Software creation/maintenance, servers and other hardware purchases and maintenance, internet provider fees, support personnel, marketing, game integrity monitoring (collusion, bots, etc.), just to name a few.

If a completely online media company can get millions of visitors per day but survive by being completely ad supported, why can’t a poker site? What significant expenses does PokerStars have that Facebook doesn’t?

The only reason online poker players tolerate a rake system is that this is what they were used to from live poker. If there had never been live poker, and thus online poker developed out of the culture of other online sites rather than the culture of B&M casinos, you would never have seen them monetize through a rake system.

Because no poker site gets millions of visitors per day, and the demographic is extremely narrow compared to something like Facebook. There are only so many companies that would be interested in advertising to poker players.

And this thread is started the very same day that Microgaming makes public that they are going to close down after several years of losing money....

How many developers, support and game integrity personell do you think it takes to run a poker network? More or less than 50 heads? I will go with the overs... Those needs to get their salary too.

Yeah, I'm aware it's quite unrealistic but keep in mind that if this idea would somehow get on rolling then it is very likely that it would overtake all sites and monopolize the market, making it easier and easier to sustain as it grows.
Ok so instead of giving badges to top contributers it could be that everyone who chips-in at least 10$ gets a badge each month. Part of that money would go for big freerolls which would create a feelings that fish don't contribute and are leeching and regs give it back. Also you wouldn't know if a player is new or just didn't play this month yet.

I'll admit I didn't do much research about the numbers, because I don't even know how, but maybe someone from the inside is aware of how much does it cost roughly to run such a website?

lost my **** for some reason when I saw the thumbs up icon + thread title

Not an insider, but Im guessing more than $€£ 250k per month? (not counting advertisements)

Exactly. If there was a small handful of companies in this market, I could see one arguing that they are colluding in some fashion to keep rake high, but there are tonnes of sites, and if a low rake model were simple and profitable, we'd have one. That's not to say there isn't the possibility of someone being innovative and finding the right mix of lower rake, promotions, etc. to upset the model a little, but many of the half-baked ideas that come up in these threads would result in the site generating a small percentage of the revenue that today's rake generates, and I don't think that's sustainable.

You've put two important points together here. On the revenue side, I've posted about possible revenues previously, and NooooBingo has some great points about the comparison to Facebook. As for expenses, I find it hard to believe you can't think of some significant expense like the costs of transactions, legal expenses, fraud, and site security.

Exactly.

Why? Have you allowed for major marketing in your plans?

We already had what you wanted, but better, and it didn't succeed. WSEX offered rake-free poker, and had a decent amount of buy-in from pros. They didn't need donations for it - they were running it as a loss leader for their sportsbook. It never got any traction with recreational players, despite starting up back in the "good old days" (2006) and shut down after 6 or 7 years. When it closed, one site said that "at last check, the online poker room only had an average of 10 reach cash players at any given time during the week."

There's no reason to think that a rake free model will be successful simply because it's rake free. In fact, the only evidence we have points to the opposite.

which of those games reply on tons of players depositing millions and millions of dollars that they lose playing in order for the sites to even run at all?Aquring these players isn't free for the site, nor is any site run by anyone with half a brain going to just put out a basically rake free site for poker nerds to turn into a printing press. Sure i'd love it if a super soft site existed that charged 100 dollars a month for a membership but that's not realistic.

you can play poker for play money for free which is a fair analogy to these 20 dollar games that you mention.you should compare apples to apples.

Out-competing your competition on price doesn't make much sense when the size of the market (i.e. potential customers) is decreasing. You're basically asking your hair stylist to lower their prices. Lower prices probably sounds great for you, but then the hair stylist points out that the population of the town has been decreasing for the last few years.

There are thousands of websites that are smaller and more niche than any poker site that also survive purely on ad revenue.

And likely have a tiny fraction of the costs.

Why would the costs to run an online poker game be significantly greater than any number of other popular free to play online games?

If anything, it seems like other games would tend to be more expensive because they would have much greater actual software development costs.

Had no idea we were discussing "free to play online games"; you had mentioned "thousands of websites". Do you have any examples?

Do they have these kinds of costs?

And I'm curious why the development costs of other games would necessarily be higher, given that if online poker sites **** anything up, there's a lot of player funds at stake, which also means that they will be a huge target for people trying to find security flaws.

no rake, some rake, lots of rake... doesnt matter.

From the standpoint of a career? choice, Online poker has changed and is not coming back (unless Pornhub and Stars merge, then poker boom )

And you've proved you have no idea what you're talking about.

You grossly underestimate how much it costs to run a successful poker site. Even before Stars expanded into casino and sportsbook they had a few thousand employees, spanning several countries. Staffing costs alone are millions per month.

Licensing, taxes, infrastructure, rent, marketing spend. Those are just things I came up with in 10 seconds.

missed biggest expense. Lobsters.... Lots and Lots of Lobsters

PTLou - answering the questions no one asked.

With the exception of “licensing” (which wouldn’t even matter in the case of unregulated sites), it is unclear to me why a poker site would have to pay more for these things than a free online game like League of Legends. I would think they’d pay less, since the software is much less complicated to develop, less taxing on servers, less likely to develop bugs that need to be addressed, etc.

Wait, when you said "There are thousands of websites that are smaller and more niche than any poker site that also survive purely on ad revenue.", and then "popular free to play online games", is League of Legends" what you had in mind?

If so, I'm not sure if it's better to assume you were arguing disingenuously, or that you actually believe "free" games like this generate their huge profits from advertising.

As for costs, I already listed off a few that are unique to poker, more than once.

Recreational players are not as rake sensitive as you may believe them to be.

Comparing League of Legends and any poker site is literally comparing apples to oranges. It's been reported that LoL has 20+ million players daily. Exactly which poker site gets that much daily traffic? Even if you assume operating costs are the same for LoL and a poker site, which site do you think could generate more in selling advertising space on it's site?

Even if that's true (and I agree that it probably is), it doesn't really change his point. Instead, a company could come in and spend all that extra money on whatever it is that will bring in recreational players. Bonuses, loyalty programs, giveaways, freerolls, huge marketing, you name it.

What makes the comparison so ridiculous isn't scale, though, it's the fact that they don't make their money from advertising - they bring in hundreds of millions of dollars from micro-transactions.

I don't disagree. I'm merely addressing NickMPK's belief/opinion that ad revenue could be a successful business strategy for a poker site.

What do you think the monthly revenue for LoL is? And their expenses for servers etc?