To even the casual observer, it should be apparent that the global online gambling industry is growing. After all, we are seeing nations overturn gambling bans, other nations do away with gambling monopolies, and new online casinos spring up all over the place. Just how much the industry is growing, though, exceeds even my estimates.

Recently iGaming Business, one of the major providers of business intelligence for the online gambling industry, released a report on the state of the market. Their report, called The Global Business of Online Casinos, shows tremendous growth in the online gambling sector worldwide. In the report, iGaming Business states that the online casino market will gross approximately $4.7 billion worldwide by the end of 2010. By the end of 2012, they predict that the industry will be worth $5.8 billion. They estimate that by the end of 2014, the online casino industry should rake in $7.1 billion, which is a 79% growth from 2009 numbers.

The Global Business of Online Casinos does more than look at revenue statistics and predict growth, though. It looks at every aspect of the industry, including internet gambling history and comparing established online casinos to start-ups. It also goes into the difficulties of starting up a new online casino, which it estimates costs $1.5 million initially but pays for itself quickly due to the low payroll and overhead. In comparison, opening a brick and mortar casino carries approximately $300 million in start-up costs.

Though there are many factors at play in the expansion of online gambling, perhaps none is more significant than the global recession. Global economic stupidity led to most of the economic powers in the world spending drastically more than they could afford, borrowing more money, and creating huge money-gobbling bureaucracies. The result was a recession that affected the entire planet, though each country was hurt to varying degrees. Virtually every nation, state, province, county, city and town is in debt and strapped for cash. As the world looks at ways to increase revenue to pay off massive dept and crippling entitlement programs, online gambling is seen as a much-needed source of revenue.

Most economic experts predict that the recession will last many more years, with no recovery in sight. With that in mind, continuous expansion of the online gambling market by governments looking for funds seems likely, and thus the expansion of the online casino market is all but assured.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Gambling News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.