Online Gambling News

According to gambling market report released earlier in the week by UK Gambling Commission, online gambling is UK’s most popular form of gambling. The research ran through April last year to March this year.

Increased Revenue through Licensing

In November 2014, the UK government requested all online gambling operators to get licensed by the UK Gambling Commission. Since then, this report is the first to be held that covered an entire year. The report also shows that the licensed online gambling operators were able to generate revenue amount slightly less than £4.5billion.

This tax amounted to a third of the total revenue collected from the gambling market. In fact, this amount was more than what was collected from land based casinos, high street bookmakers and the National Lottery.

The report showed that the National Lottery was able to raise £3.4billion, bookmakers a little less than £3.3, and only £1billion for land-based casinos. Casino gaming, which remains to be UK’s most popular form of online gambling, was able to accrue £2.6b worth of revenues while slots provided £1.7billion. Also in the casino category is poker which raised a total of £99million worth of income.

The UK earned £1.8b from remote sports betting and £152.5m from bingo. Online betting related games were also included in the research whereby football made 37% of all revenue and horseracing made 22%. The “other” category made 9.9%.

There are online gamblers who chose to self-exclude themselves from the reporting period; they came in at 611k. Compared to the 180,000 that self-excluded in a six-month time frame from November 2014 to March 2015, this number is slightly higher.

During the coverage of this report by UK Gambling Commission, land based casino industries were not performing well. 95% of the non-remote betting were claimed by high street bookmakers while 4% were taken by pool betting operators. The remaining 1% was garnered by on-course racing bookies.

Betting Shops

As of September this year, the number of betting shops in the UK had decreased by almost 2% and were only 8,709 which was lower compared to the last reporting. Betfred, Ladbrokes, Gala Coral, and William Hill remained the major betting shop operators. Electronic gaming machines in these shops reduced by 1% but their revenue for the reported year increased by 3.5%.

However, as of March this year, land-based casinos recorded a 14% decrease in revenue to £1b thereby becoming the only category that saw a decline in revenue in the entire report.