Wednesday marks the first day of eGaming Review’s new existence behind a subscriber paywall. From this day forward, readers looking to access eGR’s articles and archives will need to splash out £370+VAT annually — although that also gets you 12 issues of their hard copy magazine delivered to your door and a daily summary email delivered to your in-box (and for a few more pounds, we hear Pwin’s Norbert Teufelberger will come to your house and wash your car). Non-subscribers will be greeted with this.
Judging by the tone of the comments posted to the site following their announcement at the beginning of September, the subscription-model decision has been not been popular with eGR’s readers. But eGR has stuck to its guns, and we respect their decision. We also humbly suggest that those readers looking to fill their global gambling news void look no further than CalvinAyre.com. Unlike eGR, we are as accessible as a waterfront bar hooker, but unlike waterfront hookers, we will always give up our goodies free of charge.
In other eGR doings, the company is preparing to publish the latest version of their annual eGR Power 50. This past April, Calvin Ayre took issue with the methodology eGR employed in ranking the online gambling industry’s power players – in particular, the institutional bias displayed towards publicly traded companies. Calvin feels that these companies – whose shareholder agreements preclude them from offering services in the North American and Asian markets, which together account for 80% of the global business – are effectively squabbling amongst each other over crumbs in the comparatively miniscule European market. In Calvin’s view, the low rankings eGR gave the private companies that do have a presence in the more lucrative markets reflected a Power 50 based more on ideology than reality.
However, eGR seems to have taken some of Calvin’s constructive criticism to heart. For the first time, their submission form for inclusion on this year’s Power 50 explicitly lays out a formula by which the rankings will be identified – with 50% of the weighting allocated to a company’s financial performance, 30% given to “strategy, deliverability and geographic reach” and 20% stemming from “influence”. Of course, much of the rationale behind private companies choosing to stay private is to keep their financial info, er, private, so eGR’s list will by necessity rely on some educated guesswork. If we could make a suggestion, why doesn’t eGR do two separate lists – one public, one private? That way, readers could compare apples to apples, and diamonds to diamonds.
Regardless of how eGR’s 2012 list turns out, we’re sure Calvin will have something to say about it. Or perhaps he’ll go all the way and come up with his own PowAyre 50…
