The recent problems surrounding the News of the World of hacking into voice mail messages to gain information for articles has clearly shocked the British public and led to one of the best known newspapers running its final print on Sunday 10th July. The termination of publishing even after 168 years was imminent but there was some uncertainty of related operations. As with most newspapers the media was associated with its own online bingo site.

While online bingo operators such as Mecca Bingo and Gala Bingo are successful because of their well known brand within the bingo industry, online bingo fans would be unlikely to think to be attracted to non bingo branded online bingo sites without the use of high profile marketing campaigns. Clearly these come with high costs and for these reasons a lot of bingo sites available to UK players fail to attract large numbers of players or end up closing down within a short space of time. The News of the World bingo site had the advantage of free publicity in one of the biggest Sunday papers in the UK and as most people are not working on a Sunday and it is the most popular day to play bingo it was a match made in heaven. Without the paper it was clearly evident that the business model for the online bingo site was now flawed.

The Sunday paper which is owned by News Corp. is also the sister paper of the Sun which has its own online bingo website. It was clearly an odds on favourite that the following the news that the News of the World bingo would be merged with the Sun Bingo site and this is exactly what has happened. On the website there is a statement from the Head of NOTW Bingo, Barry Sage, which tells players that the site has been permanently moved to Sun Bingo and that players can be confident that they can log on to the sister site to play or withdraw funds from their account should they wish to. As the Sun Bingo site uses the same software players are unlikely to find the experience that much different from what they were used to.