Free bingo or bingo promotions?

27th September 2009 10:47 AM

If you had to make a choice what would it be? Free bingo or bingo promotions? You may be sitting there thinking both but the fact is these days you will rarely find both sitting side by side. Traditionally bingo promotions were used as the hook to attract new bingo players onto a site with the promise of superb prizes but all of that changed the day Cheeky Bingo launched.

Cheeky Bingo hit the market last February at a time when the economic climate was looking dire and people were watching that pennies. At the time we are sure they did not realise they would change the face of online bingo forever. Suddenly bingo players had the chance to win real cash prizes without it costing them a penny; essentially no risk gambling.

OK, prizes were not huge but they were large enough to start drawing players from the more established and traditional bingo sites. Like all good concepts it was copied and soon we had the likes of Costa Bingo and Foxy Bingo and over the space of six months the use of free bingo rooms grew from just 3% to a whopping 31% of the total market.

Sadly the rise of free bingo seems to have killed off the exciting bingo promotion. You may think this is an exaggeration but just look at the proof, six months ago we had sites giving away hundreds of thousand of pounds worth of prizes including cars, holidays, shopping sprees and even villas in Spain but these days we get vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, bunches of flowers and Patrick Swayze DVD's.

The simple fact is the real cash prizes paid out in free bingo rooms have to come from somewhere and bingo sites no longer have a bottomless pit of depositors to draw from. In the short term this may be a good decision for them but we hope they come to their senses before the real bingo players find an alterative outlet to get their promotional fix.

Click here to play free bingo at Cheeky Bingo

Written by Sandy Scott

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