Monthly Archive: March 2016

We all love online casino, bingo and betting, right? That’s why we’re here, after all, to enjoy it and have some safe fun. However, when we’re playing, we must never, EVER forget that these activities, while awesome in small doses, are incredibly addictive, and that we must exercise our self-control and seek help when we realize we’re no longer able to. If we don’t, then we risk harming ourselves and our family. Earlier we reported that the creator of NYPD Blue spent his fortune feeding an addiction to betting. Now, it seems like even bingo – the most innocent out of all online gambling activities – has claimed a victim.

According to The Falkirk Herald, Margaret Henderson (61) was placed in charge of taking care of her 94-year-old mother’s finances after the latter was diagnosed with dementia. Henderson’s responsibilities were to pay her mother’s taxes and bills, but she decided to get a little bit creative with her future inheritance. Soon enough, the Falkirk Council social services started noticing that rather peculiar payments were being made from the elder’s account – payments which didn’t seem like they belonged to a 94-year-old woman suffering from dementia. Case in point – over £5000 were being deposited to bingo sites over a two-year period. The police were quickly alerted, and after a brief investigation into the matter Henderson was arrested.

Henderson herself admitted that she was a compulsive gambler and that she lost all of the money, which she was court ordered to return after pleading guilty to her crime. According to the woman, she suffers from agoraphobia (fear of situations that could potentially cause anxiety), which left her housebound for prolonged periods of time, and that gradually led to the addiction to bingo. “For some reason she saw an outlet in the internet and became addicted to online gambling and online bingo in particular. She used the money she took from her mother’s account to rack up some serious losses,” said Siobhan Monks, procurator fiscal depute.

Henderson is no longer in charge of her mother’s finances, but she still sees her every day. Sheriff John Mundy placed Henderson on a community payback order with the condition she complete 150 hours of unpaid work within six months. So all in all, the situation was resolved relatively peacefully – the elder Mrs. Henderson will receive her money back, and her daughter will be able to curb her addiction before it snowballs into something even worse. Not all cases of addiction can be solved that easy, though. In fact, most of them keep getting worse, spiraling out of control until it’s too late to help anyone involved. If you feel like you’re suffering from gambling addiction, please contact the respective organization in your area as soon as possible.

Okay, let’s make one thing perfectly clear from the get-go – online gambling is immensely successful already. The online gambling industry, as a whole, rakes in billions of dollar (estimated revenue of $50 billion for 2016, globally) every year, which is a number that has only been improving since the inception of the medium. We’re talking about absurd amounts of money here, far more than I’m ever going to see in a lifetime – or, hell, even in 50 lifetimes. But even that amount pales in comparison to the global profits of physical casino, which for 2015 was $182 billion – almost 4 times more than the entire online gambling industry combined. It’s not hard to make the conclusion that physical casinos are a whole lot more popular than online casinos, which is a shame because as we all know online casino, while not an adequate replacement for the experience that big physical casinos provide, has a whole lot of benefits over them and doesn’t deserve to be left in the dirt like that. So, how can online casinos improve their profits?

I can think of two ways this can happen. First and foremost – make players stay! More casinos than I would like operate on a principle where they only care about players for their first deposit, and that’s it. Have you ever wondered why there’s so many first deposit bonuses, but almost none for regular clients? This is why. Honestly, I don’t blame casinos for doing that – stats show that a large majority of players quit after their first deposit, with a lot of them quitting even earlier than that, so the thinking is generally something along the lines of “They’re going to quit anyway, so let’s take what we can first”. And to that, I have a very simple and very elegant solution – don’t let them quit. Create a reason for the players to stay past their first deposit. Hire a game designer working on free to play games (because gambling is essentially a huge free to play game) and have him or her work out a model which would hook the players. Think past the surface level!

Another thing that could be done is to increase the marketing efforts. I understand that a lot of countries have laws against gambling and casino ads running on TV, but I’m sure there’s a way to work around that. Back in the mid 2000s, when Microsoft released their second videogame console, the Xbox 360, ahead of their direct competitor, the PlayStation 3, they decided to take full advantage of the situation by absolutely overflooding the market. I’m not just talking about ads on TV and billboards, because those rarely work when it comes to videogames. I’m talking constant mentions in movies and TV shows. Whenever a character had to say “I’m playing videogames”, Microsoft paid up to have the line changed to “I’m playing Xbox” instead, to the point where videogames and Xbox became synonymous, almost interchangeable words. The campaign worked, and despite being an objectively inferior piece of hardware the Xbox 360 still managed to outsell its competitor by 4 million units globally. This just goes to show that, despite limitations, an intelligent marketing team can easily figure out a way to craft an effective marketing campaign. It’s a question of how, not of if. And I believe that, provided that casino operators manage to attract new members and keep them longer than for a single deposit, the online casino industry may soon rival its big brother.