According to statistics, the online gambling industry is HUGE. I mean, really, really big. In 2015, the global online gambling industry (which includes online casino, betting, lotto, bingo and all other gambling activities that happen on the Internet) made $41 billion, which may not sound like much until you realize that it’s what the top 40 highest grossing movies of all time made in the global box office combined, and online gambling made that money in one year. Wrap your hand around that – the most successful movie of all time, “Avatar”, still made 20 times less than what the online gambling industry made this year alone. Holy crap! And you wanna know something crazier? That’s not even close to what the physical casino industry is making! In 2015, physical casinos (JUST casinos, excluding stuff like betting and lotto) made about $160 billion – 75% more what the entire online gambling industry did. If that doesn’t blow your mind, it should. I’d calculate how many movies that amounts to, but honestly, I’m pretty sure that the top 100 highest grossing movies of all time combined still won’t come close to what physical casinos made this year alone.
Why is the discrepancy so gigantic? I mean, it’s not like online casinos are a new medium still finding its feet – they’ve been around for almost as long as the Internet! Videogames are only a few years older than them, and they’re currently the most profitable entertainment industry of all, with individual online free-to-play games (which utilize a somewhat similar model to online casinos) regularly raking in profits in the millions per game, and there’s hundreds of thousands of them! Arcades (the videogame equivalent of physical casinos) have long become a thing of the past in the West as more and more gamers transition to playing on their mobile device. And yet, even as the online gambling industry grows continuously, it’s not coming anywhere near the numbers that the physical casinos are making.
So, why is that, and more importantly, will it change? To answer the first question, there’s three major reasons. The first one is that online casino marketing is dreadful and needs to change ASAP. Even people who regularly play online casino can’t help but groan when they see them. At this point, the only thing that attracts people to online casinos is word of mouth, which isn’t sustainable. The second reason is that when you go on an online casino you always go there to play games – if you don’t intend to, why would you sign up? Meanwhile, not everyone who goes to a physical casino is necessarily there to play – casinos are social spaces, people often go there with friends or co-workers without intending to play, but doing so anyway. And the third reason is that, well, people don’t trust online casinos. Despite the various certifications that each casino has to go through, most people are wary of them and think of the games as cheating.
The most important question, of course, is what we can do to fix that and attract a larger audience to online casinos. Well, I already outlined the problems, and the solutions are obvious – better advertisement, a more social experience and more trustworthiness. If a soft drink that’s objectively bad for your health can be turned into one of the biggest brands in the world through clever advertisement, then I don’t see why online casinos can’t follow suit. For the second point, online casinos can take a page from the book of online MMO games and allow people to form groups and communities, to gamble alongside friends, to share each other’s winnings publicly if they so decide, to have a message board dedicated to that particular casino. Once you build a community, you have a guaranteed user base. As for the cheating misconception… I don’t know how that one can be fixed.
In conclusion, to answer the question posed in the title – is online casino the future of gambling? I’d say yes, but not as it is right now. If the online gambling market changes in order to accommodate itself for the new, tech-oriented generation rather than trying to encourage a “sign up once and never play again” business model as it’s doing now, it may very well catch up with the physical casinos or even surpass them. But as things are now, it’s going to take a lot of work.