DoT data: Is player churn a real problem for UK operators?
Department 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 following data 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.
How sticky are new players?
Figure 1 breaks down the percentage of players who placed bets in Q4 2024 but have been active since Q1 2023. We found that only 6.19% 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 — whereas 58.8% were “long-term actives” who had played on more than one occasion within the two-year period.
“New” here is anyone who has not gambled since at least 1 Jan 2023; they are either long-term lapsed or have never before played.
It’s clear from the data that there is a general trend whereby players drop off as time goes on, although the trend is not linear. The percentage of those placing their first bet in Q4 2024 is much lower than in Q1 2023.
We also looked at trends in market entry. To do this, we defined “new” players more narrowly as people who made their first transaction across at least the three consecutive prior quarters. For example, someone is “new” for this purpose if they deposited in Q4 2024, but not in any previous quarter in 2024. This range is narrower than the previous table (which covers a longer look-back period).
For both these analyses, the sample set is consumers for whom we have a full two years of banking data.
Notes:
- This is higher than the previous table for the same quarter because it is looking back only three quarters.
The trend is generally to a lower percentage of customers being new (i.e. not having played in at least 12 months) between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024, down from 14.57% to 10.7%. We also know that reactivation of players who had not played for at least 12 months would reduce these numbers even further
How long do players stay active for?
Operators know how long players remain active on their own sites – but not what happens when they move their activity elsewhere. How likely it is 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 by seeing when they appear to have stopped.
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).
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 January 2023 and 1 October 2023), then we track forward to seeing 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 this tells us is that around 30% of new entrants appear to stop playing after the first quarter in which they start gambling and 65% appear to have stopped after a year.
Around one in three new players into the market each quarter will go on to become regular gamblers, with most stopping before the end of the first year or being very infrequent, once a year, punters.
A number of CRM specialists supported the trends shown within the data, noting that it is certainly more difficult retaining new customers, as they have a much higher drop-off rate. This could be partly put down to bonus abusers, who sign up to new brands to utilise welcome bonuses before moving on to the next offer.
This means that the population of gamblers is relatively stable and the key battleground between operators is for share of wallet.
Share of wallet
Share of wallet means the percentage of a person’s total gambling spend which an individual operator captures. We looked at gambling in the last quarter of 2024 to see how much they each spend and how many operators they spend it with.
Spend here is net deposits (deposits minus withdrawals at individual operators). It does not take into account funds left in wagering accounts. This graph shows why share of wallet is the key battleground for operators.
(* Average number of operators for 5+: 7.54)
There is a clear relationship between the number of operators a player is active with in a quarter and the spend per operator. The more operators, the higher the spend per operator.
This implies that players open accounts when they want to play more; they don’t play more with their existing operators. Another striking finding is that nearly 60% of players have four active accounts in the same quarter, whereas only one in five are single-operator loyalists.
DoT’s previous analysis considered the behaviours and experiences of female players versus males in the UK. The research found on average male gamblers in the UK had a much higher monthly salary than females
Bio: Charles is the founder and CEO of safer gambling platform, Department of Trust. A career entrepreneur, in 1998 he founded digital currency Beenz.com and Probability plc in 2003, which pioneered real-money mobile gaming and was sold to IGT in 2014. He stayed to lead IGT’s mobile solutions and roll out of US sports betting before leaving to start DoT in 2021.
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