(Newswire.net — June 15, 2018) — The World Cup has just gotten underway in Russia and it has triggered a slew of gambling advertisements all over the world. In the UK, PaddyPower are promising to donate £10,000 to charity every time the hosts score a goal; in Australia, the entire country is getting behind their team with big events; and all across Europe online casinos are creating games, promotions, and more in order to attract fans of the world’s biggest sport.
The United States is lagging behind, because not only is this not the biggest sport in the United States, but also because online gambling is tightly restricted. However, despite those restrictions and despite the fact that gambling in the U.S. is done at out-of-town Indian casinos, and in cities like Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City, the gambling industry stateside is considerably bigger than it is in many countries worldwide.
How Big Is the Gambling Industry on the Whole?
In 2009, it was reported that the online gambling industry was worth $20 billion. This has increased every single year since then without fail and it is projected to continue on this trend until it is worth just shy of $60 billion by 2020.
A lot of this comes from the online casino industry. The online casino market is one of the fastest growing in the world, with online casino top 10 uk ranking sites like online-topcasino.com helping to bring more attention to the hundreds of new online casinos that are launched every month.
This is not a sector that has had any bearing on the U.S. gambling industry, but despite that the U.S. gambling industry is growing year on year, and that’s because offline casinos are making considerably more money.
In fact, the casino industry is said to be worth over $150 billion dollars, and while it is not growing at the same rate as the online sector, it is going to be a long fall from there. In the U.S., a significant portion of this money comes from Nevada, and the casino industry in cities like Atlantic City is on a rapid decline, but there are more than enough casinos elsewhere to make up for this.
Lotteries, sports betting and charity betting also adds to the gambling industry in the United States and helps to make it one of the biggest in the world.
It isn’t quite as profitable as Macau, which is considered the Vegas of the East, but on a per capita basis Americans are one of the 20 biggest gamblers in the world and the biggest in the Americas.
Will This Change?
The U.S. is on a precipice right now. With Trump in charge it seems likely that gambling laws will relax slightly, considering he has owned casinos in the past (albeit not successful ones) but there have been no signs of that just yet and he might have some issues passing such law changes considering his party is typically against them.
But it’s clear from the above statistics that the U.S. doesn’t need to make any changes. It could certainly make a lot more money if it legalized online gambling, but when you consider that offline gambling is still so much bigger and the U.S. has a significant share of those proceeds, there is no need.
If online gambling continues to grow and offline gambling continues to stagnate, maybe they will decide they need a piece of the pie. If so, then there will be plenty of sites for gamblers to choose from, providing they make sure they check with reputable online casino reviews first, because where there is money there are scammers trying to take an undeserved share.