I'd go further than that, because the way I see it UK domains should be owned by UK people, UK search results should show UK results, and anyone setting up to advise a UK audience should be based here and answerable here.

If you're serving the UK, you should answer to it. We pay our tax here, remember, on money from UK players who pay theirs here too, while the overseas affiliates, the ones doing the promoting rather than the operators who actually run the games, take that same money out of the country and leave nothing behind them.

The independents here know this field better than anyone, but none of that counts for much if the industry won't let them survive.

I know all that sounds controversial, and it'll raise a few eyebrows. Women over 40 usually do.

It isn't only me feeling it, either. Alice cried herself a pool and near drowned in it, and this lot have gone and built one the same way, with the honest affiliates left treading water in it.

I'm hearing of UK ones who've already jacked it in, and others openly talking about walking away, and that's experience and local knowledge leaving the field for good, the sort that doesn't come back. So hear this, if you're on the operator side: you're losing your affiliates, and you're losing the honest ones first. Ask yourself this, though, would your brand have done half as well back in the day without affiliates like us pointing players your way?

Who's Behind the Screen

It's the players who'd feel this most, if only they knew. Bingo chat hosts used to be UK-based, to a person, part of the same community as the people playing, same towns and same sense of humour, and lately those jobs are going overseas and UK folk are losing them.

I should know, because I tried to get my old chat host job back, and I was told "no room, no room". Well, for the UK lot anyway. When the chat room gets going about last night's EastEnders, you're half hoping the host has seen it too, ready to gasp along with the rest of you.

And it's the same with the bingo itself, because you expect whoever's running it to be playing it, popping down the clubs, knowing the game from the inside. A lot of players would stop tomorrow if they knew the host they were nattering to wasn't in the UK at all, and plenty would never click a site in the first place if they knew it wasn't British-run, but the trouble is they've no way of telling the real thing from a painted card.

I'll say this plainly, because I know how it can sound. It isn't about where anyone's from. It's about where a business is based and who it answers to, and about knowing who's on the other side of the screen, because the players built this as a community, and a community means you know who you're talking to. Right now they don't, and nobody's telling them.

A word, too, for the managers chasing the TikToks and the Instas, forever hunting the next young crowd to sell gambling to. Online bingo isn't the young crowd. The younger lot do love their bingo, but they're out at the Bongo's Bingo and the party nights, dabbing with a drink in one hand and a mate in the other, not sat at home chasing a fishing reel. Online bingo is the Facebook generation, the forty-somethings and a good bit either side of that, the ones still happily on Facebook and still clicking onto a website to find what they want. I know that for a fact, because when I'm not on Glitzy I build websites for those very people, and that's who turns up. I know the players, too, because I live here, I play bingo, I go to the events, and I talk to the very people who play, not a focus group three time zones away. You'll not reach them with a fifteen-second video they'll never see. You reach them where they already are.

This is who that online audience really is, the part the managers forget. It's the ones who can't get out, the ones who are a bit vulnerable, who can't make it down to the local hall any more, sat at home of an evening with the telly on in the background, that same EastEnders, dabbing their numbers. That's who you're talking to, and a good few of them are lonely. They want a chat room for the company, a little cheeky game, and to win a few quid while they're at it, nothing more complicated than that. Online bingo does the same job for them the hall did for their mam, the company and the chat and a reason to log on, and they deserve better than being handed a slot machine with a dabber on it.

Look at why the charity lottos do so well. Bingo is lotto and lotto is bingo when you boil it down, the same business of drawing numbers and hoping yours come up, so this is the same crowd really. People play the charity ones because they know exactly where their money's going, and who the people are behind it. That's the whole of it. Folk trust what they can see and understand, and they're right to.

That's the thing, really. Mine has always been a UK-based, honest business, run from here and answerable here, with a real person behind it you could put a face to. That's what Glitzy's always been, and it's what folk still want.

One Ask to the Operators and Agencies

So, operators, if you reckon it's all gone as mad as the March Hare sat at the tea table, you'd not be wrong, and the honest affiliates need some help here. This is me coming to the ones I've worked with, cap in hand. If you value Glitzy Bingo as a partner, put my brand on your affiliate page as a testimonial, with a do-follow link, the kind that actually passes Google a vote of confidence rather than the sort that counts for nothing. I'm not after a bottle marked drink me or a key to a secret garden, just a link, because that one small thing tells Google I'm a real business vouched for by real ones, which is the very thing the link ring burns all its energy faking. If partners won't start backing the honest web affiliates, there'll be no British ones left. Only the ring.

Off With Her Head

Then there's the regulation, and the regulator's gone full Queen of Hearts, sentence first and verdict after. The way UK online bingo gets treated now, you'd think it was more dangerous than smoking, because it's lumped in with online slots under the same rules, and it's off with her head for bingo and slots in the same breath, no telling one from the other. The caution around slots, fair enough. But bingo, the community game my readers actually play, gets caught in the very same net, and the way things are going it only goes one way.

I reckon that's half of why the taxes on online bingo sit where they do, because when the whole online space looks like one long mad tea party of clones and slot reels, the entire trade wears it. A name like Mecca Bingo, running bingo clubs since the sixties, ends up painted with the same brush as some domain that turned up last Tuesday, and the ones who've done it right for decades pay for the look of the rest.

Back to My Other Passion

So I'm climbing back out of the rabbit hole, towards the thing I was trying to reach the whole way down. There's a garden on the other side, and mine's eyupmiduck.co.uk, my web studio, and from now on my main work. And before anyone asks "do you build affiliate sites", no sorry. There is enough bingo competition. 

The truth of it is, I get the local Derbyshire people the same way I get the bingo players, because I live among both and I build for businesses within 6 miles of where I live. The café down the road, the tradesman, the groomer taking her bookings off Facebook at nine at night, they're my neighbours, the same as the women I natter to in the chat rooms are my crowd. It's the one instinct behind the lot of it, knowing who you're building for because you see them at the shop and the school gates. You build better for people you actually know. There is no main bingo clubs in these areas. These are the locals that would like open the Sun Bingo app or play a game of Foxy Bingo - and these people are my people and they don't like anything selling them a talking flower that turns out to be a thistle.

Am I closing Glitzy Bingo? Not a chance, and I want to be clear on that, because I know how a piece like this can be read.

I'm not walking away from bingo, and I'm not walking away from the bingo sites I work with. The regulars still get pointed to the reputable, licensed brands, same as always, because that's the job, sending players somewhere safe, and I'll keep doing it. What I'm doing is widening what I build, not dropping what I love.

None of this is meant to offend anyone either, I want to be clear on that. But a world where we all keep quiet doesn't work, and I've been quiet long enough.

To the handful still doing bingo affiliates the honest way, respect to you. You know who you are.

Plenty of affiliates are walking away for good now, and I understand why, but I'm not one of them. I'll keep going, though keeping going doesn't always pay the bills, and that's the honest reason I'm tending a second garden alongside it. I'm staying put, keeping Glitzy going, and hoping the industry comes to its senses, because I'd dearly love to be proved wrong. There's room for both. And if you are an operator and got this far.. don't forget that link, it is my way of climbing out of the rabbit hole. 

The Tea Party can keep its hatters. I'm not going anywhere and neither is my head.