Global Online Poker Traffic Down 10% Compared To 2013
April 22, 2014 12:35 pmPokerScout has released its latest ‘Online Poker Traffic Update’ showing online poker traffic fell by 2% last week compared to the previous week, marking ten week in a row of weekly declines. Overall, the global market is now 10% lower compared to the third week of April 2013.
Last week ending April 20th, Full Tilt Poker’s Build Your Bonus promotion helped propel the site two spots higher into 3rd place at the expense of the iPoker Network which subsequently fell to 5th spot. The rest of the top 10 ranked poker sites managed to maintain their places from last week.
Interestingly, last week at this time Full Tilt Poker, PartyPoker and the iPoker Network all shared the 3rd spot, but as of today iPoker has fallen into 4th place and PartyPoker to 5th following a power plant explosion in Gibraltar which disrupted the Easter celebrations and took down many online gaming sites for several hours.
Affected sites included iPoker Network skins Ladbrokes, William Hill and Betfred, and worse affected of all PartyPoker which didn’t come back online until 13 hours had passed.
Turning our attention to the regulated US market, New Jersey has now experienced three months in a row of falling traffic with the excitement created by its first online poker site launching 5 months ago but a distant memory. Despite falling traffic, however, New Jersey online poker remained relatively flat in March, generating $3.2 million in revenues compared to $3.1 million for the prior month. Online casinos games, on the other hand, reported a $1.5 million improvement in revenues to $11.9 million in March, prompting Macquarie Capital Inc. analysts Chad Beynon and Jeremy Luskin to comment:
“Even as geolocation issues have been mostly resolved and platforms are more built out, we still are not seeing the demand necessary to make us believe this will be a meaningful part of the [profit and loss] of regional gaming operators.”
Finally, Delaware online poker revenues surged 14% in March over February totals, but they were still significantly lower than those results recorded for December and January. The situation is likely to improve in the next few months as Nevada and Delaware move to implement their interstate compact agreement.