I posted about Play Monday’s awful website a while back. Since then, little has changed on the usability front – apart from them adding a link to play future draws.
I did suspect it would improve fairly quickly, but I was getting a little suspicious that things weren’t quite as they seemed the other day…
From an email they sent out, the prize for matching just four numbers a couple of weeks ago was apparently £4,075!! I thought I’d check that… schurely schome mischtake? Then I noticed that on Monday’s website that they don’t declare the amount of winners or even the winning £ amount for each prize tier. Hmmm!
So it’s not really any surprise to me to read that Monday now seem to be in trouble. Biiiiig trouble!
I don’t think they are trying to con anyone, but I am pretty sure they are doing their best to hide the lack of actual players and this BBC news story pretty much confirms that.
Now the reliability of Alexa data is a whole new kettle of fish, so I’ll save that for another day – but it does give a very broad overview of what’s happening with a site. Here’s the last three months Alexa reach data for playmonday.com:
That clearly shows the benefit of a heavy advertising campaign to promote the new lottery. The first week saw the website go down due to high demand. Doh! After the first week, people just didn’t want to seem to return. Why?
Was it the crap website? The overly complicated ‘how to play’ pages? Poor ad campaign? Or the problems accessing the website that drove people away after the first week?
Compare the above to the National Lottery’s website:
You can see that Monday’s impact was tiny against the National Lottery’s established lead. We know the prize fund for each National Lottery draw, so you can assume that Monday’s is going to be pretty small in comparison. What’s also interesting is the trend of decline for the National Lottery!
Judging by Chariot’s Plc’s (ie Monday) share price, which closed at just 8p today…
…you have to think that it’s a dead duck now.
Now I’m not going to say “I told you so”, but did lack of usability help kill off internet-only Monday?
Your previous comments on the usability are sage-like and then your above anlalysis brings some science to the unfortunate conclusion that “Monday’s days are over”. I am afraid I saw the writing on the wall on launch-day when their site crashed most of thel day because it wasnt up to the traffic. Sounds like you work in new-media so I don’t have to tell you that Chariot had one chance at convincing the public that their planning has been robust enough. Chariot failed on the first hurdle. That’s not to mention the scandalous lack of transparency, visibility and fat pay-cheques in the corner offices and now begging the Charities they originally were meant to fund, for funding! A case-study on how to not to go about a web-based, charity partnership.