How Popular Is Online Gambling In 2021?
What is the future of online gambling like? Funny you should ask! We’re here to give a brief rundown of the current state of affairs of online poker real money games, report on how it’s been growing over the past year, and predict where it’ll be by the end of 2021.
While poker is still a world-wide phenomenon, people have been steadily moving away from the brick-and-mortar sites in favor of playing for real money online. The emergence of sports betting sites has also provided a boost for online gambling operators. Bovada.lv is the most prominent of these, but Intrade is another major force in the industry. Despite being less popular, there are already more active players on Intrade than PokerStars!
An Increase in Number of Online Gamblers
Based on recent reports, there’s been a significant increase in the number of online gamblers over the last year. There’s been a lot of talk about people moving away from traditional gambling and toward online gambling. This hasn’t actually happened yet, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Online casino and poker players made up 49% and 37% of all online gamblers respectively in 2012. Sports betting was responsible for 14%. Online horse racing, interactive games, lottery, and bingo combined for another 15%.
While online gambling has been growing, it still remains a niche industry. It won’t be until the late 2020s that online gambling will reach the scale of traditional brick-and-mortar casinos.
A Lack of Prominent Sites
In this article, we’re going to discuss two poker sites – PokerStars and 888Poker – because they’re well-established and popular. There aren’t that many other moderately popular sites online just yet, but you can bet that there’ll be more to follow suit in the near future. They may not be massive just yet, but you can expect them to grow in size over the next year or so.
A Hard-to-Beat Bovada Sportsbook
For all its advantages, online sports betting hasn’t managed to overtake poker or casino games in terms of popularity. It’s basically just as big as online horse racing, bingo, lottery, and interactive games put together. We’re not saying that it hasn’t experienced any growth over the past year, but it hasn’t managed to move beyond its niche audience.
The reason for this is that people like to wager on sports in person more than they like online sports betting. It’s undeniable that the technology behind online gambling is quite good these days, but people still prefer traditional brick-and-mortar casinos when they want to place a wager.
This means that you can expect to see more money being bet on horse racing card games, bingo, or lottery in the future. However, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever beat sports betting when it comes to numerical value. Even if online sports betting expands by a factor of 100, it’ll still be dwarfed by the number of sports bets placed during traditional sporting events.
A Larger Player Base for PokerStars
PokerStars may be the top dog when it comes to real money casinos in Canada in terms of players, but these two attributes are bound to change over time. The most popular poker site in the world is already growing at an incredible rate. There’s no telling how much larger it may become in 2022, but we can make some fairly educated guesses.
It’s well-known that the player base of PokerStars is expanding at a rapid rate. This year will be even bigger than last year, and next year will be even bigger than this year. At the current rate, the player base of PokerStars should be roughly 50% bigger by 2022.
Online poker players are moving away from traditional poker rooms in favor of playing on the world’s most visited website for real money play. You can expect to see more people playing on PokerStars every single day, week, month, and quarter over the next few years.
This will also result in a bigger player base for 888Poker as well, but not as big as those of PokerStars. 888Poker has been around for more than 10 years, and it’s more popular in regions outside of the United States. As the number of online gamblers increases over time, online poker operators can expect a bigger slice of the pie.