An introduction to, and background of Win.ly - Part 2

In part 1, I gave a history of how the initial idea behind Win.ly came about.

Now a little more about how it all came together.  There are really three elements to estimating the chances you have of winning a game.  They are:

1. Number of prizes
2. Frequency of prizes won
3. Number of visitors competing for these prizes.

If you knew all three of these, you'd know the exact odds of winning a prize.

Now #1 and #2 are relatively easy.  All of these games are required to publish rules that specifically state quite a few parameters which can then be used to always exactly determine the number and frequency of prize awardings.

But there is no way to know the number of visitors exactly unless you have access to inside reports from those who run the game.

But in recent years, a number of services have arisen that give some glimpses into traffic.  The challenge for the Win.ly Rating Engine was to gather these diverse statistics from various sources and then arrange them appropriately to gather a close approximation of the traffic.

That, along with the exact answers to 1 and 2 give us a close approximation of the odds of winning any given game.

And that is the magic of Win.ly.  The rating engine runs every night, automatically gathers thousands of statistical points from various services, rates every single promotion based on estimated odds of winning, then ranks them in order from best to worst.

And the difference from best to worst is quite significant.  More on the odds we've found in a later post.  But promotions at the top of the list have proven to win in less than two weeks in some circumstances.

Promotions at the bottom you could most likely play for several lifetimes and never win.

So the value for Win.ly is not only providing a tool that might allow a player to win more prizes, but also one that will save a lot of time that might otherwise be wasted on games that have extremely low odds of winning.

Sign up for a month of premium membership at Win.ly.  It doesn't cost very much.  And then let us know your results.  We're pretty sure that you'll be more than impressed.

An introduction to, and background of Win.ly - Part 1

The initial idea for Win.ly arose several years ago.  I happened upon an instant win game that had a not uncommon issue, the game was up and live prior to when the marketing around it was really able to get organized.

So the end result?  The instant win game was very hard to find, but once you found about it, every play was a winner.


That's right.  There were so few people coming to play the instant win game that everyone won.

The reason this happened has a lot to do with the way most promotion firms run their instant win games.  (More details on this in a later post).  Suffice to say for now that there is generally an allocation of prizes per day.  So if less people came in that day than there are prizes, everyone wins.

This obviously doesn't happen too often and when it does, it's very hard to find about.  But it leads to another conclusion.  What if a game is getting low traffic for other reasons? Maybe not so extreme as the above example, but let's say it's only getting 500 visitors per day and giving away 50 prizes per day.

Every instant win game play then has about a one in ten chance of winning.  That means if you played the instant win each day you would only have to play for about a week and a half (on average) to win a prize.

That led to wondering how many games are the opposite--getting tens of thousands of visits per day for a small number of prizes.  Making the chance of winning almost zero and any time spent paying a complete waste.

In part two, I'll describe how all the pieces came together and the Win.ly rating engine got started.

In the meantime, stop by and visit Win.ly and check it out.  Drop me a note if you have comments, I've been known to give out free Premium subscriptions for valuable feedback. :)