Market Impact Data on Gambling Behaviour – Operator Data to Sept 2023

BIRMINGHAM, U.K. (October 31, 2023) — The Gambling Commission has published further data on the gambling industry in Great Britain.

This data, sourced from operators, reflects the period between March 2020 and September 2023, inclusive, and covers online and in-person gambling covering Licensed Betting Operators (LBOs) found on Britain’s high streets.

Comparison should not be made with the industry statistics dataset, as this data set may include free bets and bonuses and does not include data from all operators.

This release compares Quarter 2 (Q2) of financial year 2022 to 2023, with Q2 of 2023 to 2024, looking at how the market has changed in comparative periods over a year.

Note: This dataset includes revised data on slots sessions. We encourage you to refer to the excel data document which contains updated data for the entire period. This can be found on Gambling business data on gambling to September 2023 (published October 2023)

The latest operator data shows¹:

• online total Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) in Q2 (July to September) was £1.2 billion, an increase of 0.6 percent from Q2 the previous year. The overall number of total bets and/or spins increased 10 percent Year-on-Year (YoY), whilst the average monthly active accounts² increased 7 percent
• real event betting GGY decreased by 5 percent YoY to £428 million. Total bets for the vertical decreased by 1 percent while actives decreased by 0.2 percent
• slots GGY increased 8 percent to £589 million YoY. The number of spins increased 11 percent, while the average monthly active accounts in Q2 also increased 11 percent to 3.8 million per month
• the number of online slots sessions lasting longer than an hour increased by 4 percent YoY to 9.3 million. The average session length decreased to 17 minutes, approximately 7 percent of all sessions lasting more than one hour
• LBO GGY decreased by 0.4 percent to nearly £539 million in Q2 2023 to 2024, compared to the same quarter last year, while the number of total bets and spins decreased 1 percent to 3.1 billion.

¹ We are currently investigating the categorisation of certain products. This may result in the changing of some data between verticals, however this should have no impact on the overall totals.

² This is the total number of times activity has taken place across all verticals; therefore, an active account may be counted more than once if they participate in more than one vertical. Additionally, a quarter-on-quarter comparison means that there is further degree of double counting in the active accounts’ data-point. For example, if an account has been active in two of the three months in that quarter, it will be counted twice in the total for that quarter. This is only applicable to active accounts and not any of the other data-points.

SOURCE: Gambling Commission.