Caesars Entertainment Controls 25$ of Licensed New Jersey Online Gambling
Caesars Entertainment told the Star Ledger that more gamblers are visiting Caesars Entertainment sites from Jersey City, Cherry Hill, and Toms River than any other cities in the state. Caesars Entertainment websites, including Harrah’s Online Casino, Caesars Casino, and World Series of Poker Casino, account for 25% of all licensed gambling in New Jersey.
The Star Ledger asked Tropicana and Golden Nugget where the most of their traffic comes from, but both declined to provide those kinds of numbers. Joe Lupo, SVP of Borgata Online, also declined to provide such details, saying that would be offering proprietary information with a potential impact on marketing.
Lupo added, “We are happy to be seeing play in northern Jersey and in the middle of the state. However, those are the more heavily populated areas, so one would have assumed that would be the case.”
Marketing Online Gambling to New Jersey
All the companies must study such demographic numbers to decide how to market to the new online gaming crowd. Some feared that online casinos and card rooms would simply cannibalize the land-based traffic to casinos, but that does not appear to be the case.
Sue Schneider, former chairwoman of the Interactive Gaming Council, earlier suggested that online gambling would mainly take place with elderly gamblers who could not get to Atlantic City anymore. In other words, most of the participants would be old Boardwalk gamblers who would preferred the ease and convenience of online gaming to the brick-and-mortar experience (according to Schneider).
But early numbers from the four-month old New Jersey Internet gaming industry show that 85% of the players have not visited an Atlantic City casino in the past 2 years. Most of the gamblers are therefore new to the industry.
Online Gambling Brings New Customers
After seeing the numbers, Sue Schneider said the opposite of early predictions appears to be happening, “Those new customers they get online might be in a younger demographic that doesn’t want to go into the casino and play slot machines. That’s the value in a land-based casino that goes online. It could eventually bring new people into the casino itself.”
The nearness of these gambling centers to major cities may indicate one other possibility: these gamblers might be commuters to New York City and Philadelphia. Of course, these people would not be able to gamble once they entered into another state, but they could spend a significant part of their commute into work gambling for real money with their Android smartphone, iPhone, or Ipad.
The difference of opinion on what the numbers mean underscores the difficulty in marketing to the new customer base. Besides population figures, it would help to know why these three cities have performed the best. To be able to replicate marketing appeal, analysts need to know what it was that causes people in Jersey City, Cherry Hill, and Toms River to make the decisions in the first place.
About the Harrah’s and WSOP Online Customer Base
Jersey City is a city of 247,000 people in Hudson County, New Jersey. It is the second most populous city in the state, next to Newark. Jersey City, as everybody knows, is located across the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay from New York City (Lower Manhattan). Cherry Hill is a township of 71,000 people in Camden County, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Toms River is a township of 91,000 people in Ocean County, which is 25 miles north of Atlantic City, 50 miles east of Philadelphia, and 70 miles south of New York City. The township is located in the Jersey Shore region of the state.
Betting Technology Drives More Signups
Since two of these three most active municipalities are found near the boundaries of New Jersey, it’s easy to see why the geolocation issue was such a problem in the rollout for legalized and licensed New Jersey online gambling. Because the geolocator devices on mobile phones did not work properly when iGaming began in November 2013, many people in these cities would have been considered inside Pennsylvania and New York State. They would not have been able to register a legal account a Caesars Online or the Borgata Online, so the overall numbers were lower than expected.
Signups were disappointing to some in the New Jersey political class, but they were less familiar with online marketing than business analysts. The growth has been steady over the first four months. After two months, the signups were around 126,000. After four months, signups were around 248,000. That shows steady, incremental growth with only a small amount of drop-off. Until these numbers fall off month to month, New Jersey’s online gaming numbers should eventually get into the range Chris Christie and his political allies had hoped for.
