It makes sense that you don't advertise a product in a market where you cannot sell the product. But if you live in single restricted market you might never even know that another, perhaps better, product exists.
Due to various governmental interventions the ability to play online poker is restricted in many countries. The United States, of course, has had the UIGEA law for over a year. France continues to limited access to its internet public, as does Turkey, Sweden and several other EU countries. The UK has some bizarre advertising regulations based on where you put your servers and there are the still unclear but heavily controlled or banned practices in China, India, Indonesia and the rest of the Far East. Governments in South America and Africa are each devising more or less restrictive regulations to control how citizens there will access the "free" internet.
So if you live in one of these restricted locations (and you do!) not only are you prevented from playing poker on some of your favorite sites, you will not even know that many new poker sites are appearing everyday. Contrary to the common perception in heavily regulated areas, the choices for online poker are increasing worldwide not decreasing.
Party Poker might be a common name to you but over half of the world's population either have not heard of Party or know only that going there on a computer is restricted or illegal.
How about ChiliPoker, never heard of that site; blame your government.
Here is just a quick partial list I drew up last week when comparing the advertisements in four poker/gaming magazines from different parts of the world, each pubishing and accepting advertising in a "restricted" poker market.
BlueSqPoker
FairPoker
BingPoker
MultiPoker
BestEverPoker
LittleWoodsPoker
WilliamHillPoker
RedStarPoker
Faccedapoker
AllOrNothingPoker
BlondePoker
I asked some poker friends around the world to help me with a little experiment. In part one they each picked up the poker magazines in their local cardroom and made a list of the online sites that were advertised in our hometown. We could have added over 80 additional sites to that short list I made above.
Next, I asked my friends to attempt to reach each of the sites on my list. This was done in Ireland, Denmark, Canada, USA, Indonesia and Australia. We used internet connections from our homes and at least one public access facility in our attempts to reach each of these sites. No one could reach all of the sites and in many cases our browser could not find the host server or found a completely different non-poker website. Never believe your internet access is not restricted by your government.
