I have been in the gambling industry for over 20 years. My roots are in online poker. I later moved to casino content. My wife Kristina managed our Las Vegas table game database for 10 years before joining me full-time to build websites in 2020. We had no investors or employees. The investment and labor were entirely ours. Our company is Advantage Media LLC.
Vegas Advantage launched in 2018. In 2021, Kristina and I visited 58 casinos on or near the East Coast. We previously visited two other casino markets for content ideas. Using what we learned on those trips, we built nine Advantage-branded websites at great expense. Network traffic peaked at over 2000 visitors a day.
Making the most of a bad situation
Over 100 people from major affiliate companies became unemployed in the last week. Many groups worked together on the same project for years. There are ways to turn a negative situation into a positive one.
These days, Kristina and I work on outside projects to keep the sites going, so we don’t have any cash to invest. However, we have decades of gambling content creation experience, four websites with nearly 1000 quality pages of content combined, an established brand, a large social media presence, and own hundreds of top three gambling keywords. Our websites host over 1000 daily visitors in combined organic traffic.
Vegas Advantage is an authority site and a link magnet. It has been featured and quoted in dozens of mainstream media articles.
Our experience taught us that two people cannot do all the work needed to remain competitive. This is the time to see what others are considering for their next move.
If an experienced content creator or group is interested in discussing ways to take our sites to the next level, we want to have that talk. It can be through investment, a partnership between active participants, or anything in between.
We especially like the idea of turning this site into a partnership between content creators and going from there. It has so much potential. It once ranked number one in Google for many video poker and table games and on page one for hundreds of others.
Let’s talk
Our Advantage sites were built by players for players. That is our vision. We are not interested in turning the sites into SEO content involved in sketchy link schemes. Great content is king. As Google improves its ability to target blackhat SEO, sites that take shortcuts will continue to get penalized in updates. Advantage sites will always survive changes in search engine ranking algorithms because we play by the rules.
We have more ideas, and others may think of options we never considered. If you would like to discuss our websites or anything related to the industry, including introductions, please contact us at admin@vegasadvantage.com or DM me on X/Twitter @John_Mehaffey.
How we got here
We merged seven of our local sites into this one. We kept Atlantic City Advantage and West Virginia Advantage live due to the online casino markets, doing occasional updates to keep them from getting too stale. Most of our focus moved to our flagship site, Vegas Advantage. It is monetized through memberships and localized advertising.
Most major regulated online gambling affiliate companies are publicly traded with responsibilities to shareholders private companies do not have. These groups also have massive executive salaries and associated bureaucracies. The startup feeling is lost in most of those operations. The money these companies do not think is enough to bother with is substantial to small businesses.
Monetization help
Our main missing piece is access to affiliate programs. In 2021, we pitched nearly every regulated online gambling operator to promote their products. None replied to our multiple emails.
We never found a way to monetize most of our sites because we lacked the connections and the operators appear unwilling to work with small businesses. Whatever happens, access to those types of deals seems imperative.
Another idea is expanding our social media reach through video content. Our strengths are in poker and casino games, so expert sports betting content would complement our skills.
We look forward to discussing this with the industry. Whatever happens, we wish everyone affected by the layoffs the best of luck.