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Article:
A Profile of the Online Bingo Player by: Jonathan Bentz 'There was a farmer had a dog'¦' You know the rest. For most of us, our first encounter with Bingo is as a farmer's dog. Bingo's legacy as a children's campfire song is undeniable. As we grew up, so did that dog. Bingo mutated from a song to a game. Five column cards filled with random numbers became the essential game of chance. That dog's name became a shout of victory, filled with the joy and satisfaction of beating the odds. For several decades, bingo was played in large halls, where hundreds of people played on game cards of cheap cardboard, hoping for the big score. Over the past decade, the game that owns the name of a farmer's dog has made the jump from the VFW to the WWW. Bingo as a song is still tailor-made for young kids at the campfire, but the game has changed with the times and moved online. Bingo has always been one of America's hidden pastimes. According to IGWB (link to: http://www.igwb.com), an estimated 1.6 billion people attended bingo halls across the country in 2003. To put things in perspective, that staggering attendance number is almost more than the amount of people who attended movie theaters and bowling alleys, combined. Over the past four years, the number of bingo sites on the internet has increased twenty-one fold, from five in 1999 to 105 in 2003. Free bingo sites definitely seem to be the most popular place to get a game going. According to WhichBingo.com, over 45% of bingo sites are free play only. Around 70% of all online bingo sites are either totally free to play, or mostly free with a few premium, pay-to-play games. Online bingo shows overwhelming popularity here in the States. According to Bingo.com, 90% of online bingo players who use free play sites are North American. Eighty percent of those who played free, online bingo last year were female, according to Bingo.com. Surprisingly, the average age of an online bingo player (male or female) was '41
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