Great minds: how Catena Media’s co-founder is delivering positive change for charities

Great.com is the brainchild of Catena Media co-founder Erik Bergman who decided to pursue a new opportunity with his fledgling affiliate site which donates 100% of its profits to climate change initiatives. Bergman discusses why it’s a personal goal for him to make a difference through effective altruism, his early years of “immoral” affiliate marketing and today’s ever-increasing pressures of regulatory compliance.

EGR Intel: How did you first come up with the idea for Great.com?

Erik Bergman (EB): The idea for Great.com is really two or three ideas, depending on how you look at it. One, is my ambition to build a big affiliate site, and that’s something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. It’s just been short-term and more profitable to work on lots of different projects and sites. The idea of doing it from a charity perspective has simply come from my upbringing. My family has always been very involved with different charitable causes. My father has been very involved with very left-side politics and always been involved with humanitarian actions in various ways. That’s something I’ve been brought up with and obviously it doesn’t really go well with being a professional poker player and then a casino affiliate.

Still, I like the idea of combining the two and I think it makes perfect sense to do so. I met with Niklas Adalberth, who is the founder of the Swedish tech giant company Klarna, a multi-millionaire [billionaire in Swedish krona] who did something similar. He started Norrsken Foundation, a start-up hub for social entrepreneurs where he is funding lots of them. The foundation built a big house for them in in Sweden, and he told me about a concept called effective altruism. One of their concepts called earning to give, which is basically that the best thing you can do for the world, if you have certain skills and are good with money is to focus on what you’re really good at. Make the most money possible and then let someone else who is really good at making use of that money in terms of charity put it to the most good use. It doesn’t make sense that I should start schools in Africa because I don’t know anything about starting schools or that I should try and come up with a vaccine for coronavirus. I don’t know anything about that. It’s much better that I work on gambling marketing, which I’m very, very good at and then I let someone else do the good stuff with the money.

EGR Intel: In what ways has your prior industry experience shaped your approach to developing Great.com?

Erik Bergman (EB): I’m not sure if anything really changed it from that regard. I’ve always wanted to build one really big affiliate site; I think that’s one of the things missing in the casino affiliate space, and the sportsbook affiliate space for that matter. Catena is developing 50 different projects; they have AskGamblers as well as lots of different smaller sites. Similarly, with Raketech, Better Collective and XLMedia they all used to have one big site [and] then turned it into lots. When I was part of Catena Media, I missed being able to have a long-term focus on one product, and I think there’s space to do one site really well.

The reason no one’s done it is that it’s far easier to start new websites in new markets and target new keywords rather than focusing on one site. I’d much rather focus on becoming the TripAdvisor of gambling in the long run, and from a business perspective I want to build one site for 10 years or even 50 years if it goes well rather than working on a multitude of websites. It’s funny really because Catena was the first affiliate to invent the multi-site strategy. We were already running over 1,000 different websites.  I want to build a big affiliate site that’s a real brand. In the industry right now from a gambling perspective, it’s just AskGamblers that is doing this, maybe gambling.com and a few others but not many, and that’s what I want to develop.

EGR Intel: Which charities does Great.com give money to and are there any plans to expand this list?

EB: The short answer is that we’re currently very focused on climate change because we believe that’s the most important and pressing matter, but it’s kind of been following my own charity endeavours over the last four years. This started with me involving myself in a couple of very personal projects, organisations people close to me were involved in. The more research I did on charities, the more I realised that it was harder to determine what differentiates an amazing charity from just a good one.

Having said that, there’s a lot of research on that and there’s a couple of organisations that research which charities make the most impact for each dollar donated in respect of climate change. We’re going to base our list of charities solely on the recommendations of these firms. Most of our donations go to climate change charities such as the Clean Air Task Force and there’s another one called Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Others have really long names and no branding so we’re hoping that we can raise their profile through Great.com.

Great.com helped by providing funds to build a roof for an orphanage in Sri Lanka

EGR Intel: Are charitable organisations comfortable with receiving money from gambling operators?

EB: So far, we haven’t had any charities we’ve partnered with raise any concerns at all. I think a lot of that is down to the fact that we’re focusing on those charities that are the top performing ones in the sector but still relatively unknown. We’re not working with the biggest and most well-known organisations that are probably very cautious about their brand name. We’re working with quite unknown organisations that are mainly funded by people who have a real deep knowledge about charity. It’s probably more important to them to see a result from the charity rather than questioning where the money comes from. We’ve not had any problems at all so far using this approach.

EGR Intel: Which markets does Great.com operate in and are there any plans to expand?

EB: We’re currently live in New Jersey and we’ve just gone live in Sweden in June. After that, the idea is to gradually tick off all the licensed markets in turn. We’re probably going to head into the UK once we feel established in Sweden and New Jersey. We’re probably going to go into Pennsylvania and move into whatever regulated markets open in the future. The idea for now is to keep the brand to the well-regulated markets and operate a very long-term business expansion perspective.

EGR Intel: How is Great different to a traditional gambling affiliate site from a player’s perspective?

EB: Our idea is that we’re aiming to be 100% honest with our players, meaning that you’re not going to be able to buy a better position. In the affiliate industry, it’s more or less standard that whoever pays the highest commission gets the top position, it’s often about a fixed fee on top of revenue share to have spot number one, it’s not about who is the best casino, just about who pays the most. On Great.com, we will do our own testing on each casino and we will not allow someone to pay extra to get higher spots, we’re just going to charge every casino the same fee. At least that’s the idea for now and we’ll see if it is going to work. The idea we’re working with right now is we’re charging everyone the same flat fee and we charge everyone the same commission base model, and then we have a ranking system where we’re testing their customer support.

We’re testing how the page load speeds are, we’re testing how quick you can withdraw and deposit funds and we’re testing how fast they approve documentation. In the short term, yes that’s a big headache for us and a lot of work but we believe that’s what it takes to build a real trustworthy brand in the long term. That’s also something I haven’t seen in the affiliate space – someone who thoroughly tests the online casinos.

EGR Intel: What strategies are you using to attract customers to Great.com or do you use an external site?

EB: For the moment, it’s going to be only SEO-based. SEO was what built Catena Media and that’s where my passion is. We’ll be search engine-based for at least the first couple of years and that’s where most of the traffic on the site will come from.

EGR Intel: Why do you think no-one has chosen to pursue this business model before, or have they?

EB: I come from the luxurious position that I’ve already made more money in my life than I’m going to need. So, for me, it’s not really part of the business model. I’m already giving away most of my money already, so it just makes sense to me to start a business with the intention of giving away the profits. It probably benefits the business all in all. It has benefited us in terms of recruitment where we have managed to hire a lot of very talented people that I wouldn’t have been able to hire if it wasn’t for a charitable cause.

EGR Intel: Why is it important to you that all the profits go to charity?

EB: Personally, I believe that the world needs the money a lot more than I do, and I feel very good about making a difference. I’ve been visiting different organisations around the world and seen the amazing job that they’ve done. The people I help, the better the world will feel and looking at this completely selfishly, the better I will feel. I can already buy anything that I would want. I don’t have very big demands. I don’t buy many material things. I don’t want a boat; I don’t want a plane. I have my Audi A3 and all the rest, but I just want to make a difference here and now.

EGR Intel: Aside from the charity aspect of the business, what is Great.com’s other big selling point?

EB: We have a podcast where every week we share either business ideas and strategies or we do updates about what’s going on with Great.com, if we are hitting our targets and, if we are not, we talk about what mistakes we’ve made which I think is one of the interesting talking points. We are making the business into something of a reality TV show with a podcast and we’re sharing our weekly meeting on video online. Anyone can watch what we’re talking about and whatever is going on in the company. We’re combining that with entrepreneurship advice and personal development and leadership advice in different episodes. That’s called becoming Great.com.

We release one episode every week and we record a weekly meeting every Monday, like the weekly update meeting, on Zoom that we publish publicly as well for anyone to see. It’s a weekly meeting where we go through everything that’s happening in the company. I believe in transparency, which is one of the main pillars of Great.com. All our salaries are public and you can read about anyone in the company on the website. That’s been an important part for me because I felt that in some of my previous businesses, I’ve taken advantage of my senior position as someone’s manager and given people lower salaries than I personally would believe fair, just because I could.

One way around this is to make this process fully transparent because if everyone can see how much everyone makes, I will not be in that position again and neither will anyone who joins the company in that sort of role. There’s a lot of these kinds of ideas that I would love to see across companies in general, which is more philanthropical visionary ideas. From a personal standpoint, I believe that if we didn’t have secrets in companies, we would have just a happier population.

EGR Intel: What is the fundamental philosophy at the heart of Great.com?

EB: The fundamental philosophy is honesty and that we want to give away all the profits. The other important thing that we haven’t touched upon is that we want to make the problems of gambling smaller. One of the main pillars of what we’re doing is going to be about preventing gambling addiction, providing a lot of the information on our website, not just the mandatory footer link. Probably 10% of all the exposure on the site is going to be about dealing with gambling addiction, details on where the closest support group is. How can you deal with it if one of your relatives is suffering gambling-related harm? We really want to be on the forefront when it comes to preventing gambling problems even though we’re a gambling marketing company.

EGR Intel: Do you believe affiliates often get unfairly labelled as non-compliant?

EB: I do believe that affiliates very often get fairly labelled for non-compliance, looking at it from my own experience and sharing the things that I used to do. I got into the gambling industry from falling in love with poker when I was 16 years old, and from there I got into gambling affiliation. Early on in my career, I was acting as an affiliate for both online casinos and payday loans and cross promoting these two things. I was sending loan offers to my gamblers and sending gambling offers to my loan clients, something which I today realise is a really fricking immoral thing to do – to try and promote casino offers to someone I know desperately needed a loan. But I did it.

This was way before Catena Media, around 2010, before it was a big thing. A lot of us come into gambling affiliation without really having lots of business experience before, young men like myself. I was 22-23 years old at the time and not really thinking about the consequences of the actions I was taking. I didn’t think about that and I didn’t see the big picture. I wouldn’t do that today, but I did back then. A lot of people come into gambling affiliation without really thinking clearly about what they will do when they are there.

EGR Intel: What for you is the key element of ensuring full and ongoing compliance by affiliates?

EB: First and foremost, people need to understand the importance of it. I don’t think that a lot of affiliates understand the importance of it. I wouldn’t have understood it when I first got into this business. It’s about information and long-term thinking. If you want to be doing anything long term, then you need to be compliant. I know a lot of people who just immediately leave the regulated markets and start going for the next unregulated market because they don’t want to deal with the headaches or paperwork.

EGR Intel: Are operators too stringent on the compliance requirements they place on affiliates?

EB: Hard to say if something is too stringent. I mean, it’s challenging. I think the gambling regulators don’t really understand the affiliates and the affiliates don’t really understand what it means to be a regulated government institution. I think there’s a very big gap. Looking at my own experience as an affiliate 10 years ago, I barely knew anything, but I still made a lot of money in affiliation, and I didn’t know anything about regulations and laws. To some extent that’s still the way the market is, affiliates are barely real companies, sure. Catena, Raketech and XLMedia are big companies, but there’s still a lot of one- or two-man operations out there that still make a lot of money effectively from their hobby.

EGR Intel: What effect is the Covid-19 outbreak having on your business and the wider affiliate space?

EB: I don’t think that the affiliate space will be harmed that badly because it’s already a remote working-friendly environment for many affiliates. The smaller the affiliate is, the less they will be affected. We are a fully remote organisation but we’re only eight people, so it works well for us. But I feel people are being impacted by the lockdown in terms of their focus and their mood, it affects a lot of things. We’re running at half speed now because people are not in the best shape mentally or physically during these conditions, unless you’re already used to working from home. Also, as affiliates, the more sports betting traffic you rely on, the more you will be affected by the current crisis.

EGR Intel: What is your aim for the business in the long term?

EB: For me, this is a lifelong project, I want to do this for 50 years. So, my main mission with this is to enjoy this for 50 years and keep learning and keep making a difference in the world. Hopefully that means 50 years from now, I will be donating a billion dollars a year to important causes around the world. My perspective is very, very long term. The most important thing for me is that I enjoy this and that the people in my team enjoy this and that we feel that we’re learning and making a bigger and bigger impact each year.

EGR Intel: Why did you choose to leave Catena Media, a business you helped found?

EB: I was really burnt out. I was working way too much and I put way too much pressure on myself throughout all that process. I was working around the clock. We did the IPO faster than was sustainable for me personally. I needed a break from everything. After I left Catena Media, I didn’t really do anything for like a year, other than just recover and be normal. That was the main thing, I stopped enjoying anything that had to do with work regardless of Catena or anything else because I was all drained of energy.

EGR Intel: The Catena Media business has gone on to be very successful, although it is having a tougher time of it now. Looking back, do you have any regrets about leaving or did you leave at the right time?

EB: No, I don’t have any regrets about leaving. If I wanted to do the same thing all over again, I would probably try to build it slower and love a bit more of the journey. Before I focused too much on pushing myself and this cut into my passion for the business. Catena was started out of joy and out of passion. We didn’t have any plans of making that a multi-million-dollar company when we started, it was just a hobby gone wild. I wish that I would have taken things slower because then I wouldn’t have burned myself out the way I did and burn my business partner out the way we did. We could have built it bigger, stronger and just slower and it would have been a more sustainable profit base personally.