GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 13 - June 2010

By Gary Trask After seeinga surge inpopular- ity and revenue for the better part of the last five years, the online bingo industry is sud- denlyat a crossroads. “We’ve been very fortunate as an industry,” admits Phil Fraser, the founder ofWhich- Bingo.com and WhichBingo. co.uk. “But it now appears we have our work cut out for us if we want to continue to see the kind of growth we have become accustomed to.” Fraser is scheduled tobeakey- note speaker at the 5thAnnual Online Bingo Summit in Lon- don June 8-9, where topics for discussion include player satu- ration, consolidationandprod- uct innovation, all of which are critical elements to the future of onlinebingo. “We are not yet at the point where we’re desperate to sur- vive,” Fraser explains. “There is still money to be made and we can all still make a profit. But howmuch that profit will end up being over the next few years is in seriousdoubt.” As little as 16 months ago, there didn’t seem to be any doubt that the economic opportunities for online bingo were end- less. The number of online bingo sites in the U.K. – the most prolific bingomarket in theworld–went from 17 in2004 to238 in 2008 and the number of players in the U.K. doubled between 2007 and2008. H2 Gambling Capital, a leading supplier of data regarding the gambling industry, reported that global online bingo rev- enue in 2008 topped $1.5 billion and would reach $2.5 billion by 2012. Even Internet powerhouseGooglegot into the act, reporting in December of 2008 that Web research showed that Internet bingo was near- ing the same popularity as on- linepoker. But instead thebingoboomhas gone bust, to some extent. Af- ter seeing a 10 percent growth in playersmonth-to-month for most of 2008 and the begin- ning of 2009, that number has dropped to less than 1 percent a month. The primary reason for the flatlininggrowth ismar- ket saturation, but theproblem goesmuchdeeper than that, ac- cording toFraser. First off, there have beenmore new transactions during the last year that have helped the “big get even bigger,” accord- ing to Fraser, a former online casinomanager atWilliamHill who now owns Focus Online Management, which runs the WhichBingo sites as well as OnlineBingo– What a difference a yearmakes Has thebingobubbleburst, or is thebest yet tocome? Phil Fraser, FocusOnlineManagement ? 24 Online Bingo —What a Difference a Year Makes