Online casino news ? Overview of the online gambling industry

Online gambling is still in its early stages. Despite its relative infancy the market has forged established casino operators. Soon enough, online gambling will be made easy with interactive tv., or web tv. Players will soon order local lottery products, play casino games, or bet with a sportsbook with relative ease.

Over the years, the industry has seen a rise and fall of unprofessional casino sites. The internet, with its complex legal and political nature towards online gambling, has produced internationally recognized standards associations, such as ecorga and the interactive gaming council. Web brokered games of chance, as well as the online casino and sportsbook industry, are expanding at a phenomenal rate. Market share and growth will only be found by the exceptional operators that offer the very best and can attract and retain players.

Composition of the e-gaming industry

Online gambling can take many forms. In order to have a closer look at where the majority of the revenues are generated it is useful to divide the market into different segments.

The following graphs depicts the breakdown of the worldwide online gambling market in terms of revenues generated based on Datamonitor estimates for the year 2002.

The above chart illustrates that online casinos make up the most significant segment of the online gaming industry in terms of revenues generated. Datamonitor's forecast that online gamblers will spend more than $30bn by 2005, from a starting point of almost $15bn in 2001, shows the enormous growth rate in this market.

Key markets

As the market develops and continues to mature and the industry continues to broaden its appeal to a wider range of new customers, the uptake of online gambling services will continue to rise. According to Datamonitor the number of regular online gamblers will grow from almost 10m today to over 15m by 2005.

The US is the largest single market for the Internet gambling industry today. However, analysts forecast a surge in e-gambling for other regions of the globe. As savvy operators offer multilingual services and appeal to the likes of many cultures, e-gambling will grow at an steadily increasing rate. Despite this the US market is predicted to maintain strong growth in the number of online gamblers, with more than 4m customers estimated by 2005. As can be seen in the graph below, turnover from US consumers for the online gambling industry will grow at a compound annual rate of 21% to reach a total of over $7.6bn by 2005.

Another key geographical source of online gamblers will be the Asia-Pacific region, which is forecast to have 7.7m regular online gamblers by 2005. The graph below shows how fast revenues generated in this region will grow over the next few years. Despite these strong forecasts this region remains relatively untapped.

Australia is an area of high growth and a liberal attitude towards online gambling. Queensland and Tasmania offer some forms of e-game licensing and a number of nationwide interactive games are forming a web based marketing scheme.

The European market is currently an area of much interest and activity. Interest in the UK in particular is clearly heightened because of serious movements by the UK government towards licensing and regulation. Alderney and The Isle of Man already have a comprehensive and transparent approach towards licensing of interactive gaming / electronic betting centers. New EU block members such as Latvia and Malta already have extensive laws and to make online gambling a source of the countries GDP and economic growth.

High per capita income and easy internet access in European countries will make it a key region for growth in the long term. The potential of the European market can be seen in the following graph, which shows the steep rise in revenues that is expected to be generated over the next few years.