With a great fanfare (of sorts), the Monday Lottery launches today, proclaiming itself to be “the charities lottery.” And there was me, cynically thinking that it was just a commercial operation run by Chariot UK plc…
But let’s have a look at that charities connection shall we? Well their website lists 70 charities who, I assume, are all benefitting to one extent or another. And the proud boast is that “30p from every ticket bought goes directly to charity – five times more than on the National Lottery.”
Very impressive. Except that if you go to the National Lottery Good Causes website it says that “for every £1 spent on a National Lottery ticket, 28p goes to good causes.”
2p less than the Monday Lottery is offering, certainly, but not one fifth the amount. I suspect that the Monday Lottery makes that boast because when some of your National Lottery cash replaces the roof of your local youth club, that’s not actual charity work. Similarly, when various promising Olympians are offered lottery cash to continue training in their sports, it can’t be argued as being charity work. But the fact is that nearly as much cash is going to good causes as in this new lottery.
But then there’s cash to be saved elsewhere. No retailer costs. No equipment costs. No complicated IT infrastructure linking all those machines in a secure fashion back to base. No duty payable. Internet only play keeps the costbase low. The minimum spend level is higher at £5 – you don’t have to play it all at once, but they’ve got your money, and are earning interest.
I think these two charts explain it pretty well:

Source: Lottery Good Causes website.

Source: Guardian/Press Association
That 15p is for the “development of new products and operational costs.” Profits are also from that 15p.
Monday Lottery does claim to offer better odds at 501,000:1 to win the jackpot which might be either £100,000 or £200,000. However, I’ll leave others to calculate the full “expected win” odds of this game.
Incidentally, can it be a good thing that the Monday Lottery’s server is falling over all the time today? A broken website means you can’t play the game.