Since being legalized in the 1960s, bingo has virtually become a cultural institution in the UK. Most large towns and cities house at least one bingo hall, whose customers act like a real community, gathering regularly to observe the game’s many rituals – there’s the spinning of the balls, the drawing of one ball, the announcement of the number using the game’s famous rhyming slang. Two little ducks, 22!
So popular is bingo, in fact, that one of Britain’s biggest bands, Arctic Monkeys, scored a No. 5 hit with the song ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ in 2007, which cheekily references the pen bingo players use to mark off the numbers on their bingo card – the Mecca dauber. The UK Gambling Commission estimated that in 2010, 12% of women and 6% of men played bingo.
Recently changes have been afoot in the UK bingo industry, however. Since the late ‘90s, online bingo sites have been operational, offering a different take on the classic game. These sites became fully regulated under UK law with the passing of the 2005 Gambling Act. The Act paved the way for bingo sites to advertize themselves, and since then the online sector has grown and grown.
For example, a Gambling Commission report found that the online bingo industry quadrupled in size between 2008 and 2017, increasing its Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) – the amount of profit made after pay-outs are factored in – from £43m to £162m in less than 10 years. Furthermore, while there is still more profit in land-based bingo operators than online bingo sites, the share of bingo’s GGY which is attributable to online sites has also quadrupled in the same time period, increasing from 8% in 2008 to 31% in 2017.
So what’s behind this phenomenal growth? One factor is that online bingo sites are able to deliver a high-quality simulation of the bingo games that people already enjoy playing, whilst also going beyond what people know and expect to create new experiences and game-play options.
For instance, as online bingo games are purely virtual, sites have the freedom to adapt what playing bingo should look, sound, and feel like, to suit a wide array of tastes and provide novel experiences to returning customers. For example, if a customer were to choose to play bingo at Paddy Power, they would find many different kinds of bingo games. There is bingo themed after the popular TV show Deal or No Deal, as well as Rainbow Riches bingo, Age of the Gods bingo, and many bingo rooms themed after precious metals and jewels.
Online bingo can also recreate the social aspect of playing in a bingo hall, with chat boxes allowing players in the same ‘room’ online to chat to one another throughout games. But perhaps the biggest reason for online bingo’s surge is also the simplest – online bingo sites require much lower overheads than land-based casinos, meaning online sites can invest more of their revenue in jackpots, making their games more enticing to players, and swelling their profits.
Online bingo offers players something classic as well as something new. Its growth in recent years suggests it is here to stay.