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Integrity Legal

Posts Tagged ‘Gambling’

21st September 2010

Online gaming is an interesting phenomenon, from a legal perspective, as it has only been in existence for a relatively short period of time. Therefore, a great deal of legislation that addressed gaming issues of the past have been rendered obsolete while new technology allows for transactions and platforms that were not even thought of only 5 years ago. That said, there are some jurisdictions which have made the decision to allow online gaming in most forms pursuant to rather stringent regulation and official oversight. The United Kingdom is a prime example of this approach to dealing with online gaming. The UK has created a statutory scheme for regulating and overseeing legitimate gaming enterprises operating on land or over the internet and/or world wide web. In a recent article posted on the website CasinoPeople.com, it was noted that online gaming has become more popular in recent years:

While it is quite clear that online gambling has increased in popularity recently, the figures that came out of a study by Nielsen, an independent media measurement company, are somewhat surprising.

The study by Nielsen shows that online gambling in the United Kingdom has gone up by 40 percent in the last year. The numbers show that there have been about 3.2 million more people in Britain who have logged onto Internet gambling sites in the past year, than there were the year before. In the same time period, the number of additional visitors who accessed various social media sites such as Facebook, and others who offer similar services, only totaled 2.2 million.

There were a number of other interesting statistics that Nielsen published as part of their study of the United Kingdom online gambling world, such as the division of how many men and how many women take part in online gambling, and information regarding the ages of online gamblers, as well as the incomes of the online gamblers.

This author finds it interesting that while internet gaming sites saw over three million new registrants in the past year, the highly popular Facebook  service only saw a little over two million registrations. It should be noted that Facebook is a single website while the gaming website statistics cover multiple sites. This tends to show that gaming websites are not as monolithic in their appeal to consumers compared to some social media sites, but overall demand for online entertainment in the form of gaming seems to be high and steadily increasing. What was really interesting to this author was the fact that women appear to be significant players on online gaming platforms, at least in the UK:

It seems that around half of the online gamblers in the UK earn over £30,000 each year. Of all those gambling online in the United Kingdom, women make up 46 percent of the players. Hopefully for the women out there, this will give online gambling site more incentive to offer sites that appeal to women. While there are some of these sites out there, with the high percentage of female online gamblers, the market may be able to sustain even more of them.

Female players may pose interesting new challenges to online gaming websites as marketing strategies to attract such players would likely be different compared to the strategies employed to bring in new male players. It was encouraging to note that many of the players online come from a comfortable income bracket. That said, legitimate gaming operations ought to strive to eradicate problem gambling regardless of the income or assets of the players concerned.

Whether demand for online gaming in the UK will increase in the future remains to be seen. However, there are strong reasons to believe that demand can only increase as the world wide web continues to expand and new sites are added daily. Furthermore, new gaming markets may open up in the future which could result in an overall increase in global demand for such services.

For related information please see: online gaming lawyer.

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