22
2005
Notes from Vegas: Search Terms and the Competitive Substitute
Here’s an interesting concept. While preparing for the Casino Affiliate Convention in Vegas, I stumbled upon the following chart depicting volume of searches on two terms “Online Poker” and “Sports Betting.” In our charting lingo, we would describe these two terms as having a loose butterfly effect (or more technically a negative corellation).
Considering the terms, this chart could be telling us that Internet users consider the activities of online poker and sports betting to be competitive substitutes, or two activities that are dissimiliar but can be substituted for one another. In practical terms, If I’m an online gambler (which by the way I’m not), and I enjoy betting on the NFL, I’ll have less money to spend on my other activity betting on online poker… hence the reverse correlation. I’d be interested to hear other examples of competitive substitues, post your ideas in comments. If I find any interesting charts I’ll post them.
good observation, we have definatly seen this reverse corellation in effect as punters win and loose their cross channel activities fluctuate. A better way to see this would be to make basic assumption such as a poker player is more likely to be a sport bettor then a casino player and as such we can infer that when this poker player wins and his game is on then he will be on it, but the same can’t be said about casino gaming which is more of a passtime for poker player then serious gaming. Our research has shown that most gamblers will play casino games when they either have low bankrolls or there is a special promotion on a game their favor (usually blackjack).
If we could have had the figures for casino keywords such as online casino and online gambling i am sure it would have shown a steady pace throughout the time period as casino players migrate from one site to the other based on offers and are not particulary loyal.