Churn rate

What churn rate is

Churn rate is the share of customers who stop using your product within a given window — a month, a quarter, a season.

🔗 In iGaming the definition narrows to the player who was active or deposited in a prior period and did not return with a bet or deposit in the current one.

Two versions matter in practice: logo churn (players leaving) and revenue churn (spend disappearing). The former tells you about audience attrition; the latter shows how much earning power you have lost.

Both should be read through cohorts rather than aggregates, because the July cohort behaves differently from the one that joined during football season.

The calculation is plain.

Take the number of players who were active in Period A and absent in Period B, divide by the number active in Period A, and you have the period’s player churn. For revenue churn, compare stake, GGR, or net revenue from the same cohort across the two periods.

What complicates a simple fraction is the calendar. Sports calendars, local holidays, new regulations — all conspire to make two adjacent months look unlike each other.

Churn is, at heart, a story about behavior change over time, so the context around that time matters as much as the numerator.

The operator’s lens

Operators do not “fight churn” in the abstract — they redesign journeys to prevent people from quietly leaving.

• Onboarding friction is one culprit: if KYC steps are unclear or deposit instruments fail too often, players leak before they ever meet the product.
  
• Lobby editorial is another: a week of uninspired placement can make a new depositor behave like a lapsed one.
  
• And then there is the cadence of communication. Brands that match messages to player intent — a precise prompt to continue a bonus trail, a clear reminder of an event that fits the player’s sport — see slower attrition than those who broadcast the same offer to everyone, every Friday.

Retention math is unforgiving, but it is not mysterious. Day-1, day-7 and day-30 return rates, average sessions per user, and the share who reach a game’s core feature are the daily instruments. If day-7 softens, you do not need a new mechanic — you need players to find the ones you already have.

This is why even small adjustments to search, categories, and first-screen tiles can move churn in ways that raw acquisition cannot.

📖 You can check the most popular games via Blask Game Visibility Rank. Read more in a quick tour.

Providers and affiliates

Providers read churn as verdicts on clarity.

If newcomers cannot understand how a feature triggers, they will not return to try it again. This is why re-spin and bonus-entry cues have become larger and language in the paytable plainer.

Affiliates, for their part, reduce churn by setting expectations. A review that shows a game’s tempo honestly creates return visits; a clip that strings together unlikely jackpots trains viewers to expect something no operator can sustainably deliver.

Measuring and managing churn with Blask

Churn is a house-metric, but it never lives alone. External signals help you decide whether you are watching a product problem or a market tide. This is where Blask’s lenses are useful.

Blask Index shows whether overall attention to iGaming brands in your market is rising or falling in near real time. If your churn worsens while the index climbs, you are likely under-merchandising or over-complicating flows relative to rivals.

If churn worsens while the index falls, part of the story is ambient demand — plan retention around that backdrop rather than against it.

Seasonality demands caution.

Month-to-month churn can look worse simply because last month’s sports calendar was friendlier. Reading index deltas year-over-year and month-over-month keeps you honest about that backdrop. The moment search intent moves, YoY/MoM in Blask registers it — which helps you separate a true retention issue from a calendar quirk.

🔍 A concise guide sits here: How to use Blask for analyzing the iGaming industry: 6 use cases

Churn never travels far from acquisition.

Acquisition Power Score (APS) estimates how efficiently you convert attention into new customers. If churn climbs while APS also rises, you are filling a leaking bucket — your top-of-funnel is outpacing retention, which can mask the problem until paid budgets tighten. If APS is flat and churn grows, the house is shrinking at both ends and needs immediate editorial fixes in the lobby and CRM.

Revenue discipline completes the picture. Competitive Earning Baseline (CEB) helps you benchmark expected earnings given your market position. When churn tick-up coincides with a CEB drift down, it confirms that attrition is not just cosmetic — it is eroding the floor of your P&L.

Conversely, if CEB holds while churn blips, you may be losing low-value actives while retaining high-value ones — a different operational response.

📚 Read more: Leading the shift: ushering in APS & CEB for a new era of brand performance

Read the quartet, not a solo
Churn describes who left; APS describes who arrived; Blask Index describes the tide; CEB describes the cash. The shape of those four together tells you whether to edit the lobby, fix the flow, or simply respect the season.

A working method

Pick a cohort window and freeze it. Track logo and revenue churn for that cohort week by week. On the same chart, annotate changes to the lobby’s first screen, deposit flow, KYC steps, and CRM copy. In a second pane, keep the Blask Index and MoM line for your market to control for ambient demand. In a third, monitor APS and CEB.

When churn jumps on the same day you quietly moved a core game off the top row, you have your culprit. When churn changes while your external lines are flat, the problem is inside your app, not in the air.