UPDATE: April 8th 2023 

The next live draw will be later on in the year. 

We know, it’s not ideal but there is a method in our madness folks and to be completely transparent here are the reasons why and what is going on in the background. 

One of the constant battles of running any competition website is with Facebook and Instagram (Meta) which of course are the main advertising platforms for any online  competition business.  

Even though Watch Winner has prior RMG Licence approval and cleared to advertise competitions on these platforms their bots and algorithms seem to do all the thinking and decision making with no human interaction with exception to the RMG approval process at the very start.  

Few of you were aware but on December 23rd 2022 our ad accounts with Meta were locked by these bots and algorithms leaving us many weeks without any real form of advertising at all. At the time we decided to keep going, take the hit rather than postpone any competitions as quite a few were already live. 

You probably noticed at the time that our competitions to win a watch were not made live in advance from that stage and prize value decreased also as a result. This was a precaution just in case it happened again without notice and a good move as it turns out. 

A 2nd set of ad accounts were set up in January. When this happens Meta places a cap on new ad accounts and what a business can spend, i.e. £21 a day for the first month which slowly increases over a 4 or 5 month period to reach maturity. Needless to say, a laughable advertising budget of £21 on a competition draw day will do nothing for any competition site and businesses. As you know 95% of advertising happens on draw day. 

Then, yet again, yesterday (April 7th) our 2nd lot of new ad accounts which had still not reached their full potential were also locked. Leaving us now with no choice but to start all over again for a 3rd time. 

Therefore the decision has been made to open new sets of ad accounts and allow them to work in the background over a few months and then pick this up again when the spend cap is back to normal and how it was November/December last year. It takes between 4 and 5 months for a Meta ad account to reach maturity and enough to have a real impact on competition ticket sales. Until this time our hands are pretty much tied. 

It’s obvious that there’s no point in doing competitions to win a watch if you can’t sell tickets for it. We will also be implementing a ‘triple’ backup plan should this happen again which is highly likely due to Meta’s track record, twice so far in our first 9 months. 

All 48 competition prizes to date, except one which is still awaiting delivery have been given out to winners. This prize will follow in the next few days once delivered to us. 

In a few months you will see our next set of competitions go live on the website and the next live draw will be announced. This date is yet to be confirmed, but rest assured it will happen as too much time, money and effort has gone into Watch Winner to just give up. We hope you understand that this has to be done the right way to achieve decent enough ticket sales. 

The second these next competitions go live we will post to social media so please make sure you follow us on Facebook or Instagram to receive this update. 

Thanks for the support so far and see you later in the year. Wayne