Press of Atlantic City – Three of the five municipalities where people are spending the most time logged on to some Internet gambling websites are within an hour’s drive of Atlantic City, but operators say these gamblers are not the same clientele who frequent the resort’s casinos.
As Internet gambling continues in New Jersey, operators are trying to learn more about where their gamblers are coming from and what can be done to access untapped markets.
Caesars Interactive Entertainment, which has captured a 31 percent of the state’s online gambling market since its November launch, is seeing more log-in time from Toms River, Ocean County, than anywhere else in the state, according to a list released by the company.
Cherry Hill, Camden County, and Brick, Ocean County — both within an hour’s drive of Atlantic City — come in third and fifth respectively. Jersey City and Hoboken, both in Hudson County, come in second and fourth. The rankings from take into account play from Nov. 21 through Feb. 28 at HarrahsCasino.com, CaesarsCasino.com and WSOP.com, all of which are licensed under Caesars Interactive.
Seth Palansky, a spokesman for Caesars Interactive, said the data will allow the company to better position marketing efforts in the future. For now, he said, the company is having difficulty finding any correlation between the cities most popular for online gambling and the company’s own marketing efforts.
“What’s interesting is there was no extra attention paid to any of these markets,” Palansky said. “This is only our first 100 days in the market. We really need year over year to get reliable enough data to take advantage of this more.
Caesars Interactive ranked more than 450 cities by time people spent logged in on the websites. The company, however, declined to say how much time was spent at each location. Palansky said the top 10 municipalities were significantly differentiated from the rest of the list.
