail to deliver to players. And with a lot of hard work and effort AskGamblers always delivers.

EGR DM: How would you sum up the design and brand of AskGamblers?
IS: These are the two things that always made AskGamblers stand out among the competition. The fact that our design has been cloned dozens of times only confirms it. We’ve found the whole website, pages, sections and features completely cloned on other websites many times, and I’m glad that we’re inspiring the industry.

We’re putting a huge amount of resources, time and effort in to our design, which includes R&D, analysing and testing until we find the right version that works best in terms of aesthetics, functionality and conversion. Everything you see on AskGamblers has a purpose and nothing was made based on the pure assumptions. I’m a designer myself and if something has to be done right, then it’s the design.

EGR DM: What about your rankings?
IS: When it comes to the casino ranking, we again have a different approach. Our CasinoRank is accurate, automated, sophisticated, the industry’s most authoritative casino ranking, based on facts and precious data collected over a decade. None of our staff can give stars and points to the casinos based on their own opinions, as is the case on many other portals. CasinoRank works equally fair for all casinos (1,000+) listed on AskGamblers.

EGR DM: What else makes AskGamblers stand out from all the other casino affiliates?
IS: With such high activity on the website itself, produced either by our tireless content team or our large community of players, the next logical step was to find a way to notify players about the right stuff in this noisy world
of information, so we introduced Live Notifications. Players can subscribe to any casino they’re interested in and choose whether they want to be updated when a new bonus or promotion is up, or someone wrote a new review or filed a complaint. Live Notifications can be received via email, on website, or through the iPhone app. What’s more, members have full control through the notification management.

One thing that I’m personally proud of and that definitely makes AskGamblers stand out are reviews generated by players themselves. We call them Player Reviews from the beginning, as we’ve set high standards and guidelines for them and wanted to have players writing about their real experiences while playing on these casinos. Reviews without any evidence of playing there, or that are full of insults, spam, and other low quality content are immediately removed by our moderators. As we’ve achieved to rank in the first place on Google for every casino review related keyword, Player Reviews are very important for every new player trying to find the right and trustworthy place to play.

EGR DM: What do you find is the most popular feature on your website?
IS: Complaints and player reviews are the sections that engage users the most, but we’ve noticed an increased number of subscriptions to the live notifications. And there’s a large forum community on AskGamblers which is probably the most fun and friendliest place to be. Everything we do is built in-house. We have a strong product development department which is divided into two teams, website and mobile, and both have some of the most talented developers and designers I’ve ever met.

Mobile-first: AskGamblers’ new iPhone app

EGR DM: What can you tell us about your new mobile product?
IS: Four years ago, many hadn’t even thought about the mobile web, nor had a decent smartphone, and we had around 1-2% of the mobile traffic back then. But this was a signal for us that something is about to happen there. A year later we’ve optimised AskGamblers for smaller screens and made it fully functional across all mobile devices and it resulted in an increase of mobile traffic by at least 5-10%.

We’re probably the first, or one of the first casino affiliates whose mobile app became available for download in the Apple App Store. Even though our website has been optimised for mobile phones and tablets for over three years now, our mobile team has made a fully functional app to provide a much better experience to our players. And you should download it, it’s beautiful.

EGR DM: How important is the mobile channel to AskGamblers?
IS: Today, our mobile traffic is almost half of our total traffic. Hence, we had our mobile team create a fully functional app that provides a much better experience to our iPhone users. The app has been available on the App Store since the beginning of February, and it is free of charge for everyone who wants to keep up to date with the latest casino news on the go. As I already mentioned, it is our last but not least project. We’re already experienced and prepared for the new mobile age.