Free Means Free: Exclusive Interview With MyFreeLotteryPool.com Founder

When we here at GP hear about the launch of a new gambling site, we’re normally pretty excited. But in the case of MyFreeLotteryPool.com – just a few weeks into its infancy – we’re all-out ecstatic. You see, My Free Lottery Pool isn’t your average “gambling site” because, while you stand to make money from participating in its games, you don’t have to pay or risk anything to play. Instead, all you have to do is sign up and click the lottery pool you want to participate in. And if the pool wins? Well, you just hit pay dirt!

The mastermind behind this ingenuous idea, Dan Bader, makes no bones about how great his new site is. Basically, as he explains on its About page, the advertisers pay his company, Jackpot Ventures, and the company, in turn, uses the money to buy the lottery tickets it pools online. Then, if a signed-up player is selected for the pool and wins, she gets a cut. What Dan has done, in fact, has found a way to take the edge off playing the lottery (i.e., you normally lose more money than you make in the long run because you normally have to pay for tickets), while in the process, offering advertisers a contagious way to get out the word for their products. So what’s the downside? Seriously, we’ve vetted it. There isn’t one. It’s 100 percent legal, 100 percent free and 100 percent win-win all the way around. And to make sure you believe us, we recently sat down with Mr. Bader to get the skinny on how it all works:

Phill Provance's Interview with My Free Lottery Pool Founder Dan Bader

I understand MFLP has members in 58 countries. What’s the site’s total membership roll at this point?
Well, I can't tell you exactly. It's a proprietary secret, you know. But we started about 10 weeks ago and currently have roughly 1,000 members around the globe.

In which countries?
Oh, tons! So far we've got folks in Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Canada - lots in India.... I could go on and on. It’s really just amazing!

Your press release says that your sponsors pay for the tickets. Could you walk me through how exactly this works?
Our advertising model is what I refer to as "reverse marketing." It's intended to attract those mass-market advertisers who will never have a major Web presence. For example, no one is going to purchase a Big Gulp, a bag of Fritos or a Starbucks latte over the Internet. But they will print out promotional coupons from our site that they can redeem in those retailers' outlets. Essentially, we drive consumers to the advertisers' retail outlets and to their corporate websites where they can participate in special marketing surveys and promotions... whatever the advertiser wants.

The huge benefit to advertisers is that we include their click-thru logos in all e-mail alerts that the member chooses from our E-mail Alert menu. The member will want to know things like: "Am I confirmed in the pool?" or "Did I get selected for the Final Members Pool?" So they'll opt-in for whatever alerts they want. This format allows us to offer a much higher advertising frequency than traditional advertising sites in a totally non-aggressive format.

And it's great for our members because they get to play lotteries all around the world - many of which they'd never otherwise have a chance to play - and they get to play them for free. It might sound counter-intuitive, but it really works and everybody gets something from it.

On the site, you mention donating a portion of the winnings to charitable organizations. Which ones will be included in these donations? How and why did you decide on these?
We’re still working on incorporating the charitable-organizations feature and hope to have it completed within the next week. Basically, though, when we set up a pool, we arbitrarily decide on three charities to give final-member positions to. The criteria we use are based on various factors such as global natural disasters or organizations like the Wounded Warriors Foundation for war veterans, the Red Cross... you know, whatever’s timely.

Is there a system for how you choose which lotteries to play?
Really, we make it up day-by-day. We look at the various lotteries, and we choose between them depending on how large their jackpots are. We're new, and we basically own our own niche, so we're playing it by ear and seeing what works.

Does the site take a cut from the pool along with the selected entrants and the charitable organizations?
The simple answer is yes: Jackpot Ventures retains one spot in each pool, and we give the sponsor of the pool one final-member position. So they could potentially recoup a good chunk of their entire advertising budget for the year just by going with us.

But the thing is, saying that doesn't really do our program justice because we plan to use that money for our promotions. For instance, what we're going to do with our first group of winners is throw a giant yacht party out here in California and fly everybody here to take pictures and just basically have fun. And that's about 100 people from all over the world we'll be flying in and putting up in hotels, so a lot of that money is going to go to defray costs. And, then, when the pool loses, we lose along with everyone else, so we aren’t really using that part of it for profit.

So final members who aren't part of the company or one of the advertisers, how are they selected for each pool?
Basically, when a pool closes we have a random-algorithm program that automatically runs and selects who is part of the final pool and who isn't. It's obviously more complicated than that, but that's how it works in a nutshell. So the bottom line is, it’s not a sure bet every time you enter a pool, but it’s free. And we really are the only free-lotto site online. We own the niche we’ve created, so there's no chance of anyone topping that. And, anyhow, how you beat "free" is beyond me.

But besides that, right now with our Reward Points system, members can enter the same pool an extra time for every seven points they collect. They can't enter more than one pool at a time – we’re just not there yet - but eventually, we'd like to get there, and also add private pools where players can send out e-mails to friends and say, "Hey join my private pool." These sorts of features will still be bankrolled by our advertisers, so they'll just give members more ways to increase their odds of getting selected for a winning pool. And the best part is, nobody gets hurt! Everybody wins in this. There’s just no downside.

All right. So now, if I register for every pool you offer consistently, what are my chances of getting one of those fat checks?
(Laughs) It’d take a real statistician to figure that one out. But it’s something we’re looking at. We'll be buying thousands of tickets as we go along here, so it will depend on how many pools we have open and how many entries you have in at one time. And then there's the difference in odds between lotteries, so we just haven’t gone down that road yet because it'd be next to impossible without some extra software and a little more time in the market - you know, to figure out what our regular players are and what their average behavior is. For now, we're just saying, "Hey, it’s free! Why not?" And we’re also offering valuable coupons, so why not? If you can to get a free six-pack of Red Bull at 7-Eleven and possibly win $10,000, are you really gonna turn that down?

As for legalities, are there any jurisdictions that MyFreeLotteryPool.com is forbidden to operate in?
Not that we are aware of. We purchase all of the tickets, and invite anyone to join our pool - no purchase necessary or anything. So there's actually no gambling or wagering that takes place. We don't take credit cards. Heck, we don't even charge anything. It'd be near impossible, for instance, for the U.S. federal government to say we're doing anything wrong because we're not actually a gambling site at all. And that's the way we plan to keep it.

Now say I am one of the winners and I won part of a pool for a European lottery; how do I, as a U.S. citizen, collect on that?
In that case, we'll have a licensed certified public-accounting firm send out claim forms to all the final members who won. The claim form will ask for photo identification (a passport or drivers license will work) to confirm the identity of the member and to confirm that they're over 18 years of age. The payout winnings will be divided equally among all the final members, and Jackpot Ventures will never touch the money.

You mentioned PDAs in your press release. What’s going on with that?
In the coming weeks we’ll be offering members the ability to receive e-mail alerts right on their PDA’s and cell phones. It’s currently in development.

Will there be any specific hardware or software requirements for the PDA program?
Not that I’m aware of. According to our guy at Strategic Productions, Brian Bickford, anyone with a BlackBerry or an iPhone - or any phone with a browser - can access MFLP right now. In the near future, though, we'll also offer text messaging through all U.S. carriers. The goal is to allow people to jump into pools any time, anywhere. If they’re waiting for a bus somewhere, for instance, they'll be able to jump into a pool and go on their way - then, hopefully, come home from work to find out they've won.

Well, I've just got to say, this whole free-lottery thing is brilliant! What made you think of it? What’s the story behind MyFreeLotteryPool.com?
First of all, thank you. But to answer your question: I'm a marketing guy by trade. I have an MBA in marketing, and I’ve always looked for a niche or a hole. Several years ago I was playing the lottery occasionally, and it occurred to me that there had to be tons of people playing. So I delved into it and found out literally hundreds of millions of people play worldwide.

Well, so I toyed with the idea of forming lottery pools whereby members would pay for an equal share of tickets in particular games, but the idea was a legal wash because of the UIGEA, which as you know, would make it impossible to do that sort of thing without breaking the law. But then, about two years ago, I was reading about Google and the fact that advertising dollars were driving their company into the stratosphere, and I thought, "Why not?" I checked on GoDaddy for “myfreelotterypool,” and I figured, with the 300 million Europeans and 100 million Americans that play at least once every month, I should be able to offer these people a way to play for free and sell advertising while doing it.

Have any of the pools won yet?
Not yet, but we sure have a lot of fingers crossed out there. Anyhow, that will eventually change. So far we've only played about 20 pools, but once we're in full swing, we should be up to about 12 pools at any one time, as well as daily pools for smaller lotteries. And your odds of winnings go up with those, so we figure we'll be handing out payouts left and right. We don't want to be handing out $10 checks of course. That just wouldn't be cost-effective. So, right now, we have a rule that if the pot is less than $10,000 we won't play it. That rule will change, though, because it puts limitations on us, and once we have more members, it just won't be feasible to do it that way. Instead, on the set-up of each pool we’ll determine the number of players we can pull in and still have a healthy payout. Our goal is to get everybody a check for $10,000 at least once. We may eventually have to drop that down to about $2,000, but still, couldn't everybody use a free $2,000 now and then?

OK. I have one more question and then I'm done, I promise: If Gamblingplanet.org has thousands of viewers per day and as an MFLP member I get a Reward Point for each person I refer to the site, how many Reward Points do I get for writing this article?
(Laughs) How about I just make you a free final member in your next pool?

Really?
Sure. It's my pool, right? I can do whatever I want!

- Phill Provance
phill.provance@gamblingplanet.org

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20-Dec-2008, 03:04

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