St.Minver Affiliates Blog

I thought some of you may be interested in the article that appeared in E-Consultancy and Tobacco.org in September. It’s mainly about how the Smoking ban may affect online bingo but also has some other useful stats.

The public smoking ban could see bingo players moving en masse to the web, according to research by white label gaming firm St. Minver.

The company found 60% of the 2667 British internet bingo players it interviewed smoke, well above the national average of 29%. But mobile companies aren’t set to cash in on the ban, with 95% of respondents saying they aren’t interested in playing games on their phones.

“The big issue for bingo clubs is that the ban will eat into their admissions massively,” said Leigh Nissim, MD of St. Minver. “People will be moving away from the bingo halls to playing online.”

Rank Group, which owns Mecca bingo halls, recently said it expects takings from clubs in England and Wales to fall by about 14% when the move happens next May. At the same time, several retailers and ISPs are thought to be preparing a move into internet bingo, which is estimated to have over 1 million players in the UK.

According to St. Minver, bingo sites have been experiencing compound growth in usage of between 10% and 25% each month, helped by bigger jackpots and prizes.

The research discovered that almost half of online bingo players use chatrooms during a game, and many see them as a better opportunity to socialise than clubs.

But under 5% want to play bingo on mobiles. “We’ve seen absolutely no evidence of a propensity among bingo players for mobile gaming,” Nissim said. “It’s very questionable how far mobile gaming will penetrate.”

The research found four in five online bingo players are female, and most are between 25 and 45. Sites are also popular among people with night jobs, such as security guards.

Over 78% of players have children, while popular pastimes include camping and caravanning. Tesco and Asda are their supermarkets of choice, while the Sun and the News of the World are their favourite national newspapers. Four in ten also play bingo offline at least once a month.

I managed to battle though the nerves and take part in a podcast interview by the fantastic Fraser from http://www.affiliateblog.co.uk

We went over a few things including:

• St Minver & White Label Gaming Solutions
• New American Gambling Regulations
• Implications for affiliates
• Online Bingo Demographics
• Adwords & Bingo Advertising
• Gambling addiction and responsible promotion.
• Which Affiliate Networks St Minver are working with

It’s a good 20 minutes or so long so I hope it doesn’t bore you too much.

Some good news for you on this sunny Thursday afternoon.

As of 1st September St. Minver will be introducing the Electron card as a deposit method for UK Customers. The decision is based on player demand to the call centre as well as player research we have conducted in the past.

Electron cards are often issued to under 18’s and as you know St. Minver has strong procedures and guidelines in place to ensure that no under 18’s are registered and the introduction of the Electron card as a payment method should help increase depositing players to the network and as such increase the conversion rates and cash flows for affiliates.

We will be following the Gamcare approval process for Electron cards so they will take slightly longer to have accounts activated but it is an excellent step forward as Electron cards are not often accepted on internet gaming sites.

Please feel free to use this news to promote your affiliate campaigns with St. Minver. If you have any questions feel free to drop me an email or post a comment.

If you want to know more about St. Minver and the people behind it, there was a good article in the Telegraph yesterday which provides another insight to how the company started out.

Read the Full Article at the Telepgrah website

The kings of online gaming

Sometime last year, suddenly ads for online poker were everywhere. Someone who foresaw the success of online gaming could have done really well out of it.

Someone did: Gary Shore. An internet veteran, Shore’s first start-up, in 1994, integrated back-end systems for banks; he sold it in 1999, at a discount to get cash rather than inflated stock. He needed to do something new.

“There were two markets making a lot of money,” he says. “One was sex, and one was gaming.” Gaming required complex systems and “I tried to find a brand I recognised, and there wasn’t one.”

Also, there was no customer service. “At that point, I thought one day the brands will enter this market.” His idea: to create a white label-managed gaming service.

He joined Victor Chandler, to learn the business, and built its online gaming operation, aiming to leave to set up his own. Taking seven or eight people with him, Shore left to set up St Minver, staking it with £150,000 of his own capital.

Gaming isn’t easy to get into. The key is the licence, usually issued in the world gaming headquarters, Gibraltar. No licence, no banking. He had to buy a company. The opportunity came in 2003, when he bought bingo operator Gala’s money-losing online operation, licence included, which required a deep financial audit and regulatory approval. Three shareholders, including himself, put up the necessary £2m.

“It took about a year to get the infrastructure growing. We burned through the cash, then launched a poker network, then a bingo network.” Their first customer was Gala itself. It was slow going.

By spring 2005, Shore decided he needed someone to drive the company’s growth. His choice: Leigh Nissim, already experienced in white labelling. Nissim had done his own start-up, which provided businesses for sale ads to well-known sites all over the web.

In fact, says Nissim, there wasn’t much wrong with St Minver’s operation, except for one thing. “They hadn’t really built enough deals or partnerships into the business.” It helped his cause that the market saw a dramatic change a year ago.

“About a year ago, everyone was saying they were not going to touch poker or gambling. Then, as they saw more and more ads, you saw the boards and executives of these large brands changing their minds.”

A key turning point was when Party Poker went public. For the first time, the world could see how much the company was making: $2m a day. All of a sudden, everyone wanted in, and not just for the financial returns.

They also wanted to keep their customers from going elsewhere. “It’s a very fundamental shift,” says Nissim. The big brands quickly discovered that Shore’s original notion had been correct; they had to partner with specialists. So my first attention was on improving the sales pipeline.” He focused first, logically enough, on closing the bigger ones.

Now, St Minver supplies the service behind bingo and/or poker games at Lastminute.com, Yahoo!, Virgin Games, Wanadoo and Littlewoods. The company works to retain customers with classic online techniques. It sends weekly email to players keeping them informed of recent winners and new developments on the site.

The key element is not that customers gamble huge amounts. “Our sweet spot is someone playing 12 hours a week and spending £7.” Instead, it’s that customers stay on the sites, chatting to each other: entertainment and community.

The company has become profitable in the last year and is now growing so fast that Nissim says it has tripled in size in the past 12 months: its growth is now shaped like the “hockey stick” coveted by all technology start-ups.

Even losing Gala, which recently bought Coral Eurobet and with it a gaming licence and is opting to move its online operation back in-house, hasn’t stopped it.

Shore feels fairly safe from competitors. “The barriers to entry in our market are quite high now.”

Poker               24%
Online Poker     18%
Online Casino   12%
Casino             10%
Online Bingo     8%
Followed by Online Gambling (8%), National Lottery (6%), Black Jack (5%), Sport Betting (5%) and Bet Online (4%).

Results provided by Nielsen//Netratings

New research has uncovered that men are disguising their real identities when playing online bingo by using female usernames. Zoë, Alexis and Rachel are just some of the most popular names used by men, according to St. Minver who run bingo sites for major UK brands such as Virgin, Littlewoods, Butlins and Chit Chat.

When asked why they felt it necessary to change their gender, many responded saying that they were worried that people would make fun of them for playing bingo as they perceived it as a game for the ladies. Most men said, however, that they actually really enjoyed the bingo experience.

In fact, men have been extremely successful at online bingo. As temperatures soared around the UK last Thursday, so did one particular online Bingo Jackpot. The St Minver network’s Giant Jackpot reached its highest amount to date at £27,438.83 and was won on a £6 stake by a 30 year old man from the Channel Islands, who had only been playing online Bingo for a month.

“We were not surprised to find that men often chose to impersonate women when playing online bingo!” says Leigh Nissim, managing director of St. Minver (UK). “Many of our male users believe bingo is a girl’s game but just can’t help playing because they enjoy it so much. I wonder what they talk about in the chat rooms?”

The research also highlighted that men think with their stomachs as many of their usernames had a food theme. Steakandkidney, Crispy, Roganjosh, Poppadom, Pepsi and Pringles are all popular choices, which may also be a reflection of what they are currently eating at the time. Men also believe that using high profile casino film characters and actors names will bring them luck. Luckyjackson, Bond007 and Damon are some of the most common casino related names used on the gaming sites.

Unknown to most of us, there is a group of people that are building their own private social circle, whilst we are tucked up in bed. They are however not drinking and dancing until the early hours but are being entertained from the comfort of their home or the confines of an office. These people are the night owls: the insomniacs and night workers whose lives fall outside the norm. They look for different ways to be entertained and find what they need in the virtual bingo halls of the St. Minver network.

Unlike real world entertainment such as bingo halls, pubs and clubs that have a closing time, the Internet is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This makes it the perfect venue for those people whose lives begin when the sun goes down.

Jason is a security guard who works night shifts. His job is to monitor TV screens that watch the building for trespassers. To pass the long and lonely hours, he uses his computer to entertain himself playing Butlins Bingo online. Through playing the game, he discovered the chat room and met other security officers that work in the nearby area. Jason has been able to build a group of friends through the people he meets online. As well as playing, he has taken his friendship offline. The group now meets outside of working hours for a drink. Through his new network of friends, he has also been able to set up a car-share with another user living and working nearby. This new found arrangement has also helped him cut down the cost of travelling alone and parking when he is unable to use public transport.

In addition to those working nights, there are also their partners that are left at home. Michelle plays bingo on Chit Chat as it makes her feel safe at night whilst her husband does night shifts. Moving from London to Essex and living in a new house has left her feeling a little lonely and out of her comfort zone. She has few friends in the new area and finds it difficult to arrange meeting old friends and was therefore looking for a way to reach out to other people. With the use of online bingo she is able to chat to players across the UK and feels that having people on the site gives her a sense of security even though they are not in the same room as her.

This growing community of night owls has even provided people working and living abroad with a chance to keep up-to-date with news from back home. Expatriate Sue, plays Littlewoods Bingo in Spain as she does not have the confidence to venture into a foreign bingo hall where she may have problems understanding the language. She plays online as it helps her keep close to her British roots. During her lively chats, Sue meets a plethora of night owls, who talk about the latest happenings in England including British weather, Eastenders and the latest celebrity gossip.

The combination of entertainment, growing jackpots and friendly chat has meant that the popularity of online bingo is growing. Night owls are able to use online gaming to pass time, relax and meet other like-minded people. Whatever the reason, there is a large community of people that spend time entertaining themselves playing online bingo without leaving their homes or offices.