The online gambling business is good business to say the least, though the industry continuously faces its unfair share of challenges, the bottom line is that it’s delivering a product in high demand.
College aged males are spending more time on the internet and they are spending more time gambling online. According to a survey published in several publications including the Bloomberg BusinessWeek, researchers estimate that approximately 1.7 million U.S. males aged 18 to 22 gamble online at least once a month.
The monthly use of online gambling sites for college guys in the U.S jumped from 4.4 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2010. Interestingly enough, when you look at both online and offline gambling, monthly and weekly rates actually dropped from 2008 to 2010 among high school- and college-aged males and stayed about the same or dropped among college-aged females.
When these figures are projected on a national basis, the findings suggest that more than 400,000 college-aged males aged 18 to 22 go online to gamble at least once a week. The survey is indicative that there isn’t really a significant rise in online gambling among high-schoolers despite a growing prevalence of online gambling sites. Furthermore, the increase in gambling among college guys suggests that the UIGEA and payment restrictions have been utterly ineffective in becoming a barrier to online gaming access.
Essentially, the numbers suggest that online gambling proliferation doesn’t cause a rise in under aged gamblers in any significant way. Additionally, the fact that more college males are playing online despite the payment restriction imposed by the UIGEA is another example of how that law is useless and pointless. It’s clearly not doing what it was intended to do and this comes as no surprise to industry professionals. These numbers should be beating lawmakers over the head and cause them to re-evaluate the way in which online gambling in U.S is being regulated, or should I say, unregulated.
