The iGaming Summertime Blues
Many in the online gaming industry have the impression that the summer months are a slower period on their websites. The logical reasons include that lots of people take vacations, enjoy the longer days outside and spend more time with family and friends. We decided to have one of our data scientists research the matter to see if the data empirically supports the hypothesis that there is a statistically significant reduction in iGaming player activity during the summer months.
Let’s cut to the chase:
Do iGaming sites suffer reduced player activity in the summer months? You bet! The figures we obtained clearly support the initial hypothesis that the summer months are a weaker period for iGaming operators:
The Metrics We Looked At
We chose these four particular metrics because they represent the central KPIs of the industry. Taken together, these four metrics present a complete and representative picture of the state of iGaming businesses:
- Deposit Transactions – the total number of times players made deposits during the month
- Money Deposited – the total amount of money deposited by players during the month
- Unique Depositors – the number of players who made at least one deposit during the month
- First-Time Depositors – the number of players who made their first deposit during the month
The Methodology We Used
For those of you who are really interested to know how we reached the above figures, here’s the story:
- We analyzed activity data from dozens of European iGaming operators for the 20-month period of January 2012 through August 2013, excluding data for players who reside in the southern hemisphere (where the seasons are reversed).
- To represent the summer season, we selected the months of June, July and August. The other nine months of the year represent the non-summer months.
- We calculated all metrics as monthly averages for each individual iGaming operator. We then calculated, for each operator, one figure representing an average summer season month, and a separate figure representing an average non-summer month. We took the percentage differences between these two representative monthly averages to represent the change in activity levels between summertime and the rest of the year.
- Lastly, we combined the percentage deltas of all operators to reach a final percentage figure representing the difference between the summer and non-summer months for each of the four metrics.
Conclusion
All four key metrics exhibited statistically significant drops, confirming the industry’s perception that summertime does, indeed, negatively impact iGaming activity. The largest drop was is in the number of first-time depositors, which wasn’t something we expected to see.
How did your iGaming site fare this summer? Did you beat the industry averages we calculated here? Might you have any other theories about the difference in summertime iGaming activity, and perhaps how to combat it? Let us know what you think below.
We hope you enjoy the autumn season and its expected activity uptick!
Comments (2)
Very interesting to see this perception validated. Did you distinguish between Sports, Casino and Poker in this analysis? Were the results the same for all?
Hi Bob,
We looked only at money games, not sports betting, because gaming is not intrinsically seasonal whereas sports betting activity follows the on and off seasons of the various sports. Regarding the second part of your question: There were some differences across game types (casino, poker, bingo, etc.), but we chose to combine our findings into four key metrics that represent the entire industry.
Cheers,
Varda