Around this time of year you’ll struggle to go more than a few minutes navigating any form of B2B news site without stumbling across some form of predictions for next year. We even have some coming up for you here at CalvinAyre.com.
From stock market futures to email marketing trends, pretty much everything is covered. So rather than predict what is going to happen, the brief of this article is to tell you without equivocation what absolutely will not happen in the online gambling industry in 2014. Because we like to be helpful like that.
Google goes SEO-friendly
After seeing the spammers and black-hat SEO’s rise to the top SERPs for almost every major keyword across the search engine, Google publishes a manual explaining the nuances of their algorithm and provides two months notice before each update to allow site managers and SEO’s to prepare for it. Matt Cutts publishes his personal phone number on the Google Webmaster Tools support pages and spends every minute of every day fielding calls and generally being as helpful as he can to the search marketers of the world.
Immediate action on US iGaming
President Barack Obama makes a rousing speech from the the Oval Office in the White House about the importance of civil liberties. This includes the right to gamble online and Obama urges Congress to pass a bill regulating online gambling with immediate effect. This happens within a week with Calvin Ayre and Ray Bitar being brought in as consultants to allow the United States to usher itself into the modern world of online gambling.
SheldonsSlots.com
In early January Sheldon Adelson and the Las Vegas Sands Corporation concede that online gambling is an eventuality and decides to jump on the bandwagon in a big way. In doing so the company and Adelson save themselves more than $10 million – money that is spent buying every domain possible including those of several high profile operators. Each of these domains is redirected to SheldonsSlots.com which features a watermark background of Adelson himself grinning out from the screen.
Milton Keynes becomes the Mecca of European iGaming
Following the introduction of the Point of Consumption Tax within the UK which is integrated into the industry smoothly and within any complications, iGaming companies decide to completely uproot their businesses and all of their staff in order to move to the new European hub of online gambling – Milton Keynes. The move pays off as the area attracts a wealth of tech talent who set up in the centre of town forming an area known as Silicon Roundabouts – quickly overtaking London’s Old Street in terms of prestige.
Yahoo buys Betfair
It emerges that after hearing rumours of Google looking into buying bwin.party that Marissa Mayer and Yahoo decided that online gambling business were clearly the way forward. Having paid $30 million for Summly which at the time didn’t have many users or any revenue and $1.1bn for Tumblr, Yahoo use the same rate card to value Betfair at £4bn. Following the completion of the deal it becomes apparent that Yahoo’s board weren’t actually aware that online gambling wasn’t strictly legal in most of the United States. The company is then stripped of its most talented staff and left to fester with limited resources in the increasingly unprofitable UK market.
