Online bingo
game of chance
Online bingo is the game of bingo (either the US or UK variant) played on the Internet. Sites offering the game launched around 1996, and the global gross gaming yield outside of the United States was estimated at US$500 million in 2006, forecast to grow to $1 billion by 2010.
Unlike physical balls used in regular bingo halls, online bingo sites use a random number generator. Most bingo halls also offer links to online poker and casino offerings as the patrons are often in the target market. One notable feature of online bingo is the chat functionality, with sites striving to foster a sense of community and interaction between players to assist customer retention.
History
One of the earliest known online bingo games, launched in 1996, was a free bingo game called "Bingo Zone". To play, members had to provide demographic information; in turn, members would receive targeted ads based on the demographics provided. Another early pioneer for free online bingo was Uproar, which launched Bingo Blitz in 1998.
Legality
The game of bingo has been able to sidestep many of the laws which ban gambling online. In England, for instance, section 65 of the 1928 Royal Commission Report on Gambling states, “Bingo is a lottery played as a game.” The report details that a game of chance is different than that of casino games, even requiring separate licensing.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Online bingo” is game of chance. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Online, bingo and game, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7094063. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2006, 2010 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Online bingo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.