Depression?

Patrick has a neat post on his blog called "The Best Thing to Happen to Racing - A Depression". I too believe that racing has to hit bottom before it can put policies in place to make it grow.

Give it a read. It has some cold, hard truth to it.

As a player and someone wanting to see the sport grow, I do disagree with the ADW analogy - this is not a consumer durable business model. GM does get the most revenue because they are building cars, but we are not building cars, we are selling a gambling game.

The analogy we need to use is the internet one. Online gaming will probably garner well over $750 billion in handle this year, or next. We can not get a slice of that if huge percentages are taken away from the player. We will only grow if this is a low margin high volume business. Ebay took over the auction market and will be written about for centuries because it is high volume low margin (they take a small slice of a large number of sales by taking advantage of economies of scale). Etrade charges $10 a trade. In 1990 a $10,000 stock trade would cost you $300. Low margin, high volume wins on the internet, and is the antithesis of horseman and tracks fighting over who can get a bigger slice of the monster takeout we pay. Maybe if we do hit bottom we will blow up the system and start to position racing, allowing a new business model to thrive.