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A few years ago, online bingo was booming and there were lots of new bingo sites launching all the time. Now there are hardly any. Why is this? There’s a few reasons:
A few years ago it was easy for small time operators to get into bingo by opening a skin site but most of the paths to this are now closed.
It used to be easy to attract players to a new bingo site. All operators needed to do was to come up with a fun name and theme plus a big no deposit bonus or deposit bonus welcome offer with restrictions in the T&C meaning hardly anyone would be able to withdraw winnings.
None of that works any more. The name and theme part of it ran into big trouble back in 2017 when there was a crackdown on the imagery that could be used in advertising gambling (there’s an even harder crackdown on this coming in October this year). Cartoons, fairy tales, sweets, cuddly toys, party lifestyle, celebs – all could no longer be used in the theming of bingo sites.
As for the bonus part, that was stymied by changes to advertising standards and to the rules around the taxation and marketing of bonuses.
The single biggest game changer for online bingo in the last decade has been the massive increase in the use of mobile devices to play. More than 80% of our users on Best New Bingo Sites are mobile and many don’t own any other device.
When players are on mobile phones rather than computers, operators have to work a LOT harder to keep their attention. For a start, the smaller screen size is a problem because there’s simply not room for a strip of bingo tickets, the bingo calls, chat and mini games all at the same time. It’s not simply a matter of screen size, though – player behaviour may be quite different on a mobile as they are much more likely to be doing other stuff at the same time as playing bingo.
One of the most appealing things about online bingo is the sense of community which comes from joining in with the chat, but this is much harder on a phone. Most mobile bingo solutions have the chat in a pop-up but when it’s on screen, you can’t see what is going on in the bingo game. It’s also harder to type in a message so phone players are often silent or speak only in acronyms and emojis. This makes the chat less interesting for everyone, including non phone players.
When players become less engaged with the bingo, it reduces both the social interaction and the ticket sales, which in turn makes bingo less effective as a player retention tool. Once you get to the point where players are put off buying tickets because the prizes are too small and the room is not a fun place to be, the bingo site is in big trouble.
The big operators (especially Tombola) have responded by designing games with phones in mind, where players only have one ticket to keep track of, meaning the game itself can be much more absorbing and chat can be on screen. Top tier operators also hire excellent chat hosts who start conversations and encourage players to talk as well as running interactive chat games.
Another tactic is to put money up front into guaranteed jackpot games rather than letting the prizes be funded in the normal way by ticket purchases, but this is risky for the operator as they are relying on the lure of the prize to sell enough tickets.
Skin operators are in a bit of a bind here because they don’t have the power to do any of this, but can no longer rely on the mere fact of having a bingo product for player retention.
Making money out of bingo depends on attracting and retaining a high enough volume of players. During the pandemic, this was achievable despite all of the above issues because bingo itself boomed. Stuck at home, people were looking for social things to do online and there was a surge of interest in bingo. Now they are no longer stuck at home, that interest is waning and the cost of living squeeze means it’s only going to get worse. There’s already evidence that gambling activity is going down as players can no longer afford it.
In 2022, online bingo has become very much a two tier industry.
Top tier sites like Mecca Bingo, Jackpotjoy, and Tombola are able to keep up the liquidity in their bingo rooms with decent prizes all day and all night long, keep up the community atmosphere with great chat hosts and keep players interested with new variants of bingo and/or fun promotions.
While it is still possible to get into online bingo as a top tier operator – BetVictor demonstrated this quite recently when they took over the management of Heart Bingo – a substantial investment is needed up front to build the community and kick start the liquidity. Such an investment is always risky (anyone remember Bingo Godz?) and only a huge operation like a TV or radio station, national newspaper or big bookmaker is in a position to take it on.
Smaller operators simply cannot afford to do all this and what we are now seeing is that lower tier operators are abandoning the social aspect of bingo and treating it as just another game rather than the centrepiece of their site. Some of these sites have gone further than just not having chat hosts; they have completely removed chat from their bingo rooms.
For these smaller operators, retention is typically done with gamification or redeposit offers rather than relying on the bingo itself to keep players coming back. Bingo can still function as a retention tool, however, if tickets to occasional big money network games are sold in advance; players buy a ticket and then have to come back hours or days later to see if they have won the jackpot. The experience is really more like a lottery than bingo but going by the numbers of tickets Dragonfish sell to their weekly jackpot games it clearly appeals to many players.
Other interesting solutions to the retention problem are seen at the recently launched Happy Tiger and the award winning Mr Q. Happy Tiger have just one bingo room and there’s a £2500 prize which can randomly be won in any game. Mr Q have a free bingo room for regular depositors. Neither of these sites have the word “bingo” in their name and this reflects their clever use of bingo as a retention tool for slots players rather than as a main product.
So what now? It’s a case of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and I expect to see further polarisation between the top tier bingo operators and everyone else. The players who are interested in the social aspect of bingo are all going to gravitate towards the big operators and make the bingo rooms there even more busy and lively. The lower tier operators? They’re already more like casinos with a bit of bingo on the side, so perhaps the best way forward is to embrace that, run fewer bingo games with bigger prizes and maybe even drop the word bingo from their name.