Bullet Business

2008 was the year in which Unibet continued to strengthen its position as a leading European Moneytainment company.

Non-sports betting is an important part of Unibet’s business, and the group feels such form of gambling opens up a broad range of target markets – young and old, male and female – to the possibilities of `moneytainment’.

The company believes that it has established itself as a credible operator in Bingo along with three other product areas in Sportsbook, Poker and Casino, thereby giving it a balanced portfolio of revenue streams and opportunities.

Significantly, in its annual report for 2008, which was Unibet’s best year ever in terms of gross winnings and EBITDA, CEO Petter Nylander mentioned that while its products have historically been oriented towards the male population,  within the Unibet offering, it now boasts of Northern Europe’s largest Bingo network and leading female brand, Mariabingo.com. As with Unibet, Maria is migrating from a regional to a pan-European female brand, attracting players all over Europe.

Specifically, the company’s bingo network grew by 300% in 2008, with up to 2,000 players online at any one time.

Unibet believes that it already had a strong bingo offering in the Nordic markets at the time of the acquisition in December 2007 of Maria Holdings, one of Scandinavia’s largest bingo operators.


Strength

To its credit, Maria Bingo has one of the world’s largest communities for women where they can share their life via blogs, photos, recopies and live chats.

Linda Niskanen, marketing manager, MariaBingo Western Europe at Maria group – Unibet, says MariaBingo has hit home with women of all ages looking for everyday entertainment online.

“We have quite an even demographic spread, although the women who are most active are between the age of 30-55. The average age of our players is 36 years, which is quite generic across all countries, while the playing patterns and spending patterns differentiate more,” she told Bulletbusiness.com’s Ritesh Gupta.  

“In the mature markets we see higher per user spending than in the new countries (reference to mature means markets where MariaBingo as well as bingo is already known, for MariaBingo that would be the Nordic countries mainly). The new markets are still a bit more cautious with playing, even if bingo as a game might not be new, the concept of playing it online is. New markets as we see it would be Netherlands, France and Estonia mainly,” she added.
 

Social aspect

“At MariaBingo we have developed our platform into one comprising the social aspect of gaming to a larger extent than what has been seen previously. Bingo in itself is a social game and we want to give our players the possibility to make the most of their time on our site as well as facilitate the interaction between our players,” Niskanen said.

“This possibility of choosing the level of involvement on the page has been received with much enthusiasm by our players as many people enjoy sharing their lives with blogs and photos. Others want to get to know their fellow players by visiting their pages.”

MariaBingo strongly believes in Web 2.0 features and is currently revamping the way it has used RSS feeds in the company.

“We see this channel as very promising and exciting, offering endless opportunities for all parties involved,” Niskanen said.  

From a social networking point of view, the company has currently also tapped into these features through other networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

“For the industry as a whole we are definitely moving towards this trend of instantaneous sharing of information. Setting up static websites and profile pages was the beginning, but I think we will from now on see much more interaction between sites and their players in the style of RSS feeds, with Twitter leading the way,” Niskanen said.  


Target

Niskanen said MariaBingo is planning to be the number one platform for people looking for an interactive website to spend their free time.

“Following the social media in today’s world we can see a pattern being formed where people are loyal to a site based on if their friends are there or not. If all your friends are on Netlog, why would you hang out on Facebook and vice versa. We want to create this social community and stickiness through the possibility to actually make your profile your own, to offer the possibility to actually have a “corner” on MariaBingo where you can upload your photos, write your blog, collect your recipes and share all that with friends,” explained Niskanen.

The company intends to give everyone the possibility to chose their level of involvement.

“Some (users) choose to be creators while others are just watchers, but in the end the human curiosity about others will drive the watchers to the site for new snippets of information while the creators are offered a platform from where to share their stories and lives to whatever level they chose. MariaBingo aims to provide a basic level of information and news as the common thread on the site, but in the end we celebrate the content created by our players as the most important part. Its for them that we have set up the community and they are our stars,” said Niskanen.

 

4th Annual Online Bingo Summit

Bulletbusiness is scheduled to conduct the fourth edition of Annual Online Bingo Summit on 16-17 June in London this year. For more information, click here: http://www.bulletbusiness.com/bingo/agenda.shtml

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Contact: Ravi Virpal by email ravi@bulletbusiness.com