Analysis of the online gambling industry in general. How is the industry evolving and what can we expect in the future?

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The gambling industry has been growing steadily for many years. The online gambling segment contributes to this to a large extent - with the widespread digitalization and the spread of smartphones and the Internet, online casinos and bookmakers have more and more new customers.
The online gambling industry continues to boom in 2022. How did this sector survive the pandemic, what forecasts do experts give and what contributes to the growth of the industry? Let's find out in this article.

How has the industry evolved in recent years?

Because of the "pandemic crisis" many segments of business declined or slowed growth, but the gambling industry was bypassed. Widespread lockdowns and the move to remote working have forced the population to spend more time at home.

As a consequence, users began to spend more time online, which many players in the industry took advantage of. Bookmakers and casinos began to actively buy advertising on popular resources such as Youtube, Instagram & FB, Telegram and others. Targeted advertising as well as promotion through bloggers was used.

The intrusive advertising of casinos and sports betting still follows us everywhere. Gambling companies are constantly improving their level of advertising and expanding their traffic channels to new platforms. What surprised me the most is that many casinos pay for the voiceover of pirated movies in order to insert ads on sites with such content.

But this approach works. By flooding almost all of the media space, bookmakers and casinos are attracting huge audiences to their sites/apps and doing everything they can to make them loyal customers. The influx of new customers and the continued support of the existing base allows gambling projects to constantly evolve and scale.

According to Statista calculations, the online gambling industry will show an average annual growth rate of 7.91% from 2019 to 2026. Experts also estimated the market size: at the end of 2020, it was $66.7 billion, and by 2023 the figure will reach $92.9 billion.

Analysts at Zillion Project believe that the online segment will be a major growth driver for the gambling industry. "The pandemic has only accelerated the influx of users to online casinos and bookmakers, this transition from classic offline outlets and so has been going smoothly for the past few years. Online gambling has been on the rise for more than a decade, and while there remain regions with a weak presence, such as Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe, growth will continue."

Distribution of online gambling segments by revenue

According to experts from H2 Gambling Capital, in 2018 - 2019 the market structure looked as follows: sports betting and other generated events accounted for the largest share of the online gambling market. Betting accounted for 48.7 percent of the market, which was more than 19.5 billion euros in terms of revenues in monetary terms.

In second place is the online casino industry (their share of 26.8 percent and 10.7 billion euros in revenue). Next by a wide margin are lottery draws (8.9 percent), poker (6.2 percent), quests and loot boxes (5.1 percent) - and finally bingo draws (1.8 percent). As of today, the percentages of presence in the industry have not changed much and generally reflect the overall picture - sports betting and online casinos are among the leaders.