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Was your card marked? The first-ever National Bingo Day took place on June 27th, with players from around the world indulging in the game they love. It may appear gimmicky on the surface, yet the event is bound to have a significant effect on the sector.

After all, it’s new and novel and has already raised awareness of bingo since the event happened days ago. Here’s why there is the potential for a shift after NBD.

A Healthy Market Could Get Healthier

Every gamer knows that bingo went through a bad patch in the 90s. Thankfully, it bounced back in the 2010s after it embraced the internet. Today, the online sector online boasts staggering figures that were assumed impossible a decade ago. For instance, it generated almost $1 billion in revenue in the UK in 2020. This is partly due to the variety of offerings online operators offer, such as 90 and 75-ball bingo rooms, bingo slots, and bingo scratch cards. Plus, all of the aforementioned formats arereal money online bingo gameswith the opportunity to win big.

Source: Pixabay

The industry’s trajectory is impressive, but it isn’t going to stop any time soon because the demand for bingo services is increasing. Events like NBD only turn the attention to the most popular forms of the game, meaning they are bound to skyrocket in terms of internet traffic. The number of people who switched on their computers to play during NDB is a prime example because thousands of users competed for staggering giveaways, such as a two-night UK staycation break.

The online market is already wealthy, yet NBD could ensure it improves its yearly revenues in nations like the US and UK where the game is loved. Seeing as the internet has been a saving grace for a sector that once faced bankruptcy, it’s impossible to see this as anything other than positive, something suggested by the figures post-NBD. After all, it’s a win-win situation for the providers and customers.

Offline Bingo Should Receive a Kick Back

While bingo has flourished online, other areas of the game have struggled to keep up with the rapid evolution. Traditional forms of bingo, such as playing in halls and function rooms, aren’t in danger of going out of business, yet they need to cement their industry position. This is because the global gambling market is expected to growat a rate of 5.9%through 2022, most of which will be online.

Operators understand the importance of using both formats to increase the game’s market share. They supplement each other and shouldn’t compete. Therefore, NBD was designed to encourage more people to head to their local halls to play. This was highlighted by the number of promos and offers that centered around in-person attendance on June 27th, and the number of people who attempted to claim them.

Two booming sectors will only be healthy for the industry, so hopefully, the promotional element of NBD will come to fruition post-event and show customers the pros of mixing up their gameplay.

Source: Unsplash

Bingo Needs to Compete with Its Rivals

Sometimes it’s hard to tell which sectors bingo competes with. For example, the soccer tournament, Euro 2020, is taking place across Europe. At first glance, soccer and bingo aren’t linked, so there’s no problem. Unfortunately for the game, this isn’t true because betting companies provide various markets for the competition.

With the event dominating the wagering landscape currently, aswell as the TV ratingsthroughout the continent, bingo needs to shift the focus back to itself. Waging a war with sports is a challenge as they are beloved, yet NBD has highlighted the value of the industry to customers who may otherwise be tempted by rival events.

Alternatively, promoting NBD led to the prospect of using the soccer market to lure in custom. Once people are on the platform, the odds of funneling them to the bingo section of the website are much shorter. Soccer competitions are only the tip of the iceberg because the tactic is feasible across a range of events, which is why NBD is set to continue on June 27th for the foreseeable future. To answer the question in the title, the impact that NBD could have on bingo may be considerable. That’s because it’s promoted the game’s online and offline offerings while raising global awareness. We won’t know conclusively until all the elements of the event are codified, yet it appears on the surface that NBD was a huge success for bingo.

“Madonna” (CC BY 2.0) byiShot71

It might sound like an unlikely trio. After all, there might be a rumour going around that there’s nothing Mick Jagger likes more than a good game of bingo. But it’s hard to imagine the Thin White Duke or Madonna ever settling down to a quiet game with their dibber at the ready.

But this isn’t what we’re saying at all. It’s simply making the point that all three have ensured their longevity by changing their image over time. For Bowie, he went from being a glam rock pioneer to a suit-wearing soul boy and finally ended as an elder statesman of music. As for Madonna, she’s had countless manifestations including Studio 54-style voguer to English country landowner enjoying a few pints of ale in her local pub.

For bingo, it has been a long and eventful evolution since it first caught the public’s imagination back in 1930s America and went on to be played in halls all over the world. From the late 1970s and early 1980s, these gradually started to lose popularity, but the arrival of online bingo towards the turn of the millennium gave the game the shot in the arm it badly needed. It’s a lesson that many in business could learn from.

Slots + Bingo = Slingo

This introduced many new ways to play the game including a whole new version called Slingo Bingo which is featured on sites like https://bingo.paddypower.com/p/slingo-games. Essentially, this is a combination of online bingo and slot games that are also incredibly popular with players on the sites.

So, rather than the numbers being selected one by one, they appear on spinning reels and the idea is to match them with the ones on the player’s card. To add an extra element of fun and playability, many of these slingo bingo games are themed either based on popular slots titles or even on hit TV shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or Deal or No Deal. This also gives the games a chance to include special rounds and extra bonuses which make them even more involving and fun to play.

Bingo’s no drag

“tuesday-night-silver-city-mariam-033” (CC BY 2.0) bylukas476

Another milestone in the history of bingo, and one which also helped to revive the game’s fortunes when it was losing popularity, was the arrival of drag bingo. This phenomenon had its origins in the the early 1990s when Judy Werle, a fundraiser for a Californian charity called the Chicken Soup Brigade, hit upon the idea of bingo as a way to generate donations. The twist was that the callers would be drag queens whose flamboyant style would liven up the game and make it even more fun to play.

For the first of these events, Werle enlisted the help of a group of cross-dressing and trans nuns called The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence whose fundraising efforts still go on today, as publicized at https://thesisters.org. It seemed that she had hit on a winning idea with people queueing round the block to play at the first of these events.

Soon the game spread across the States and beyond with its combination of bingo, glitz and camp proving irresistible to many people. It even inspired the documentary filmmaker Glenn Holsten to make a movie called Gay Bingo that was released in 2001.

Party, party

Many of the elements that made drag bingo so popular are also key to one of the latest ways that the game has reinvented itself.

In the last few years, the concept of club bingo nights has really taken off. Not in the old-style halls but in nightclubs where there’s a heady mix of dance-offs, talent contests and, of course, bingo. It’s a concept that originated in a club in Liverpool, England, and was the brainchild of a couple of promoters looking to boost business and whose story you’ll find at https://www.bongosbingo.co.uk/blog/4/meet-co-founder-josh-burke/. It’s probably the fact that, at its heart, bingo is such a simple game that allows all these variations to take off by giving a solid foundation that other events can be built around. So, just as we can probably expect Madonna to make another surprising comeback sometime soon, bingo’s next move is also undoubtedly on the way.

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What Impact Will the Inaugural National Bingo Day Have on the Industry?