GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 2 - October 2007

37 A strong European market focus The focus of gambling operators’ marketing efforts can be observed by monitoring the demo- graphics of their Web site traffic. Casino City tracks the demographics of the traffic to all online gaming sites. Figure 8 shows aggregated informa- tion for the source of visitors to online gambling sites for April/May 2007 and Figure 9 shows the same information for June/July 2007. These figures show the European market is in- creasingly where customer acquisition efforts are focused. Over this short period of a few months the share of European visitors increased to over two-thirds of all visitors. And the share of North American visitors was halved to just over 8%. This is in sharp contrast to a year ago when the majority of visitors to online gambling sites were from the U.S. Affiliates operating gambling portal sites know the realities of the online gambling marketplace have changed. In a GPWA poll taken late last year, 76% of the respondents indicated they were making changes to their sites in response to the UIGEA. However, most of the changes being made were to help U.S. players. Only a third of the webmasters planned to add foreign-language content to their sites, and only a fifth planned to geo-target adver- tisements based on visitor location. The demographics of visitors to gaming portal sites do reflect a strong shift away from the North American market. Historically traffic to portal sites was dominated by U.S. traffic, but as shown in Figure 10, all North American traffic was just over 40% in the second quarter of 2007. The biggest issue for portal operators is the lack of European traffic on their sites. Less than a quarter of traffic on portal sites is from Europe – the traffic most valued by gaming operators. A split online gaming marketplace becomes splintered When growth in online gaming was driven by the economics of the U.S. marketplace solid Eng- lish-language support was sufficient to operate a growing online gaming business. Today that is no longer the case. The split into operators accepting U.S. players and operators not accepting U.S. play- ers is only one aspect of the way the marketplace has evolved. As the online gambling marketplace matures, solid localized products and marketing plans are required to successfully compete in each national market. The online gaming marketplace is now splintered into national markets. Figure 9. iGaming Site Popularity by Region June/July 2007 Europe (56.6%) Africa (3.5%) Carribean (0.3%) Oceania (1.9%) North America (16.6%) Asia & Middle East (14.5%) Central & South America (6.5%) Europe (66.9%) Africa (1.9%) Carribean (0.4%) Oceania (2.3%) North America (8.4%) Asia & Middle East (13.2%) Central & South America (7.1%) Figure 10. Portal Site Popularity by Region - 2nd Quarter 2007 Europe (24.3%) Africa (2.0%) Carribean (1.3%) Oceania (1.8%) North America (42.6%) Asia & Middle East (17.3%) Central & South America (10.6%) Figure 8. iGaming Site Popularity by Region April/May 2007 Online gaming splinters into national markets | GPWA TIMES