I’m sad to announce that from today we are temporarily putting the daily Main Draw pot down to £200 from £500, the Video Draw pot down to £50 from £100 and removing 4 of the 10 daily Stackpot prizes. The Coronavirus crisis has hit many small businesses, including our own. We rely on advertising revenue to fund the free daily prizes, but the market has suffered badly.

This is a temporary change which we will review as the situation improves. We’ve never had to lower our prize money in our nine year history, but we are going through a crisis that we haven’t seen for many more. Understandably, businesses are having to cut their advertising spend, and this means we’ve been making a significant daily loss.

Since this time last year ad revenue is down by 62.5%, and our temporary prize reductions equate to about 50%.

We considered furloughing staff, but we want the team together to help us get through this. We’ve been working together to come up with new ways of funding the prizes, and we have some promising developments in the pipeline.

We also discussed whether we could introduce an additional paid subscription service, offering an ad-free interface, and priority daily reminders. This would cost something like £1 per month. At that price we would need 18,000 subscribers before it would allow us to put the prize money back to where it was, and probably even higher when the ad revenue came back. Perhaps we could donate a percentage of any excess to a charity supporting the NHS. This is just an idea, but we’re keen to hear your feedback in the comments below or by voting here.

This is far from the 2020 Vision that we had. Since we announced our £20,000 per day goal things have been tough. We had a legal battle with a paid postcode lottery service (come to think of it… I’ve not seen their ads for a while), an ex-colleague stealing from us, name change, GDPR, Google ads banning us, and the rest of the ad market being destroyed by GDPR. We had actually managed to get Google ads back in February, just as the crisis started to take hold.

The irony is that this is happening just as we were starting to become profitable again. We really do believe this to be temporary, and when the market returns prizes will be going up again, like in the good old days.

We all really appreciate your patience and loyalty.

Be safe

Chris & Team