On Thursday, the UK Gambling Commission released the latest installment of its twice-yearly snapshot of the UK gambling industry. The latest report, covering the 12 months spanning April 2016 and March 2017, show gross gambling yield (GGY) of £13.7b, up 1.8% from the report covering April 2015 to March 2016.
Online gambling sites (excluding lottery operators) produced GGY of £4.68b, up 10.1% from the year before. Online gambling accounted for the largest slice of the overall GGY pie, rising 1.5 points to 34%.
Casino products (including poker) accounted for 56% of online GGY, easily eclipsing betting (37.1%), bingo (3.5%), exchange betting (2.8%) and pool betting (0.7%).
Slots accounted for nearly two-thirds (64.5%) of online casino GGY, followed by table games (15.8%), ‘other’ games (12.3%), card games (12.1%) and poker (5.9%). Online betting was predictably dominated by football and horseracing, which together accounted for 51% of the total.
Online active customer accounts improved by one-quarter to 28.87m, but average revenue per account fell 12% to £162.
Unfortunately, online gambling also dominated the dreaded ‘social responsibility’ category, accounting for nearly 96% of all customer self-exclusions, as well as 77.6% of breaches of those self-exclusions.
However, the UKGC notes that individual customers have the option of barring themselves from a vast number of individual gambling sites, and thus the true numbers of affected individuals may be significantly lower.
Switching to the land-based realm, betting GGY inched up 1% to £3.35b, representing 24% of the overall pie. The overwhelming bulk of this (£3.19b) came via off-course betting.
The total number of off-course betting premises across the UK as of September 2017 was 8,502, down 3.9% from March 2017, and marking the fourth consecutive year of declines. Four betting brands control 87.2% of all betting shops, led by William Hill (27.9%), Ladbrokes (20.4%), Betfred (19.7%) and Gala Coral (19.2%).
Off-course over-the-counter betting GGY totaled £1.39b, while gaming machines claimed £1.8b. Machine GGY was 3.1% higher year-on-year despite the total number of machines falling 3% over that span.
Land-based casino GGY shot up 16.5% to £1.16b, however, it should be noted that the previous year’s figure was 16.5% lower than the year before that, so this is more of a course correction. Table game GGY of £956.9m was dominated by American roulette (37.1%), punto banco (19.5%) and blackjack (18.9%), while casino gaming machines added £206.7m.
As for the remaining verticals, the National Lottery had a shite year, with sales down 9.1% to £6.92b and GGY falling 12.8% to £2.98b. Retail bingo was flat at £687m, with 46.3% of that coming via gaming machines in bingo halls.