Even though the online poker industry is making tons of money as a whole, the market is still cluttered with rooms providing virtually the same service. About the only true division is that pure poker rooms concentrate on only providing poker and sportsbook/poker rooms run poker games in addition to the online gambling services they run. Seeing as how they market is already crowded enough, some rooms like Duplicate Poker and Bugsy’s Club have been forced to close their cyber doors within the last year.
But there are still some companies out there who use innovation as their tool for gaining a foothold within the online poker world. Zen Gaming is one such place since they are seeking to take their operation in a different direction from the norm.
Basically, Zen Gaming is going to differentiate itself from other poker rooms by providing a totally free poker room service. Obviously just doing this alone is not going to make Zen Gaming any money so they’ve decided to make their profits through “Advergaming”. What this equates to is lining up lots of online advertisements around the actual game people are playing. And you might think that this would be super distracting, but from the pictures I’ve seen it doesn’t look like it will interfere too much.
Still I’m not sure if Advergaming has a legitimate shot of upending the free services provided by many other poker rooms. Most people get into free online poker with the intention of someday playing for real money and that’s why they get started at somewhere like PokerStars or Full Tilt. On the other hand, Advergaming is a pretty unique concept and I think Zen Gaming might be able to attract a number of casual players who have no interest in playing for real cash in the future.