Global stagnation in poker popularity continues

11/20/2012  :  FULL TILT COMEBACK MASKS ONLINE POKER DECLINE
 
Global stagnation in poker popularity continues
 
PokerScout's weekly online traffic update recorded a fall in online poker traffic of 0.4 percent with Full Tilt's comeback masking a larger decline in the market.
 
The traffic monitoring website said Full Tilt Poker's traffic has continued to fall since relaunch with its first day of real money play delivering an average of 8900 players, hitting a plateau in the last few days of around 6400 players.
 
iPoker Network's Everest Poker integration saw a high of almost 3000 average players slowing to a 7 percent decline last week marking it as the biggest decliner among the top 10, now placed just 3 percent ahead of Party Poker.
 
Among the other top five poker sites, all experienced lower traffic said PokerScout, which it surmises are probably related to Full Tilt's comeback    Aside from iPoker's decline this week of 2 percent, 888 declined 4 percent and PartyPoker 6 percent.
 
Year-over-Year movement sees Pokerstars down 11 percent, iPoker Network down 33 percent and PartyPoker declining 34 percent attributed to tough regulatory environments and a global stagnation in poker's popularity along with the introduction of fast-fold poker effectively reducing player counts for the same amount of play volume.
 
Notable gainers include iPoker France up 1500 percent and Revolution Gaming (Cake Poker) up 49 percent, while noteworthy decliners include IGT Poker 96 percent, International Poker Network 51 percent, Merge Gaming down 47 percent, PKR down 30 percent, Ongame Network 27 percent, iPoker.it 26 percent and PokerStars.fr down 20 percent.