Online Gambling industry

 

While it’s hard to place an exact figure on the overall size of the online gambling industry, various estimates range from about $20 billion-$50 billion per year in revenue, with about 20,000-30,000 active sites serving customers. The online gambling industry encompasses a wide range of sites, including online casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms, bingo parlors, lotteries, horse racing sites, and more.

 

 

While it’s hard to place an exact figure on the overall size of the online gambling industry, various estimates range from about $20 billion-$50 billion per year in revenue, with about 20,000-30,000 active sites serving customers. The online gambling industry encompasses a wide range of sites, including online casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms, bingo parlors, lotteries, horse racing sites, and more.

With online gambling companies located and clustered in countries with friendly licensing regulations (such as Canada, Curacao, Gibraltar, Costa Rica, Belize, and Panama), the industry can be a major source of jobs, especially for smaller countries. Not only do operators hire executives, software programmers, and marketing staff, but they commonly maintain very large support staffs to be available 24 hours a day to handle customer service.

Online gambling is still considered a growth industry, as it only began to boom and see real growth in the late 1990s, but it has experienced growing pains in recent years, largely because of anti-gambling legislation in countries such as the US. While the US remains one of the largest markets for online gambling, it has become a risky one in recent years, with the US government passing laws in recent years to enable them to prosecute executives and firms involved in online gaming, including financial institutions that knowingly do business with online operators.

Other countries have followed suit in an attempt to stamp out online wagering, while others have taken the more pragmatic approach of licensing and regulating (and taxing) online gaming within their own country. Despite anti-gambling trends in some countries, the industry overall continues to show steady growth year over year, especially as new markets in Europe, Asia, and South America are developed.

The online gambling industry includes this sub-sectors:

Online sports betting

Probably the largest and most well known part of the industry. Companies such as betfair.com are listed on the London Stock Exchange, while traditional bookmakers such as Ladbrokes have large and growing online arms.

Online casinos

Online casinos automate such casino games as roulette, blackjack and baccarat. Players can play either against the central server, or in larger games with other online players.

Online poker

Online poker games, particularly Texas Hold ‘Em Poker and Stud variations, have gained increasing popularity. Non-gambling poker games proliferate on social and gaming sites like Facebook and Yahoo! Games, while the gambling versions have large and active followings.

Find out more about the industry.

Online Sports Betting

Online sports betting is a massive and growing business.

Other Forms of Online Games

Online games are one of the main growth areas of the internet, rivaling online gambling in addictiveness. This started with casual games like Manic Miner back in the PC era and on to the likes of Bejewelled on Yahoo! Games, developed into massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, and onto the latest mega-trend: social games.

Thanks to its massive Facebook games, Zynga has become the biggest game company in the world, with FarmVille alone attracting over 56m players. Its newest game, FrontierVille, is the fastest growing game in history. It attracted over 5m players within one week, and had reached over 20m within a month, according to Frontier Ville wiki FrontierVillians.com.