A Deeper Look at Closed Casinos

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: A Deeper Look at Closed Casinos
Host: John Wright
Published: Fri, 07 Nov 2025 07:39:00 +0000
Duration: 8:36

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: Welcome to revenue optimization with Stats Drone. And I'm gonna talk about not just closed casinos because I talked about that in a previous recording, but I wanna focus on the data. So I'm doing a presentation for Sigma World at Rome in Italy and what's really cool about this assignment I took on which was to do a presentation on why online casinos close. So that's a pretty good question. I think, you know, if you have the data themselves, there's a lot of market research that can be done. And I think there's operators for products and services that could be used to kind of either improve the retention

[00:00:40] John Wright: and lifetime value of players, or it's kind of the opposite. If casinos don't have these things, then maybe it's a signature that they don't have the budget or the knowledge to know what tools they need to be focusing on to stay alive and stay afloat. So I wanted to focus on some of the different data sets I was looking at. We have our own list of closed affiliate programs and we analyze data from lcb.org and Ask Gambling. They both have over a thousand casino brands closed in their databases and as well, both of them have complaints. So Ask Gambling is the most comprehensive complaint service with over, I think, 33,000 complaints

[00:01:18] John Wright: as of just end of October, 2025. I forget how many LCB has, but casinoreviews.com, I think has 7,500, which is, I think, a part of their acquisition of the POG. So I mean, Duncan Garvey has been working out for quite some time. So I said, let me look at the data and go, can I find a signature that I think is going to lead to me understanding, like, what's the likelihood of a casino going to be closing or not? And funny enough, I went through everything. I went like how many different languages they had, whether it's English or something else, what currencies, what withdrawal methods,

[00:01:54] John Wright: the game providers. And I started looking through and even the complaints and some of the things I thought I would discover as reasons or kind of like my hypothesis of like what would lead to more casinos closing, I think I'd see the signatures of that leading up in casino complaints. Some of that is there, but some of it also isn't there. So I'll give you an example. Some of the most well-known casinos in the world, like online casinos, they have a lot of complaints because they're like, they just don't care about Ask Amber's complaints. So I don't wanna name some of them, but there's quite a few that have, like we're talking hundreds of complaints and they don't look like they're more positive.

[00:02:32] John Wright: So it's hard to really say a complaint is a true signature, but it is some signal. Now, I think, you know, it's not good or ideal to have casinos that are maybe not treating players well, but you can kind of make your own decision going, is this something that you want to work with a brand that might have this or not? So what I believe to be true, and I need more time to study the data is, I believe that some casinos that are actually good today, but bad tomorrow, the signature of when they turn bad can be found in the complaints where they all of a sudden are finding not good reasons to not pay players. That's a warning sign.

[00:03:10] John Wright: I do believe that there's something out there where if affiliate programs are shaving affiliates, I do think that's one signature, but I have no conclusive proof. So just think about it this way. If times are getting tough for casino and they need to stay in business and they're close to going bankrupt, I mean, what you would assume they would do is steal anywhere they can. So that's stealing from affiliate accounts and that's also stealing from players by not paying them out. So that's that. Looking at the game providers, I didn't see anything that jumped out because a lot of them have the same games anyways, and maybe that's actually to their detriment. So I do believe if I went through the game providers, I could probably find ones that, okay, maybe some game providers

[00:03:49] John Wright: are simply not in that list, which means that certain game providers, they have a high quality threshold. They don't wanna work with lower quality brands that will bring their games down. Whereas other game providers, they're kind of like, we want as much revenue as possible so they don't really care and quality is not their job. So I kept digging through the data and the things that I actually thought there'd be something there, but I didn't realize how conclusive it would be. I actually happened to be with the withdrawal restrictions. So for example, if you look in the terms of conditions of casinos, you can find in the terms, basically it's like there's a max cash out

[00:04:28] John Wright: either per day, per week, or per month. Not all casinos have this, but some of them have it in place just to kind of protect themselves in the event that they get like a crazy winner that wins, let's say $5 million or 5 million Euro, for example. So I'm just gonna go read through some of the stats of what I curated. And this came from, I believe this was, let me just have a quick look. This was Ask Gambler's data that I went through. So Ask Gambler's, I went through a lot of the data. I didn't get the full complete set of data. So this is not fully conclusive, but I do believe it's fairly accurate.

[00:05:03] John Wright: So I'm gonna just give you some of the stats. 92% of closed casinos that had

[00:05:09] John Wright: under a 10K a day limit. So I'm just gonna give you some numbers here. 92%, that's quite a bit.

[00:05:17] John Wright: There's a lot of casinos, we're talking out of a database of, looks like it's about 300 or so.

[00:05:23] John Wright: There's basically like 40 closed brands that they had a daily limit of less than $1,000. There's another 51 that had a daily limit of less than 2,000 and another 41 that had a daily limit of less than 3,000. So that's a lot of closed casinos. Now let's go to weekly. Weekly you would assume that if the daily limit is 1,000, then that could be 7,000 a week. Well, there are some casinos that actually had weekly limits of maximum $2,000 per week. So out of that same cohort, there was 66 brands that closed that had that that term and condition on their site.

[00:05:59] John Wright: There's another 241 that had a maximum of $5,000 per week. I mean, that's 20K a month, that's not a lot. And there's another 104 that had a weekly restriction of five to 10K. So that's just so many closed casinos. I mean, that's most of your data. So the signature here is look through the terms conditions and basically they're telling you how much money they have or don't have by putting these insane restrictions on players. They're basically saying, look, if we get a big winner, we're probably going out of business. So either they're a white label or they're simply just not well-funded or they're taking up money at a certain rate

[00:06:36] John Wright: where they don't have that rainy day supply of money to keep them safe. And just one more stat, just continue. The monthly withdrawal limits. I saw another group of stats with that same cohort under 5,000 per month. I mean, this is ridiculous. That's like barely 1,000. That's not even, yeah, it's $1,250 a week. So there's 84 brands that closed with that term. Another monthly withdrawal limit of five to 10K per month was 189 brands. And from 10 to 20K was 136. And from 20 to 30K was 59 brands.

[00:07:13] John Wright: And the remaining, which were 35 to 50K was 23 that closed. 50K to 100K was 19. And 100K or more as the monthly withdrawal limits was only just four. So, I mean, the data is right there. This was probably the one stat that jumped out the most. And I'm definitely gonna make a highlight of it in my presentation. And I think this is going to change how affiliates might actually consider which programs they might wanna work with because they are going to now start looking at this data. And they wanna know, am I promoting a quality casino because I wanna know what's inside this brand because I need to make a smart decision if I can recommend this product

[00:07:51] John Wright: and if I think my Revshare is gonna be safe with it. So I'm gonna leave it at that. There's definitely way more analysis that can be done on this data. There's more data than this. There's all these closed casinos that have casino complaints. There's insane amounts of data. So it goes without saying, it helps to use AI tools and scraping tools to get this data. And I'll just preface that by saying, you obviously wanna make sure that if you're scraping any sites that you respect the robots on those sites, but the data is there in front of you and it just takes a bit of time to curate it. It helps to have a data background like I do. And if you don't, just team up with someone who knows what they're doing

[00:08:30] John Wright: and dig for the data because you're gonna get some gold out of this.