- Market traffic more than doubled from late-March into mid-April, where it plateaued and then fell.
- Still, dot-com traffic is still up 25% on July 2019 and is 9% higher than the same month two years ago.
- Dot-com market is propped up by massive online tournament series running on the world’s three largest online poker rooms.
- However, a look at other markets indicates that even accounting for these gains, there should still be some underlying growth.
Cash game traffic in the global dot-com online poker market remains up 25% year-over-year, a level it has maintained over the last two weeks.
According to data tracked by independent industry monitor GameIntel, available exclusively on the PRO Data platform, online poker operators are showing resilience after a surge of interest over the last four months during the coronavirus pandemic.
As PRO has documented in detail, market traffic more than doubled from late-March into mid-April, where it plateaued. It then began to slide back down, returning to pre-pandemic traffic levels in many markets by late June.
However, as noted at the time, a pre-pandemic level still represents growth year-over-year: traffic in summer is usually much lower than winter, so if June and July numbers can resemble those in February and March, it suggests strong underlying growth.
Traffic in the global dot-com market has been relatively stable in July, holding steady at around 15,000 average concurrent cash game seats daily. While a far cry from a 25,000 average in April, when the coronavirus was at its peak in large parts of Europe, it is still up 25% on July 2019 and is 9% higher than the same month two years ago.
