The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has announced further data on how local customers’ gambling behaviour is reacting to the current environmental factors in the UK.
As always, the data is provided by local gambling operators. It covers both brick-and-mortar and online gambling offered by Licensed Betting Operators (LBOs) in the country and reflects the period from March 2020 to March 2023, inclusive. At the time when it published the data, the UKGC warned that comparison should not be made with the industry statistics dataset, as it may include bonuses and free bets and does not feature data from all licensed gambling companies.
Apart from that, the UK Gambling Commission noted that it was investigating the categorisation of some products, which may eventually result in the changing of some data between verticals. Still, this is not expected to affect the overall results.
The latest release from the country’s gambling regulatory body specifically compares the fourth quarter of the 2022/2023 financial year, with the fourth quarter of 2021/2022, looking at how the UK gambling market has changed in the comparative periods over a twelve-month period.
Licensed Betting Operators’ GGY Rises by 6%, According to Latest Reports
As revealed by the latest data provided by licensed gambling companies in the country, the overall Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) of online gambling operations from January 2023 to March 2023 (or, in other words, the fourth fiscal quarter) rose by 5% to £1.3 billion from the same period a year earlier. The GGY of the licensed betting operators in the UK rose by 6%, reaching almost £585 million in the fourth quarter of 2022/2023 in comparison to the result registered in the previous year.
There was also a 9% increase in the total number of spins and/or bets year-on-year, and an even larger, 11% increase in the average number of active accounts on a monthly basis. As explained by the UK gambling regulator, this is the total occurrence of the activity across all verticals, so an active customer account may be taken into consideration more than once in case they take part in more than one gambling vertical.
Considering the fact that the reporting period covered the Cheltenham festival – one of the most important and popular horse racing-based events in the National Hunt racing calendar in the UK – the gross gambling yield of real-event betting rose by 13% year-on-year to £555 million. The overall number of bets and actives increased by 19% and 9%, respectively, for the vertical.
The UKGC revealed that the gross gambling yield of local slots rose by 2%, reaching £552 million in the twelve months before the fourth quarter of 2021/2022 and the fourth quarter of 2022/2023. The number of spins increased by 9% over the aforementioned period, while the average monthly active accounts rose by 15% to 3.9 million per month. Furthermore, the Gambling Commission reported that the number of online slots sessions that lasted more than an hour was subject to a 10% year-on-year growth to 8.8 million. The average session length remained 17 minutes long for a fourth straight quarter, and approximately 6.4% of the total number of gaming sessions lasted more than an hour.
- Author
Daniel Williams
