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Online slots have, up to now, been scattered across a plethora of casino Websites, some bearing the brands of bricks-and-mortar parents while others exist on the Internet only. There has been no clear market leader. But that could change with the arrival of Slots.com, following the sale of the domain name to Bodog, a venture-capital firm based in Antigua and specialising in leisure industries.
The company says that Slots.com will provide “a full suite of gambling products”, but as important as its gaming offer will be its Web address. Owning the generic domain name that describes a whole sector is widely held to be a priceless advantage, conferring easy memorability, the instant appearance of authority, and a strong likelihood of appearing at the top of Internet searches. There are more than 6m Google searches for the term “slots” each month, according to Bodog.
It is recruiting a hundred staff for business operations, headquartered in London, and technology teams both there and in Barcelona. The gaming service itself will be licensed in Antigua.
"There is no strong brand in the slots area like there is in, say, poker – yet any casino off- or online will happily admit that slots are not only physically the biggest part of the casino but, more crucially, in profitability terms slots are equally dominant,” said Lee Richardson, Slots.com’s managing director.
“The domain gives us a fantastic edge [with search engines], and when coupled with the brand experience and marketing clout we will add, this venture becomes a very powerful proposition," said Richardson, a former managing director of Tote Direct, non-retail chief operating officer of Coral Eurobet and chief executive of Ireland’s Boylesports.
Although claimed by Slots.com’s new owners to be the largest amount spent in 2010 on a domain name, the price tag of around £4m – approximately $6.4m – is dwarfed by the $35m that online-marketing firm QuinStreet committed earlier this year to pay for Insurance.com and also by the $13m that recently secured Sex.com, long considered among the most valuable of all domain names. In the case of Insurance.com, however, it is not clear whether the deal included other assets.
Casino.com sold in 2003 for $5.5m – in today’s dollars, almost exactly the same price fetched by Slots.com.
