Bullet Business

QueBingo, an online bingo portal in the Spanish market, recently completed its first year of operations.

The number of online bingo sites in its directory grew by 25 percent, up to a record 60 sites.

Also the site, which comes from the WhichBingo stable of sites, recently launched a Bingo Podcast (http://www.quebingo.com/podcasts/), the first and only podcast dedicated to online bingo in Spanish. It also features a section purely dedicated to chat moderators.

QueBingo’s manager Juan De Pedro said the Spanish market has evolved a lot in the last 12 months, and players are comfortable playing from the comfort of their homes.

“Most of the early pioneer sites in the Spanish markets were just translations of the UK/US sites  - sometimes very bad translations. However, since then some of the new ones are specifically designed for the Spanish market. From my point of view is absolutely fundamental to localise your new sites. You must be able to provide transactions in the local currency, you must have everything (copy, banners, chat room, terms and conditions etc.) in the local language not just translations and you must have a native writing all the copy for you. You must also have chat hosts chatting in chat rooms in the local language,” De Pedro told Bulletbusiness.com’s Ritesh Gupta.

“Some of the sites that appeared last year in the Spanish market are already doing these things, so clearly they have more quality. If you look at them from a Spanish player point of view, they are clearly superior to the ‘translated’ sites.”

De Pedro shared his viewpoint regarding trends and online bingo as a product in Spain in an interview. Excerpts:

Bulletbusiness.com: What do you think is critical in coming up with most entertaining and rewarding online bingo offering today?

Juan De Pedro: The Spanish market is no different to the rest of the world. The players have to be entertained. If you only offer them a big prize, but they don’t get the feeling of having a good time, they won’t stay long at your site and they won’t come back to play in it.

So from my point of view, new offers and promotions should balance between the entertainment value that the players perceive, and the prizes that they are getting. It is important for them to have the feeling of winning, so any promotion should have more than one winner, and it should be winnings often, so any given player can win a prize every now and then.  

I really think that the way to go to increase the entertainment offering of an online bingo site is through the chat room. You need good CMs and you need to keep them in your site, to avoid letting the entertainment go to a competitor. Some Spanish operators don’t seem to understand the importance of a good CM team, and that is a big mistake from my point of view.   

Bulletbusiness.com: Companies are introducing various versions of bingo software – 90 ball, 75 ball and 75 ball variant with a variety of features including, multiple languages, private game and chat facilities, a player management system and casino games. How do you assess such initiatives?

Juan De Pedro: Features like the ones that your mentioned are a ‘must-have’ for Spanish sites from my point of view. Some of them will be useful for the players, like having a greater variety on the games that you can play, or the opportunity of having private chat rooms, which will increase the offer that the players can find in your site, leading to them spending more time in it.   

Others will be more useful to the operators. Features like the player management system, or private game facilities will increase the control that the operators have over the players, allowing them to create a more customised experience. It also will help to market the site in a segmented and more efficient way.

Although, I think that some of these new features that are being released can become a double edge knife, if you don’t use them with caution, they could become a problem for you instead of being a solution or an improvement.   

Bulletbusiness.com: Do you think it is vital to understand that online bingo is as much about entertainment' as it is about winning cash?

Juan De Pedro: It is my belief that the majority of the people who play bingo online in the Spanish market do it for the entertainment part of it. And if while you’re are having a good leisure time you can win some money, better, but I don’t think that winning money is the first  reason for an average Spanish player to go and play online bingo.  

I think that operators should focus a little more in providing good and varied entertainment, because I strongly believe that if a player is having a good time in your site, he/she won’t go away to play in other site just because a bigger prize can be won in the other site.  

The best way to introduce entertainment in your site is through the chat room. The CMs are a part of the sites that is under valuated, and I firmly believe that they should be considered as one of the most important areas of a site, because they are the ones that can provide unique entertainment.  

Bulletbusiness.com: Online bingo sites are opening online bingo forum where online bingo players can meet and discuss online bingo. How do you assess such developments?

Juan De Pedro: Of course it is a good idea to introduce web 2.0 in your site. It will help to create the feeling of community within your players, which is one of the best things that you can do to achieve loyalty and player retention.  

But you have to be really careful about how you do it. You want your players to come and play in your site, and having really cool web 2.0 features will keep them out of the games, making them spend their time in this community features.  

For example in QueBingo, we give the players the chance of reviewing the sites where they have played to let other players know their personal opinions, and ever since we launched we have offered RSS feeds, although I think of the RSS feed more as a tool than a web 2.0 feature. However the key thing to remember is that large sections of the online bingo community are not ‘web savvy’ and web 2.0 hasn’t reached them yet.