Lottoland adds 450,000 customers in US lottery surge
Bet-on-lottery firm says new sign-ups took place in 48-hour period prior to ?1bn Powerball draw
Lottoland says interest in Thursday morning’s ?1bn US lottery rollover jackpot saw its website attract “unprecedented” levels of traffic and led to more than 450,000 new account sign-ups.
The new accounts were registered during the 48-hour period leading up to the world record PowerBall prize draw, yet acquisition numbers could have been higher still after the firm’s website crashed due to the high volume of traffic.
The downtime occurred on Wednesday afternoon and CEO Nigel Birrell yesterday emailed customers to apologise for the disruption and offer those affected a free line for tonight’s EuroMillions draw.
The bet-on-lotteries firm, which won both the Rising Star and Alternative Operator prizes at November’s eGR Operator Awards, launched in Australia last week and its managing director Luke Brill said the PowerBall draw helped the nascent business attract 250,000 new customers of which more than 14,000 won PowerBall prizes.
“The ‘PowerBall Rush’ confirmed our belief that we can disrupt and inject far more excitement and fun into one of the world’s oldest games,” Brill said.
“Lottoland has shown in the first week of trading in Australia that the Aussie public really has an appetite to bet-on lotteries from all over the world and not just the national lotteries,” he added.
Although official tickets for the PowerBall draw, which had rolled over 19 times, were only available to customers in the US, Lottoland offers its customers the chance to win up to double the jackpot prize by placing bets on the lottery’s outcome.