First Mega Millions Drawing At $5 Price Point Generates Estimated $25 Million In Spending

Tuesday night marked a historic occasion in the lottery world, as little white and gold balls were drawn for the first-ever $5-per-ticket Mega Millions game.

The results weren’t great for players overall, as the winning numbers of 10, 16, 50, 60, and 61 with a Mega Ball of 17 produced neither a perfect six-for-six jackpot ticket nor a single Match 5 winner.

But the results seem solid for Mega Millions, as estimated public spending at the new price rose 18.6% over last Friday’s drawing, the last at the $2 price point.

There were 217,904 total winners on Tuesday, and with overall chances of winning a prize now calculated as 1-in-23, that means Lottery Geeks can estimate that 5.01 million tickets were sold for Tuesday.

At $5 apiece, that translates to an estimated $25.06 million in sales.

For the final $2 drawing, Mega Millions retailers and online vendors sold an estimated 9.11 million tickets. To calculate the amount spent, Lottery Geeks takes into account that an estimated 32% of players (according to state lottery data) were paying an extra $1 for the Megaplier in recent years, meaning the average dollar amount spent per ticket at the $2 price point was actually $2.32.

And that leaves us with an estimated $21.13 million in sales for last Friday’s drawing.

It was expected that, with the price hike, the number of tickets sold would decrease while the dollars spent would increase. Indeed, according to our estimates, ticket sales were down 45%, and spending rose 18.6%.

Of jackpots and Megapliers

It’s important to note that comparing drawings is never a perfect apples-to-apples situation because sales figures fluctuate based on jackpot size. For Friday’s drawing, the advertised jackpot was $43 million. For Tuesday night, it was $54 million. So some unquantifiable amount of that 18.6% sales increase is owed to the fact that a $54 million jackpot attracts marginally greater interest than one worth $43 million.

For a completely different point of comparison, the last Mega Millions jackpot winner, on March 25, when the advertised jackpot was $344 million (in the end, the amount was recalculated as $349 million), Lottery Geeks estimates 14.88 million tickets were sold, translating to $34.5 million in spending — quite a bit more business than the first $5 drawing generated.

Under the new Megaplier rules, every ticket comes with an automatic multiplier, but the sizes vary from 2x to 10x and are determined at random.

Mega Millions now shares data on how many tickets won at each Megaplier value, and Tuesday’s drawing produced the following breakdown among winners:

• 2x: 46.7%
• 3x: 31.1%
• 4x: 12.6%
• 5x: 6.3%
• 10x: 3.2%

Strong marketing will be key to the success of Mega Millions sales at the new price, and to that end, the New York Lottery is doing its part with a new series of commercials: