International Lottery News -- Ireland's
National Lottery remains successful, The Irish Independent reports. Citing figures from a recently released survey of players,
DKM Consultants reports that 63 percent of Ireland's adults regularly play the
Lotto or its related games. The average amount spent on these games each week is £4.43. A desire to win the big money was the most common reason players gave for participating in lottery games.
After enduring a public relations nightmare while determining who should run the U.K. National Lottery for the next seven years, British officials are concerned about what happens next. "Our decisions resulted in a high public profile and inevitably some criticism," members of the National Lottery Commission noted in the commissioner's foreword to the group's annual report. "We appeared twice before the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport and were pleased that its report in March supported the outcome of our evaluation, and our views about likely future sales."
The report notes that there has been "a gradual decline in the level of sales" in the lottery's main game. During 2000-2001 year total sales were £4,983 million, about 2.2 percent lower than the previous year. Officials admitted that one persistent problem facing the lottery is preventing underage players from playing, a problem they continually try to remedy.
A copy of the report can be accessed online at http://www.natlotcomm.gov.uk
On the US Front -- It seems that U.S. state lotteries are losing their cash-cow status. Long seen as a reliable source of income--accounting for as much as 5 percent of some states' budgets--lottery income is no longer on the increase. A recent Bloomberg article examined just how bad the numbers are. "People have less discretionary income and that showed in our numbers," Jack Ross, director of Indiana's Hoosier Lottery said. The Hoosier Lottery suffered a 5.8 percent drop in revenue from last year. And the flattening ticket sales are bad news for officials in Pennsylvania, where the state budget will be short $869 million during the next four fiscal years.
The drop in ticket sales has been attributed to a spate of causes, including a slumping economy, rising gas costs and growing unemployment woes. Ohio, however, reports that other factors are making its state lottery a losing proposition. High on the list of woes is the competition that's siphoning away lottery players. "We're surrounded by all kinds of gaming opportunities that don't exist here," explained an Ohio Lottery Commission spokesperson. "It costs us millions of dollars when Ohioans cross our borders." Those lottery players are following the multiple gambling lures offered by Indiana riverboat casinos, lotteries in neighboring states, land-based casinos in Detroit and even the video-slot parlors at racetracks in West Virginia and Windsor, Ontario. The drain of players resulted in an 11 percent decline for Ohio's lottery earnings, which resulted in a $50 million blow to the state's Department of Education, which receives all of the lottery's profits.
In the end, some experts are indicating that doom-and-gloom remains the order of the day. "It would be foolish to count on continued growth," commented the co-author of "Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America," Philip Cook. "The lottery market is saturated."
New Games -- A new CD-ROM lottery game is being haled as the newest winning ticket for the Kentucky Lottery. Officials there announced last month that they had acquired the licensing rights to offer Treasure Tower,an interactive lottery game developed by Ingenio, a subsidiary of Loto-Quebec Inc. Kentucky is the second state lottery to offer the game, following in the footsteps of the Iowa Lottery. According to Business First, a Louisville, KY business publication, the Kentucky lottery ordered 125,000 starter kits, which will be sold for $10. The kit will contain the Treasure Tower disc and three lottery tickets.
Last month the Nordwestdeutsche Klassenlotterie (NKL) announced that it was offering new games over the Internet. The lottery calls itself one of Germany's leading lottery organizers.
"In view of this tradition it goes without saying that we can also offer an independent game on the Internet," said Dr. Rüdiger Kroll, a spokesman for the NKL board. "For us the Internet is not a technical end in itself. From the point of view of marketing, the Internet allows us to address new target groups to whom we have so far had only limited access for our classical NKL brand."
He added, "Whereas the youngest age of the typical NKL player has so far been 35, the age of the typical Internet user means that we can now reckon with accessing target groups of under 30 who we can then win over for the NKL's classical main product during the cours of time and also earlier than previously."
The new lottery website will be accessible at www.nkl-cyberlotterie.de
A New Home -- Novamedia, a.o., which operates the Dutch PostcodeLottery, the Dutch SponsorLottery and BingoLotto in Sweden, will launch its GoodLot Internet lottery on November 16. The site will be operated from the Netherlands Antilles. Auditing for the site will be handled by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
"We are still building the site," Novamedia CEO Boudewijn Poelmann told LotteryInsider, "and GoodLot will become a funhouse, where one may play for fun and for real. We will create a lot of content."
The site will offer a daily lottery draw, with tickets cost US$10, which is also good for the monthly jackpot drawing. Proceeds will benefit a number of good causes, including the Red Cross, UNICEF, Foster Parents Plan, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, World Wide Fund for Nature and Médecins san Frontières. Poelmann predicts this site will become the world's largest Internet lottery for good causes.