Online gambling has not expanded in the U.S. in the way that many expected it might have by now. To varying degrees, Nevada, Delaware, and New Jersey allow online gambling under the law. However, many other states in which there are legislative movements pushing for the same conditions have taken longer to come around than some would have liked.
Still, the expectation is that sooner or later we’ll have more online gambling options than we have now in the U.S. Just recently the world’s largest poker gaming website returned to activity in New Jersey after the state’s online gambling industry showed a 21 percent increasein 2015, netting close to $150 million. If that number keeps going up, the pressures in favor of expanding the industry in the States will only gain steam. But the interesting thing might not be when online gambling takes off in the U.S., but how quickly it spreads to mobile networks.
Where they’re legal to use, leading online gambling platforms have done a very effective job at expanding to the point of compatibility with mobile devices. Typically, there are three different approaches to adapting an online gambling platform to mobile devices. First, web design can be altered in a manner that makes a gambling site compatible with browser windows on mobile devices. Second, as has been the case with a lot of leading gambling sites, mobile apps can be developed to offer the same features and capabilities users can find online. And third, some sites that prefer not to spend money on web or app design have integrated their gambling features with existing apps for social networking channels.
This is all significant in that it indicates that once online gambling is legalized, there’s extensive precedent for its quick and thorough expansion to mobile channels. Basically, that means online gambling isn’t just available; rather, it’s made as convenient as possible. We use our mobile devices primarily to manage online tasks as efficiently as possible, and the same would be true for gambling. Legalized sites would surely spawn a great deal of activity across the U.S., but mobile versions of those sites would almost certainly result in higher activity levels and greater revenue for the sites.
The proof is in the numbers. One estimate claimed that the budding mobile gambling market is already responsible for about 20 percent of total online gambling revenue and could be a $100 billion industry by 2017. Naturally those numbers are referring to markets in which online gambling is already legal. However, compare the idea of a $100 billion market to the $150 million in revenue New Jersey experienced last year, and you can begin to see the vast potential of mobile gambling. It may still be a long road ahead, but when legalization occurs in more of the U.S., we may just see a multi-billion dollar industry grow overnight.
