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DoT DATA: IS PLAYER CHURN A REAL PROBLEM FOR UK OPERATORS?
This market analysis by Charles Cohen, founder of Department of Trust, uses raw transaction data to assess the stickiness of new gamblers and the overall churn rate of active players. The question is, are operators doing enough to retain new customers?
D epartment of Trust( DoT) sampled 778,241 users via bank transactions of any kind( including gambling) in both Q1 2023 and in Q4 2024, to analyse how active users have behaved. The data in this article includes deposits and withdrawals made by players to 349 identifiable brands, all belonging to licensed operators.
One question we set out to consider when building this analysis was whether lots of new gamblers are being created. To explore this, we looked at how active players have been within an almost two-year period. We track all the way back to 1 January 2023, when our data starts.
Fig 1 breaks down the percentage of players who placed a bet in Q4 2024 but have been active since Q1 2023. We found that only 6.2 % of active gamblers in the last quarter of 2024 were‘ new’ players that quarter – i. e. people making their first gambling transaction in at least two years – a general trend whereby players drop whereas 58.8 % were‘ long term actives’ off as time goes on, although the trend who had played on more than one is not linear. The percentage of those occasion within the two-year period. placing their first bet in Q4 2024 is
‘ New’ here is anyone who has not much lower than in Q1 2023. gambled since at least 1 Jan 2023; they We also looked at trends in market are either long-term lapsed or have entry, the results of which are displayed never before played. in Fig 2. To do this, we defined‘ new’ It’ s clear from the data that there is players more narrowly as people who
Fig 1 New entries to market
11.5 %
58.8 %
5.7 % 5.1 %
6.2 %
3.6 % 2.8 %
% of new users since Jan 1 2023 6.2 %
48 • ISSUE 138 • iGB L! VE 2025