People who play the lottery have had a busy month.
The Mega Millions prize has grown to $1.15 billion before the drawing on December 27. There was no winner in the drawing on Christmas Eve. Numbers put together by LottoReport.com show that this is the biggest win of its kind for either of the two main multistate lottery games, Mega Millions and Powerball, in the busy month of December.
Mega Millions says that the drawing on December 27 will happen at 11 p.m. Eastern time. The one-time payment is set at $516.1 million.
Ticket sales naturally go through the roof when the jackpot is big, especially when it gets close to or goes over $1 billion. The biggest jackpot in U.S. lotto history was $2.04 billion for the Powerball game on November 7, 2022.
The current Mega Millions jackpot isn’t the only thing making people more interested in the lottery this season. Also, a lot of people buy quick lottery tickets, also known as “scratchers” or scratch-off games, as gifts this time of year, especially to put in their stockings.
Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., who studies the lottery business, said that around the holidays in December, sales of these scratch-off games usually go up by 5 to 10 percent.
Jenny McIntosh is one of the people who has been excited about the draw this time of year. The public relations manager in the Phoenix area likes to give scratch-off tickets as gifts, but she said last week that this year she was going all out. She planned to give each member of her family about $50 worth of scratchers and Mega Millions tickets.
“It’s the thrill.” “The possibilities are what make me spend so much of my gift budget on lottery tickets,” McIntosh said.
Of course, McIntosh says that her lottery gifts haven’t won her any big prizes in the past. With odds of about 1 in 303 million, getting the Mega Millions jackpot is not a very good chance.
Another thing that might cause lottery sales to go up in December is the popularity of mobile lottery apps like Jackpocket.com and Jackpot.com, which let people buy tickets without going to a real lottery store.
In this area, Jackpocket.com has become a very strong player. It can now be bought in 17 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. The company was bought by the huge sports betting site DraftKings DKNG -0.83% earlier this year for $750 million.
A senior vice president at DraftKings named Peter Sullivan said that people will always be more interested in lottery games in December, no matter how big the jackpot is. “The holiday season often brings a happy mood that can affect sales of lottery tickets,” he said.
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Jackpot.com Akshay Khanna agrees. Khanna said that sales of gift cards on his platform, which is offered in seven states, have been very good this holiday season.
Dawn Nettles, publisher of LottoReport.com, said that lottery tickets shouldn’t be thought of as holiday gifts because the odds of getting anything big are so low.
She told him, “That’s a waste of money.”
