Quote:
Originally Posted by noble007
Don't know if this story has been posted in this thread already...
http://pokerfuse.com/features/editor...numbers-26-10/
They estimate there are only on average 8000 UK adult Zynga Poker users online at one time, and with an optimistic conversion and maintenance rate of 5%, this will only result in a 10-15% increase in traffic for Party Poker.
That article is not well founded. It seems to me that when writing it Hood went in with his own assumption about the impact of Zynga and tried to work the numbers to support that rather than objectively considering all factors and seeing what the numbers themselves work out to.
For instance every single assumption he makes is based at deflating the impact of Zynga without considering even very fundamental factors that work in the opposite direction. As an example of that, he directly compares raw data from PokerScout without considering how those figures are measured. PokerScout measures one seat = one player so a person 24 tabling = 24 players. On Zynga multitabling is rare and the software is clearly not designed with it in mind. So he ends up comparing individual 'players' on Zynga vs all seats occupied on the other sites. Of course there's no way to know exactly what percent of Zynga players who currently 1 table would end up playing more than 1 table on software designed for it, but it's certainly greater than 0 and lack of concrete information didn't stop him from speculating in the other direction.
To see how big this one issue could be here are some specific numbers:
http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/2009/p...nt-036766.html In March 2009, Stars celebrated signing up their 20millionth account. That doesn't mean 20million real money players or even 20 million players - it just means somebody or something created some account for the 20millionth time. You'd have to speculate about how much the site has grown since then - keeping in mind they reached 20million only after many years including all of the poker boom. Zynga, on the other hand, currently has more than 33million active unique players playing on their software every month, down from 40million a month ago.
When you start comparing the people figures, the numbers are staggering for Zynga compared to the current sites. Ironically I also think the long term impact of Zynga will be nominal, but for very different reasons. One sided 'research' is just a bit of a pet peeve of mine.