It almost passed me by, but I just realised that this little old bingo site is 20 years old this month. I don’t know the exact date I launched, but I know it was around October 2005 going by the news stories that featured at the time as the earliest on the captures at Way Back Machine. There was a smaller version of the site for a few months before that, which I will go into, but the Way Back Machine has the first fully fledged version showing October 2005 as the earliest news story on the site.
Prior to that, there was a small website I put up as a simple guide on how to play the game for my workmates that I was taking on a bingo night. There were no sections, news, hall guides, etc. In the early 2000s, I was making websites as a hobby, and then as a job. I made little websites about lots of different things, from Welsh music to sites about weird auctions and strange events. Nothing gave me more pleasure than building websites, so making one about bingo just came naturally given my background.
At the time, I thought it’s easier to build a guide for the 10+ people I was taking to play, rather than try to explain to them separately. So, in June 2005 I bought the domain, set it up on the webhost and made the site. The first version was literally a one or two pager that had none of the ideas of what the site eventually grew into. It was made in basic HTML, had the same beginner’s guide to bingo that’s still in the guides section, no fancy stuff, with a garish design, as you can see below in the later version on Way Back Machine…
When I’d first launched the site my focus was firmly on the retail game and bingo clubs, I had no idea about online bingo. It was still very much in its infancy, with only a handful of sites up and running the game. I was blissfully unaware, until I started getting contacted by people asking me to run adverts for the bingo sites. Eventually I signed up with a couple of affiliate sites, and placed a few ads on the site.
At the same time, I started trying online bingo, intrigued by the idea of playing the game online. It was a bit of a wild west back in those days, sites flew up and just as quickly disappeared. The bingo networks were still in their infancy and the retail landscape was booming, the smoking ban a distant blip on the retail game’s radar. The site started growing, new sections being added, a new logo added, new layouts, and then the first big change came in late 2006 when I dropped the garish colour scheme, and shifted to a new and simplified layout. I added a news section that was powered by Blogger.com, and the rest of the site was hand built. It looked like this:
New sections were added by myself as and when I could. The first year or so of running adverts on the site proved fruitless, with no money coming in. In those days, it really was a labour of love for me, as it remains to this day. The income was always a secondary consideration. As the site grew, and traffic grew, I started to see earnings that made running the site a nearly full-time consideration. I added the Club Finder, the first (as far as I’m aware) that combined all the UK clubs in one finder. I also added the Lost Halls section, an archive for all those closed clubs that we were at risk of losing all contact with.
The income from the advertising made it possible for me to add more and more content. I was able to bring in people to write content for the site, like our caller of the year Brett Hyrjak and academic Dr Catherine Downs, and take on our very own Bingo Queen Nickie Shute. Around 2010 the site’s new feature died, due to Blogger changing how you were able to use its service, and it wasn’t until 2012 the the site returned, a hybrid of old-fashioned HTML pages and a new fangled WordPress blog. That version looked like this:
As the site grew in size, it grew in traffic and reputation, helped by the excellent work of the various writers and contributors. We had a number of competitions, photographic commissions and collaborations that strived to celebrate the world of bingo in the UK, its rich history, heritage and culture. At our peak we were getting in excess of a 1500 visitors a day. Things were good, the site continued to grow, but there were rumblings in the wider bingo world that we weren’t prepared for.
I’ve never had access to the resources that some of the big bingo related sites out there had. It was always a personal endeavour, and the money made from the advertising at the site went into paying the bills and wages of those involved. That meant I had never really considered the technical side of the web as I should, the move to mobile, the apps, the dominance of social media and the horrific SEO that other sites could put their money into to boost the prominence of their sites in search results.
This meant things were starting to fall apart here, lagging behind our competitors in size, traffic and technology. In 2018 the strain took its toll, and I was forced to let go several members of staff that kept the site going, amidst the development of a brand-new look site that should have addressed the technological issues that I saw at the time. This was happening at the same time as a down-turn in affiliate marketing, with various big brands ditching their affiliates and closing their programmes. Over the years we’ve lost literally 100s of partnerships with brands that have closed, or stopped working with affiliates.
In early 2019 the new-look site was set up on a staging server and the process of moving all the pages began. It was down to myself to move everything over to the new site – a massive job that took an age to complete. Finally, in late 2019, the new site was ready to go. The previous version of the site only had the blog running on WordPress, the rest of the pages at the site (the vast majority in fact) were flat HTML pages running on various templates I had built from scratch. As the site was now fully WordPress, all the old content needed to be copied and pasted manually, with each new page being constructed anew, an arduous task.
The content was all moved and is here, but even 6 years after the move, there are many pages that need attention, updating, formatting, moving, expanding, etc. By my reckoning, it would take me the best part of 6 months, working full-time to update everything, to get all the info I wanted for the site up to scratch. I would love to be able to do this, but sadly, I just don’t have the time bandwidth, or the financial resources to do it.
I know, it’s not ideal, the club finder is out of date, lots of clubs have changed hands or moved to lost hall status. It breaks my heart that I can’t do this as my other commitments (work, family) have not allowed me to devote much time other than the odd update. The lost halls archive is especially important to me, and I want to do a deep dive and update all the pages, as there’s a lot more info out there which I can use to add to the pages. I did start, during the Covid lockdown – which was the last time I was able to update the Club Finder (remember all the closures?), but even with the joys of furlough, I ran out of time to do the work I wanted.
So, for the time being, the site is not as I’d like it. Over the years, I’ve been offered lots of money to sell it to bigger affiliates and people operating in the space. I could have sold up a long time ago, but as this site has always been an important passion project for me, I have refused to let go. For now, I’m having to leave it in a bit of a limbo. It’s not forgotten about, or abandoned, or unloved, anything but. I fully aim to one day update everything, but for now, I have to leave it to bumble along with the odd blog post and addition of a review.
It’s been a ride though, the 20 years since the site’s inception. I’ve met a ton of interesting people at conferences, bingo events and awards ceremonies. I’ve been able to get expert help and unique content for the site, much of which has been unique to us (until everyone started stealing it – I see you…) I’ve got to work with many talent individuals who wrote for the site, helped promote it, partnered with us and agreed to talk to us about their time in bingo. Furthermore, I’ve been outspoken, I’ve ruffled feathers, I’ve made friends, and a few enemies along the way. And that’s brilliant, all down to this little game that I stumbled into as a teenager working part-time in a bingo hall. The memories stay with me, and continue to entertain me to this day.
I’m forever in hope that things may change, and I can get back to working on this site full-time. It needs a lot of love, I know. But for now, from myself, I wish you all the best!
