� Approximately 60 percent of the players who signed on to play online were“ new acquisitions”; i. e., they were not previously enrolled in the Tropicana’ s customer database.
� Of the remaining 40 percent, about half were inactive or“ lapsed,” meaning that they had not generated any tracked play at the Tropicana during the previous 12 months.
On one level, those data points appear to portend profound implications for a critical question: Does online play cannibalize land-based play? The basic data would indicate that one out of every five online players – half of the online players who were in the Tropicana database – were existing land-based customers, and the initial assumption would be that such online play would cannibalize the land-based spending by these customers.
Not so, according to Woods. Those customers who played in multiple channels – online and land-based – increased their total land-based spend, as well as their frequency of visitation. Woods summarized it thusly:“ Not only was their online spend completely incremental, but they also grew their land-based spend.”
If you assume that humans are rational, the reasons for that phenomenon are easy to glean: Adults earn rewards online, which supplement their rewards at land-based casinos, so they have an added incentive to increase their visitation to the host casino where they can redeem the rewards they have earned.
These observations raise several critical questions, including:
1. Why are online sites that are tied to land-based brands well positioned to gain more play than would free-standing brands – such as those that predominate in Europe?
2. What are the public policy implications for states that seek to pursue online gaming?
Historical Overview, Relevance
In order to understand the current state of online wagering in the United States, we must first explore and analyze the recent history of the relationship between land-based and online forms of gaming. That, in turn, requires an examination as to how other, similar industries have reacted to landscape-shifting technologies, such as the Internet. Indeed, history has shown that many industries initially react to new technologies as a threat. Rather than adapt the technology to create a new business model, existing industries often begin by affirmatively rejecting the technology. This rejection evolves into acceptance and ultimately into an embrace.
Observing 15 th Anniversary of SIGHT 6