Almost All Casino Ratings are Paid: How to Detect?
There are thousands of online casinos currently operating on the market. Unfortunately so many of them are rogues that are going to rob you one way or another.
As a result casino players often have to rely on some third-party reviews and ratings in order to grab a reliable online casino to play at. But the problem with this approach is that the majority of online casino ratings that you can find online are no any better than rogue casinos itself. How so? Because such ratings have been made not to serve the players’ best interest, but to simply make money.
Let’s learn how the industry works and elaborate on:
Why online casino ratings you can find online are often paid
How exactly it happens
How to detect paid online casino ratings (including forum threads)
Why almost all casino ratings are paid in one way or another
When you search on Google for something like “the best online casinos rating”, it shows you results in hierarchical order, presumably the best rating is in the first place. However, unfortunately this is not how it works.
In fact, in the first positions presented not the best ratings (consisting of only reliable online casinos), but the ratings of the biggest websites, which Google consider the most trustworthy ones.
Big websites from the first page of Google search results are often operated by big corporations as one blogger can not produce thousands of articles on scale.
Of course there are relatively small blogs like mine, and some of them are even quite legit and have been created keeping players’ interests in mind. But ratings on small blogs have no chances to compete with big corporations, so they are displayed by Google on positions 50+ so that nobody really can find them.
Corporations are here to make money, and to maximize their profits they sell places in their ratings, which can cost casinos tens of thousands EUR per month.
I am not claiming that all casinos from such ratings are scam. Some of them are reliable, but I guess you get how wrong this approach is on its core level.
How exactly online casinos get their place in the rating
As I have mentioned briefly it is often some monthly/yearly fee plus some fixed price to get listed.
For example, an online casino pays 50,000 EUR to be included in the rating and 10,000 EUR per month to remain there.
Some casino rating websites at least do not list clear scam casinos though some of them do not really care until a casino pays. I suppose I don’t need to explain how such practice is harmful for online casino players.
Fake online casino awards
The same can be said about endless online casino rewards. They are all fake.
There is the whole industry around when you first invest a lot of money promoting your award and then monetize it by selling the winner places.
So to say, when you see an online casino awarded many times by …. nobody even knows by whom really, it is a clear sign that a casino invested a lot of money in marketing instead of high quality service.
How to detect paid online casino ratings
Here are our red flags which should raise suspicion:
Hundreds of online casinos are listed on the website. You can not keep track of so many casinos at once. Some of them may change owners and become scam, some of them just may become worse in terms of service as time passes.
The website is flooded with “winning strategies”. There are no winning strategies to profit long term at online casinos, period (except for this and that, and they are not easy). The house always wins in the long run, everybody should keep it in mind.
Gambling is promoted as an income opportunity. Websites which do so clearly can not be trusted. The only reason they exist is to get you involved in something very dubious.
All reviews are very complementary. It is normal that a business is not ideal and there are some flaws here and there. Though if you read some reviews, it seems like that basically everything is perfect, which can not be true…. cmon.
Promoted bonuses are overly generous. A legit online casino can not afford charity so when you see something like “200% up to 1000 EUR” somewhere must be a catch.
The website is operated by some public company (such info is often provided on the bottom of the website). As I have covered it in the previous chapters, purely business websites are not the best place to get your advice.
Can I rely on threads on gambling related forums?
No, you absolutely can not. The majority of forum threads have been written not by real customers, but paid guys at best, or even have been auto-generated by special software.
What about casino related comments of rating websites’ users
As you may have already figured out, they are also basically always paid. There is the whole industry to buy/sell comments on websites.
What should I do if all ratings are fake?
The best way is to do your own research. I have written an article on how to do so without relying on third-party ratings (read it here).
Alternatively you can use ratings of independent bloggers, like this one. Though be careful as so many of them are garbage as well.
Conclusion
Summing up, the online gambling industry is rotten, and you can really trust nobody here. The best way to get a fair online casino is to make your own research which takes some time and effort, but pays out big time.
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