Online Bingo: The Next Big Thing in
Internet Gaming?

By Phil Fraser

/i-ludus Consulting/ - LONDON - The latest reports state that there are now over 1,800 online casinos on the Internet. Online sportsbooks proliferate and there seems to be a new online poker site launching every day. One aspect of online gambling that doesn't grab the headlines, but is becoming a vibrant, growing and commercially important market is online bingo.

“Online bingo? But the little old ladies who play bingo don’t have Internet access," I hear you say. That may, or may not be the case, but land-based bingo is huge, and it’s not only played by little old ladies. In fact, there are more visits to bingo halls in USA than there are visits to the cinema. In 1999, the US bingo industry alone had a turnover of $5.1 billion. Add to that the fact that the rules are simple (everyone knows how to play bingo), and that most people don’t even perceive it as gambling and you can see it’s potential. Little wonder that online bingo is growing and set to become big business.

Multi-player bingo on the Internet (as opposed to single player, "Keno-Bingo") falls into three basic groups; Free Bingo, Game Sites with Bingo and Pay to Play Bingo. Free Bingo is offered by a small number of specialist sites. Game play is free and prizes are usually points or small denomination cash prizes. The operators’ business model is built on banner advertising sales and/or data mining. This is the same model as operated by those sites offering a range of games, one of which happens to be bingo. These sites include places like Pogo, Gamesville and the Flipside Network. The core of the industry, however, is the Pay-to-Play bingo sites.

Compared to the 1,800 online casinos, the bingo market is small, but it’s growing quickly. There were only ten credible pay-to-play online bingo offerings in April 2000. A year later this had increased by 50%. One year later, by February 2002, this had double to 30 sites. As I write (December 2002) this figure has risen by more than 60% in less than year and the current count is at 52 sites. (All these numbers exclude white label sites and affiliates etc)

The structure of the industry is similar to the online casino industry. Software is licensed to operators and costs are usually based on an up front fee plus and on-going, turnover-based royalty. Up to recently the software was supplied by bingo specialists only. However, recently two of the online casino world’s ‘big boys’ have entered the market. Both Boss Media and Cryptologic have commenced supplying bingo software. Again, as with the online casino market, the games come in download, Flash and Java versions, with the download option seemingly returning to favor after an up-turn in Java and Flash in the last year. All pay-to-play bingo sites offer slots games (as per their land-based cousins) but recently there has been a surge of new additional games on offer including Video Poker, Keno and other card based games.

So, who’s playing these games? We've already established that it’s not the ‘little old ladies who play land-based bingo’. From original research carried out at Which Bingo.com (http://www.whichbingo.com) it can be seen that the audience is predominantly female (85%), two thirds of them are aged 35 - 54, almost all of them are based in North America and over 80% of them also play land-based bingo. Interestingly 40% of online bingo players do not take part in any other type of online gambling. For those operators in the online casino market this is great news – entering the bingo arena will open up new audience streams for them rather than cannibalizing their existing player base. However if you really want to see what this audience looks like, pop into any bingo site. Most of them have players’ galleries so you can indeed "see what the audience looks like."