Last week I had the opportunity to speak with a real thought-leader in online bingo. Jeremy Collis is a former managing director of Littlewoods Gaming who last year launched BigHeartBingo.com.

The clever concept behind BigHeartBingo is that it aims to give more than 170,000 registered charities in the UK the opportunity to become online bingo affiliates. The charity program works much like any other affiliate program, except that charities, as you know, all have substantial databases of people who are eager to support their causes through fundraising.

Here's how BigHeartBingo works: Participating charities post a link to BigHeartBingo on their website and promote the site to their database through email, newsletters, etc. When a player registers and plays using the charity's affiliate link, the charity receives 50% of the net revenue generated by the player.

If players discover BigHeartBingo through organic search (rather than an affiliate link), they are able to choose the charity or cause they wish to support.

I also really liked Jeremy's take on the state of the online bingo industry today. When I asked him if he felt online bingo in the UK was becoming saturated, he said:

"One of the great things about any product category, whether it is beans or online bingo, is the more players you've got in the pot, the bigger the pot becomes. The sites all fight to create awareness for the game. Yes, things shake down to two or three players as the small ones shake out. What BigHeartBingo is looking for is a small share of a very large category.

"And there is no reason why online bingo shouldn't be as big as the National Lottery in a few years time. It can grow and grow because particularly the marketing activity has only just started. All the big guys are advertising on prime time television now, and that's never happened before. So we've only just begun!"

Look for my complete article about Online Bingo and Charity in the March issue of iGaming Business. By the way, BigHeartBingo is powered by Parlay Entertainment software.