{"id":3710,"date":"2006-11-24T18:23:02","date_gmt":"2006-11-24T22:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2006\/11\/24\/online-poker-playing-halved-in-octob"},"modified":"2006-11-24T20:04:16","modified_gmt":"2006-11-25T00:04:16","slug":"online-poker-playing-halved-in-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2006\/11\/24\/online-poker-playing-halved-in-october\/","title":{"rendered":"Online Poker Playing Halved In October"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whatever <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techliberation.com\/archives\/040825.php\">you think<\/a> of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act&#8217;s (UIGEA) medium-to-long run impacts, the short run effects are clear.  WaPo&#8217;s blog <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.washingtonpost.com\/posttech\/2006\/11\/post_11.html\">reports<\/a>, &#8220;According to <strong>Nielsen\/NetRatings<\/strong>, which tracks Web use, traffic to the top 10 Internet gambling sites dropped a staggering 56 percent in October&#8221; (via <a href=\"http:\/\/iggy.pokerworks.com\/2006\/11\/19\/like-a-pheonix-from-the-ashes\/#more-166\">Iggy<\/a>).  PartyPoker, which promptly banned US players, apparently dropped from 7.5 million unique users in September to 2.5 million in October.<\/p>\n<p>In time, many players will likely turn to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techliberation.com\/archives\/040825.php\">various work-arounds<\/a> or switch to sites like FullTilt and PokerStars <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2006\/10\/11\/whither-online-poker-pokerstars-says-business-to-continue-as-usual\/\">so long as<\/a> they accept US players. But the switching costs aren&#8217;t solely responsible for the decrease in online poker playing. With online poker and casino gambling booming before, sites like Party Poker were able to liberally hand out bonuses to customers &#8212; free money just for signing up or making a new deposit. These bonuses helped lure in new players or bring back existing ones, and a larger playerbase meant they could spread more games and increase the value of the site overall.<\/p>\n<p>Given t<a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/business\/2006\/10\/02\/internet-gambling-offshore-tech-ebiz-cx_po_1002gambling.html\">he current uncertainty<\/a>, I doubt these businesses can hand out large bonuses &#8212; at least, I don&#8217;t see any sites providing bonuses comparable to PartyPoker&#8217;s past offers. In the short run, that&#8217;s also going to hurt businesses&#8217; ability to bring in players.<\/p>\n<p>See also: <a href=\"http:\/\/forumserver.twoplustwo.com\/showflat.php?Cat=0&amp;Number=8059296&amp;page=2&amp;fpart=all&amp;vc=1\">this interesting post at 2+2<\/a>, also via Iggy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whatever you think of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act&#8217;s (UIGEA) medium-to-long run impacts, the short run effects are clear. WaPo&#8217;s blog reports, &#8220;According to Nielsen\/NetRatings, which tracks Web use, traffic to the top 10 Internet gambling sites dropped a staggering 56 percent in October&#8221; (via Iggy). PartyPoker, which promptly banned US players, apparently dropped [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}