UK’s Gambling Market Posts Encouraging Start to the Year

A new survey of the United Kingdom’s high street and online gambling sectors has found that aggregated first-quarter slot yield increased by 2% year-on-year to reach £552 million thanks to a 9% rise in the total number of spins.

The investigation conducted by the Gambling Commission using operator-supplied data also concluded that the average number of active monthly accounts for the three months to the end of March grew by 15% year-on-year to 3.9 million.

Also of note was the length of individual slot sessions on casino sites lasting longer than an hour escalating by 10%, hitting 8.8 million.

Continuity Constant

The Gambling Commission’s review moreover discovered that the median length of online and land-based slot sessions during the three-month period remained static for a fourth consecutive quarter at around 17 minutes.

However, approximately 6.4% of all turns had gone on for more than an hour.

The evaluation from the Gambling Commission established that gross online gaming yield in the UK for the January-to-March interval swelled by 5% year-on-year to £1.3 billion.

That is thanks to a 9% upturn in the quantity of total bets and spins as well as an 11% boost in the number of average monthly active accounts.

Land-Based Largess

The Gambling Commission disclosed that this encouraging trend furthermore ran to the nation’s collection of approximately 6,200 licensed betting offices (LBOs).

LBOs recorded a surge of 6% year-on-year in aggregated first-quarter gross gaming yield to almost £585 million as the number of total bets and spins similarly increased by 2% to 3.3 billion.

The period covered included mid-March’s Cheltenham Festival and the Gambling Commission finally theorised that this horse racing betting extravaganza had helped the British gambling industry’s first-quarter gross gaming yield from real-event betting to escalate by 13% year-on-year to £555 million. 

Total bet and active account numbers grew by 19% and 9% respectively.

Conclusion Consideration

In line with the ongoing review of the nation’s gambling laws, the Gambling Commission proclaimed that it is ‘currently investigating the categorisation of certain products’ and that this may result in ‘the changing of some data between verticals’. 

Visit Our Responsible Gambling Section For Advice 

Nevertheless, the regulator assured stakeholders that such a move ‘should have no impact on the overall totals’ seen in its most recent investigation covering online and in-person gambling at the LBOs.