UK gambling charity organisation GambleAware has recently published some details for the gambling habits of online gamblers in the country for the first time. The charity has published an interim report to improve understanding of the online gambling market in terms of basic patters of play and their effect on gamblers’ behaviours, especially when it comes to at-risk or problem gambling.
The research was conducted by the National Centre for Social Research in partnership with Professor Ian McHale and Professor David Forrest from the University of Liverpool. It is based on data collected in the period from July 2018 and June 2019 and detailed the gambling habits and patterns of a total of 139,152 active online gambling accounts registered with the seven biggest online gambling companies on the territory of the UK.
Each of the seven online gambling operators that agreed to take part in the analysis was requested to provide an anonymised list of the customer accounts whose registered address was in the UK and had at least one money transaction processed in the aforementioned period. Still, GambleAware noted that the data provided is a sample of players from a sample of gambling companies, so all figures presented in the study should be considered as estimates rather than true values because different samples would have provided different results.
Most Online Gambling Active Accounts Spent Less Than £200 Annually
The research results show that a large majority of active online gambling accounts spent relatively low amounts of money. The survey also found the accounts’ owners used them infrequently throughout the 12-month period from July 1st, 2018 to June 30th, 2019. However, in the same period, a small proportion of accounts were extensively used by their owners who generated considerable losses.
The analysts carrying out the research concluded that a small proportion of accounts made up a large proportion of gross gambling yield (GGY).
As mentioned above, the vast majority of accounts were not frequently used, with around 85% of the accounts that have been active spent less than £200 in the 12-month period. Furthermore, 90% of gaming accounts had generated either a total win or loss amounting to less than £500 for the period.
The research found that less than 1% of the accounts used for betting (0.7% representing approximately 60,000 online gambling accounts), as well as 1.2% representing about 47,000 online gambling accounts, generated losses of £5,000 and more during the 12-month period. The study also found that the 5% of online accounts that had the biggest losses generated at least 70% of GGY in live casinos, online casinos, sports betting and slots.
As revealed by GambleAware, pre-match football, in-play football and horseracing were the aspects of sports betting that accounted for most customer spending, while casino and slots games accounted for the largest spending portion in gaming. Furthermore, online gambling participation rates were higher in more deprived areas.
Researchers found that male players, who owned 78% of betting accounts, generated 94% of online sports betting GGY. Gaming was more popular among female players than betting, with 26% of gaming GGY generated by them, in comparison to 6% for betting. As far as losses are concerned, 4% of accounts used for gaming were found to have lost over £500 from July 2018 to June 2019.
- Author
Daniel Williams
