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FEATURE
likely is it that they have stopped gambling altogether?
To measure long-term retention, we took all the people who gambled in Q1 2023 and looked at the date of their last gambling transaction up to 31 December 2024. We don’ t know when these people started gambling of course, but we can measure churn simply by seeing when they appear to have stopped.
As shown in Fig 3, we found that 63 % of Q1 2023 gamblers were still active with at least one licensed site some two years later, in Q4 2024.
In other words, a 37 % cumulative churn rate after two years means that only approximately 1.5 % of long-term active gamblers either stop gambling each month( the overall churn rate) or move outside the licensed market( where we are unable to count them but they keep gambling).
Fig 3 User retention – percentage of 23Q1 users still active by quarter
' 24 Q4 ' 24 Q3 ' 24 Q2 ' 24 Q1 ' 23 Q4 ' 23 Q3 ' 23 Q2
94.5 %
92.3 %
90.3 %
87.8 %
84.0 %
76.0 %
63.0 %
Fig 4 New user retention – percentage of 23Q4 actives still in market
' 24 Q1
69.6 %
SHORT TERM RETENTION OF NEW ENTRANTS
What about the apparently‘ new’ gamblers( i. e. those making their first transaction in the period)? Do they stick around at the same rate as those longer established players?
We look at some short-term retention in our data. First, we take all the people who appear to start gambling in Q4 2023( i. e. not making any deposits between 1 Jan 2023 and 1 Oct 2023); then we track forward to see what percentage of them are still active in each subsequent quarter; they are still in the market if they make a transaction in this or any later quarter.
What Fig 4 tells us is that 30.4 % of new entrants appear to stop playing after the first quarter in which they start gambling and 64.5 % appear to have stopped after a year.
Around one in three new players into the market each quarter will go
' 24 Q4 ' 24 Q3 ' 24 Q2
62.0 %
51.1 %
35.5 %
on to become regular gamblers, with before moving on to the next offer. most stopping before the end of the first This means that the population of year or being very infrequent, once-ayear punters. key battleground between operators is
gamblers is relatively stable, and the
A number of customer relationship for share of wallet. specialists supported the trends shown within the data, noting that it is certainly SHARE OF WALLET more difficult retaining new customers, Share of wallet means the percentage as they have a much higher drop-off of a person’ s total gambling spend rate. This could be partly put down to which an individual operator captures. bonus abusers, who sign up to new We looked at gambling in the last brands to utilise welcome bonuses quarter of 2024 to see how much each
50 • ISSUE 138 • iGB L! VE 2025