The Dutch Online Gambling Market Continues to Grow
Gross gaming result stabilizes, number of player accounts increases
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (April 4, 2024) — The legal market for online gambling will have grown again in 2023. The gross gaming result (BSR; stake minus prizes paid) has increased; this growth is significantly less than in 2022. The Dutch gambling market is also growing less strongly than gambling markets in other countries. The number of players who occasionally take a gamble remains approximately the same, but the number of accounts has increased.
This is evident from the sixth monitoring report on online gambling that the Gaming Authority (Ksa) published today. The BSR was 1.39 billion euros at the end of 2023. That is a growth compared to 2022, when the BSR was 1.08 billion. The market continued to grow strongly in 2022, but the percentage growth has leveled off in 2023. In the last six months the BSR increased slightly by 1% compared to the first half of the year.
Number of players
The number of accounts played with increased to 1.1 million in 2023. A year earlier there were 970 thousand. Because players can use more than one account, the number of accounts does not directly indicate the actual number of players. The Ksa estimates that about a third of accounts are played with a total of 448,000 players per month. In the second half of 2023, around 726,000 players were active with legal providers. This means that approximately 5% of adult Dutch people gambled online in that six months.
Expenditure
It is estimated that players lost an average of 958 euros over the last six months of 2023. This amounts to approximately 160 euros per month, slightly lower than the 170 euros in the first half of the year.
Young adults
Because young adults are a vulnerable target group when it comes to gambling, they receive special attention in the monitoring report. This group (aged 18 to 23) has a relatively large number of accounts: although they represent 9.5% of the population, they play with 22% of the accounts. This percentage was virtually the same in the previous monitoring report, so the number of young adult players in the past year has not increased significantly. Young adults lose less money than players aged 24 and older: on average 52 euros per month.
Channelization
When the online market was opened, the objective was that at least 8 out of 10 players would play with legal providers after opening, where they would be in a safer environment than on the illegal market. This target is still being met: 90% of players only play through legal websites. This high degree of channelization is largely caused by new players.
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This is the first monitoring report since the ban on untargeted advertising came into effect on July 1, 2023. The report shows that the market has not experienced any noticeable contraction since the ban. However, the number of visits to gambling websites by people who are not players has decreased significantly. People who already played do not come less often, so the advertising ban mainly affects people who do not yet play.
SOURCE: de Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa).
