ONLINE POKER STILL STRUGGLING

Posted 12/22/10 By Anthony Fish :

Independent monitoring site issues year-on-year figures
 
The respected independent online poker monitoring site pokerscout.com has highlighted the decline in online poker business year-over-year which has already been pointed out in several corporate financial reports.
 
Commenting on the week beginning 20 December the site noted that, year-over-year, and even with the opening of the French market, the total worldwide online poker market continues to stagnate.
 
According to PokerScout's ACES indicator, online poker traffic is shrinking at an annual rate of 1 percent.
 
For the current week the decline was recorded at 0.4 percent with the top 20 movers including the following:
 
Merge Gaming Network  134 percent
 
888poker          8 percent
 
PokerStars      7 percent
 
The report notes that the Cereus Network overtook the French-dedicated PokerStars site to claim eighth place with the Entraction Network overtaking Winamax.fr to take the twelfth place and Ongame.fr edging out Svenska Spel in the eighteenth spot.
 
The managements of some sites will be less than pleased with declines in their fortunes over the year; Notable losers over the year are identified by PokerScouts as:
 
Everest Poker  – 64%
 
Cake Poker Network  – 59%
 
iPoker Network  – 31%
 
Cereus Network  – 31%
 
IPN  – 26%
 
PartyPoker  – 24%
 
Full Tilt Poker  -16%
 
 
The top spots this week based on the average number of players over a seven day period continued to be dominated by PokerStars.com (30000) and FullTilt Poker.com (15600) bringing up the third place is Party Poker.com (3600).