We’ve known for a while now that online gambling has been on a steady increase in both profitability and popularity. If you look at a chart for profits and market share worldwide as far as online gambling is concerned (in any and all of its forms – betting, casino, bingo, you name it), you’re going to see a very steady and often drastic increases in the number of people who are willing to bet money on online casino games and betting sites. I mean, just look at the increase from ten years ago until today! In 2005, the market share of online casino games was a meager 13 billion dollars, which isn’t bad by any means, but it’s nothing that’s going to blow a market analyst’s mind. It’s not something that you show to an investor to convince them that this is where the next big thing is at. 13 billion dollars worldwide is average, very, very average. It’d be decent for a single business, sure, but for an entire industry?
Compare the numbers to 10 years later, though, and all of a sudden you see an entirely different picture forming. In 2015, the online gambling industry had an estimated 41.4 billion dollars’ worth of market shares. That’s a 200% increase, and is a whole damn lot. While still nowhere near rivaling the share that physical casinos (and only casinos) have, the industry’s growing at an increasing rate in the entire world. A 200% increase in market share in 10 years is great – at this rate, we’re looking at a 400% or even 500% increase by 2025. The bigger the market share is for a company, the easier it is for it to keep growing even more. Let’s compare casino gaming to a flu, shall we? Let’s imagine that only one person has the flu, and one out of ten people they speak to gets infected, and everyone speaks with about 10 people a day. That means that today we’re going to have 1 person who is sick, tomorrow we’ll have 2, the day after that – four. In ten years we’ll have a slow, but very steady increase of sick people, but the more people there are who have the flu, the more it’ll spread. So the amount of people who get infected between years 1-10 will be significantly smaller than those who catch the flu in years 11-20, as year 11 will see a whole lot more carriers spreading it.
Online casino will work in precisely the same way. This isn’t an activity that’s aimed at a niche – it’s something that has to be as mainstream as, saying paying for apps and mobile games if it wants to truly break out. Ads thus far have mostly been aimed towards niches and existing gamblers, which is a very bad way to promote something like this. As such, I’m expecting that in the coming years, as the amount of gamblers increases, word of mouth is going to start spreading and leading to a bigger increase. And we’re not just talking about the big casino markets, such as the UK, the US and Germany. As online gambling starts being legalized in more and more countries, various markets begin seeing an explosion in its popularity, for very obvious reasons. Spain, for example, has seen a 26% increase in its annual revenue, which is insane! Remember – we’re talking pure profits here, not market share like before. Sweden and other European countries are also seeing a gigantic jump in people who play online casino games, and that interest is only going to keep growing in the next few years.
Asia, which has always been fairly conservative as far as online gambling is concerned (or, well, any kind of gambling), is gradually warming up to legalizing it. With each passing year, we’re seeing online casino