Last week, online bingo giant tombola began a redundancy consultation process with staff members. Around 250 jobs are reportedly at risk, some at their Sunderland headquarters and some remote.

Until the end of 2021 tombola was privately owned, but at that point it was purchased for a massive £402 million by the world’s biggest betting company Flutter Entertainment (who also own Paddy Power, Betfair, Sky Bet and Pokerstars). At the time of the takeover, a company spokesperson told the Sunderland Echo that the move was unlikely to affect any tombola employees and indeed, tombola’s UK headcount has gone up from 629 at the end of 2021 to 706 today. But now, they are reportedly wanting to cut costs following an operational review.

250 jobs at risk out of 706 is a huge number, and any such exercise is bound to be upsetting and unsettling for all staff (which is quite bad enough), but the potential big mistake Flutter could be about to make concerns WHICH jobs are at risk – tombola have confirmed that it’s the customer experience team that’s being looked at and according to the FT the aim is to cut 250 roles to just over 100. So what do the people in those 250 roles currently do? It includes:

  • Chat hosts
  • Customer support
  • Safeplay advisers

Although the staff in these roles have been told that there will be “significant opportunities for redeployment within the business” that means either moving to different roles at tombola or moving to similar roles at other Flutter sites. So whatever happens, the number of chat hosts, customer support staff and Safeplay (responsible gambling) advisers at tombola is going to be reduced.

Flutter are not the first bingo operator to reduce chat host numbers in order to cut costs, but when other operators have done this in the past it has not ended well.

The reasoning goes that chat hosts are expensive and because only a small percentage of player actually join in with the chat, they are a luxury rather than a necessity. But this line of thinking completely ignores the existence of lurkers.

You only need to go to any online forum, Discord channel or social media platform to see that there are a few people who do a very large amount of the talking and an invisible majority who lurk silently in the background, liking and sometimes sharing but rarely even commenting let alone posting anything in their own right. But what do you think all those lurkers would do if the prolific posters all left? The answer, of course, is that they would get bored and leave too.

But why is it a problem if lurkers who were not contributing to the conversation in the first place leave? On a social media platform, a substantial part of the advertising revenue (which is based on impressions) goes away with them. And at a bingo site, those lurkers stop coming to the bingo rooms to be entertained what’s happening in the chat and no longer feel part of a community (which is one very important reason why many people like to play online bingo in the first place). The result is that the bingo rooms get quieter and quieter, and that means that fewer players buy tickets, and that means that the prize pools get smaller, and that means that fewer players buy tickets because the prizes are unappealing, and that means that the prize pools get smaller again – and the death spiral goes on.

One of tombola’s big strengths, and the reason that there are always lots of players in every tombola bingo room and lots of tickets sold for every game despite the lack of pre-buy facilities that would cripple any other bingo site, is the community atmosphere. It’s not just in the bingo rooms either – you see it in their social media presence and at tombola arcade, the instant win and slot game sister site, which also has chat rooms. So what will happen to this lively, buzzing site which normally has thousands of players online at any one time, if the number of chat hosts is slashed?

Well, it largely depends on how the remaining chat hosts are deployed. If the chat is simply removed from some rooms and/or at some times of day, history tells us that those rooms will go downhill quite quickly as all the lurkers leave. An alternative would be to give each chat host a larger number of rooms to monitor at the same time. Since one of the qualities of a good chat host is the ability to draw out lurkers and get them involved in a conversation, this would work up to the point where the chat host is trying to engage in too many conversations at the same time to keep track. Beyond that point, the chat becomes less interesting and engaging and again, players start to drift away (though not as quickly as they do when the chat is removed entirely).

And what happens when players drift away? They stop buying as many bingo tickets (and this is a particular issue at tombola where you have to go to the bingo room just before the game starts to buy tickets and can’ bulk buy in advance). And when players stop buying as many bingo tickets, the operator stops making as much money.

If Flutter scale back the tombola chat hosting to the extent that all the lurkers who are currently buying bingo tickets while watching and enjoying the chat but not joining in leave, they could very well lose much more money in bingo ticket sales than they save by employing fewer chat hosts. In effect, they’d be killing the golden goose. Let’s hope, for the sake of all of the other staff at tombola as well as all the players who currently enjoy playing at this unique bingo site, that it doesn’t happen.