Out of all the industries that are getting enormous profits thanks to their growth on the internet, online betting businesses are probably the most underrated. Even though 7 out of 10 people in the UK, for example, states that they have gambled at least once in their lifetime, we tend to not realize how big the industry is. The market is worth $67 billion today and is expected to achieve a $40 billion growth in the next five years. It will blow your mind if you think about it
There are many reasons behind this staggering growth that has now brought so many different betting sites on the market that you need platforms like https://kazinoekstra.com/ to be able to choose the one that suits you the most. We will focus on two particular trends that are helping the industry the most: the people’s increasing use of online services and the legalization and regulation of online betting and gambling by Countries all over the world.
Smartphones Are Boosting The Industry
Nowadays more and more people are using smartphones to communicate with others, to keep up with the world around them, and, of course, to pass some time. The mobile gaming industry, for example, is another growing market that some experts think will even be bigger than the traditional console/pc-gaming business in few years.
This increasing adoption of smartphones with their improved internet accessibility is boosting the gambling and betting industry: with more people spending time on their phones, there will be more people finding on their mobile stores betting and gambling apps. Considering how easy it is to pick up a smartphone, place a bet, and put it again in your pocket, it comes with no surprise that the share of gamblers and bettors placing their mobile devices to access gambling and betting platforms grew by more than 100% between 2013 and 2018.
According to a report, the percentage of people having gambled online at least once during the whole year grew by three percentage points from 2018 to 2019. And that percentage is almost surely going to grow more in the years to come. Think about it: as of today, many people have access to the internet and mobile devices, but it’s still just half the global population (we are talking about 3.9 billion people in 2018). That number is 100% going to get bigger, as the economic and social development of the poorest areas of the world goes on. In a couple of years, the number of people connected to the internet may even double the one we had in 2018. And let’s say, for example, that just 1% of those new potential clients actually start gambling or betting regularly: there will be 39 million new users ready to create an account on a gambling or betting site.
You should also consider that the mobile industry is a very competitive one: the developers and the platforms that want to get in that market have to constantly come up with new ideas to convince new clients to subscribe and old ones to stay. This means that the development of new technologies won’t stop for a long time yet. So more and more clients will be attracted to the business, which will keep on growing.
Legalization Of Online Gambling
The online gambling laws vary wildly from one country to another. Most countries tend to set their own laws to deal with the legal issues behind these online activities, and their strictness depends on different factors: in the majority of the Islamic countries gambling is forbidden or accessible only to the tourists and international visitors due to their religion-based laws, while in many European countries gambling is perfectly legal and only subject to age limitations and other not-really-strict regulations. On the other hand, in the USA, for example, the laws change between States that are looser on the matter and States that are stricter.
It’s not so easy to be familiar with all these different laws, but gambling and betting societies know what they are dealing with, considering the profits are unimaginably higher than the costs of adapting their business to the specific regulations of each country. The common objective is to ensure gambling sites are operated lawfully, ethically, and safely, and usually a strict code of conduct is imposed on gambling license-holders to keep them from any kind of “cheating”.
Some may think that this could lead to a slowdown of the growth we were talking about earlier, and in some cases, it actually will, but you have to look at the bigger picture. Until some years ago, online gambling didn’t even exist. Gambling and betting themselves were not seen as respectable activities in many places and societies. So, when the whole industry slowly built up, country laws weren’t ready for it. Even today there are still huge holes in online gambling and betting laws, even in the US, that are getting slowly fixed. Of course, this meant that many platforms could operate in an unregulated market, but, on the other hand, this also meant that there wasn’t any completely legal way to get access to the vast majority of the population. Legalizing online betting and gambling means that these platforms can now operate without any unnecessary pressure and limitation, letting their market grow endlessly.
Laws are necessary as the risk of frauds and scams will always be a serious problem, but new technologies such as blockchain will help to address these concerns. Using blockchain technology, everyone would be able to see exactly what is going on behind the scenes, preventing scammers to operate their plans. And this is just one of the many examples of what the future may save for the online betting and gambling industry.