Bingo and Slots in Harmony - A Gambling Affiliate’s Story

WDW Bingo started life as a bingo affiliate.

Founded almost a decade ago, first as a PPC (pay per click) site and then as an SEO site, it has been quite a journey to becoming one of the UK’s top online bingo affiliate portals. In fact this year, we expect to post our highest revenue figures ever. You may ask how that can possibly be true when there’s a broad consensus that bingo is declining rather than growing in our nation as a whole.

There’s also an ongoing cost of living crisis with statistics showing that consumers are spending much less on non-essentials. In the months of May and June this year, the Guardian wrote that the largest cuts in consumer expenditure were on gardening, airline travel, subscription services and gambling. 

The online bingo industry itself has faced some internal turbulence such as the acquisition of Dragonfish, one of the UK’s most popular bingo platforms, by Broadway Gaming from the struggling gaming bigwigs, 888.

Despite all of this, we’ve grown. Not just because we’re always trying to improve as a business, but because, and this is our secret, we’ve expanded beyond bingo. For the past few months, less than half of our revenue has come from bingo. The remaining and therefore majority of  WDW Bingo’s revenue comes from slot sites.

A few years ago, the idea that bingo focused affiliate sites could break through into the much bigger and more intimidating online slots and casino sphere was rather fanciful.

The truth is that the casino space proper, especially from a search engine perspective, is still an uphill struggle. There’s still an authority and quite frankly an interest gap that Google considers between bingo and the idea of gambling in a Casino Monte Carlo type environment.

However, Google understands that there’s a great synergy between bingo and slots game play. Bingo players themselves, apart from being bingo fans, are also very often big slots fans.

Of course, the Google algorithm is trying to match intent. Therefore a high quality bingo affiliate like us, provided we put in the work, is a perfect place to attract slots players too.

For one, slots are such a big part of the average online bingo player’s experience. For a bingo site to have any chance in this day and age, they must have as many slot games as an online casino.

Even on bonafide bingo sites, there are actually fewer active bingo rooms than before, as platforms try to shore up liquidity and an active player base. With fewer and less frequent bingo games, players like to play slots in between. To be fair, they always have, but it’s a bigger part of the experience than ever.

The colours, the lights, the characters and, of course, the simplicity of video slots are appealing to bingo players. There is no machismo or pretentiousness to playing slots.

These two types of games coexist so simply in the same universe. Some of the biggest slot brands now also exist as bingo games. Fluffy Favourites by Eyecon, one of the UK’s most popular slots, also exists as a bingo game on the Virtue Fusion network. Likewise, Rainbow Riches, a video slot that often shows up in the local pub, also has a bingo game now.

We noticed the potential for this cross-pollination a few years back and worked hard to make our site a competitive slots comparison portal as well. Thankfully, we weren’t the only ones to see it. Search engines also recognise that online bingo and online slots are two sides of the same coin.

Now that we are for all intents and purposes a slots affiliate site, we’ve toyed with the idea of changing our own name and branding. But that’s not really the point. Our bingo and slots in harmony approach may have paid off, but the key is to keep providing players with the experiences and the products that they want.