Should the Gambling Industry Rethink Its Strategy?

There are roughly 2,300 gambling operators in the UK market, which is a slight decrease from the previous twelve-month period of around 3%. The volume of operators dropped 9.2% from pre-2020 numbers.

Still, the number of active remote gambling accounts has gone up 4% since 2020 and at the end of the reported period, a staggering £877.5 million was held in online customer gambling accounts.

During the same period, the UK Gambling Commission also released information that 44% of adults had gambled at least once in the preceding four weeks of being surveyed. Males have a higher rate of gambling participation at 45% with females at 41%, and the dominating age demographic is 45-54, likely those with more disposable income.

While sports betting is heavily synonymous with the British gambling scene, it is not the biggest sector by a long shot. Online casino slots produce the highest revenue stream in the UK, followed by football betting, horse racing betting and then bingo.

To sum up just how key slots are to an online gambling business, of the £6.5 billion gross gambling yield (GGY) from the 2022-23 period, £4.0 billion of that came from online casino games. More than three-quarters of that was from slot games alone (£3.2 billion), with the rest made up of other features like table games.

The Gambling Commission report highlights that the industry is doing well across all areas. But slots are popular because they are simple, luck-based games based on a random number generator. They are designed to be very inviting to grab attention and don’t require a steep learning curve such as poker or baccarat.

So this perhaps is a case of operators learning towards giving customers more of what they want, which in this case, is slots. The market already exists and that means that any expense used in trying to make sports betting catch up, for example, is likely not going to ever yield the returns to make it happen.

There is never going to be the volume of players that take up roulette compared to the number that will simply pick a slot from an online portfolio. The revenue of all other forms of gambling is way behind slots. So the industry doesn’t need a total rethink of the way things are going, it’s already doing something right from a revenue perspective.