Data-driven analysis will reveal the same thing for all online gambling sites with a full offering – Casino, Sportsbook and Poker: Casino is the main revenue driver, and poker is merely a fraction of the GGR. Numbers don’t lie, adding and administrating poker is not worth it. Is this the final verdict? Or is there more to the story?
As a poker provider, having worked in the industry for 10 years, I have dug deeper in the data of dozens of gambling sites. The findings are quite astonishing.
Player Retention
Poker tournaments are long. They usually last for hours, and have a lot of dead time. It is of course a natural consequence then, that poker players spend an average of 17% more time on the platform than the non-poker players. This has to be a good thing, right? For some, it is.
Sites that have spent development time making other games available while on the poker platform, for instance by providing minigames next to the tables, manage quite successfully to turn this extra time into extra revenue (see numbers below).
Not to mention the simple fact that if the part of the player base who likes poker needs to leave your site to play it, these players are given the opportunity to take their spends elsewhere. Most poker platforms today offer casino games too, and those players are prone to just get their fix there instead.
LifeTime Value
It is of course interesting to compare the general habits of players who occasionally enter the poker rooms to the ones who don’t ever log in. Unsurprisingly, poker players do also provide a higher LTV than non-poker players. The average number is 12%, but some operators who have done lots of work to integrate their game offerings in the same website space reach an increased LTV of as much as 21%. It’s not rocket science – games that take longer retain players, and retained players play more.
How Should You Provide Poker?
A full poker room has many different game modes – cash games, tournaments, spin & go’s and more. If you have been involved in online poker for a minute, you will know that cash games drive the most revenue per player, especially the higher stakes.
Does this mean you should push for high stakes cash game play, or cash game play in general? No, that is not necessarily true. It may be true if you happen to have a large group of highroller poker enthusiasts, then this can grant you a lot of revenue. But that’s usually not the case.
You may get some of your highrollers to play cash games, but that generally means diverting them away from their usual games that may normally drive even higher revenue, and channeling them into those games instead.
What you should be interested in doing, is provide fun to players through your poker platform. An opportunity for players to enjoy some competition, and stick around for a while longer. Several-hours-long tournaments & freerolls, weekly leaderboards and challenges are all excellent retainers for the sites. Reoccurring series with main events that have a grand guaranteed prize pool will work well, and given an online casino with decent traffic, this promotion budget can be quite big and still net you more revenue.
Poker Network
Unless you have lots of experience in launching your own poker room, it is vital that you join a network. A network not only comes with a full-fledged marketing offer (freerolls, leaderboards etc), it provides an existing player base for your players to immediately engage in.
As a poker provider in negotiations with an operator who wants to launch their stand-alone poker room, I always say the same thing: I require a pre-commitment of a marketing budget and allocated personnel for this launch to make sense for us to take on. I have seen it fail so many times. Operators launch poker and expect the revenue to just grow by just having it there. Instead, it turns into a ghost town, which looks very bad for the site. Even giants like Stake and BC Game failed to do it properly.
Poker revenue grows exponentially with the number of players in the lobby. Double the player base, and the revenue will quadruple. Why? Because the more frequent games you have, the more each player can play their favorite game mode.
Imagine a Spin & Go solution where players have to queue for a minute to get a game, compared to if it only takes seconds. Given that the average time spent in a Spin & Go is only a few minutes, this phenomenon speaks for itself. On top of that, the more players you have, the more different game modes you can comfortably provide, which leads to more players being able to play their favorite games, hence generating more revenue.
Best Poker Providers with Networks
We all know the biggest poker rooms in town – GG Poker and PokerStars. These are great if you are an affiliate and you want to provide the best gameplay to all your players. But if you are an operator and decide to take the leap of faith to launch poker on your site, there are a few recommended options for you (in no particular order):
- EvenBet – based in Russia, providing a solid, feature-rich poker experience with a stable network.
- PlayTech – the largest network and highest number of operators. Hard to get into, but a very good experience if you get a spot.
- Cubeia – based in Sweden, providing a newly started network with a very large offering of promotional content included.
- Stretch – providing White Label solutions with payment gateways as part of their offering, should you need a full-fledged solution.
Conclusion
With years in the industry and with lots of data to look at, it is clear to me that the number of advantages with having peer-to-peer poker in your offering is many. Some of these advantages remain somewhat unknown, and it is of course my duty to spread this knowledge. It is my vision and my dream to make poker boom again, similar to what we saw in 2003. Not only is online poker a gambling game that will grow your revenue, it is also probably the healthiest part of the gambling industry.