Online Casino Gambling And The Internet

Online casino gambling exists because of the Internet. Two recent studies focused on different aspects of the relationship between online casino gambling and the Internet and their results make interesting reading.

Greenlight is an Internet research company. 90% of the US searchers use the US version of Google to locate online casinos through search terms such as 'casino', 'online casino', 'casino games', 'online slots' and 'Internet casino'. Based on the first page results of these searches Greenlight sought to determine which the most visible online casinos to US searchers were.

The top three most visible online casinos were 888.com, Spin Palace and Mansion group's Casino.com, with scores of 70%, 62% and 55% respectively. The web sites of these online casinos is most search engine optimized based on the criteria followed by the Google search engine. Ironically, none of the top three online casinos mentioned earlier accept players from the United States. The other online casinos that followed were Getminted.com with a score of 30%, Littlewoods Casino with a score of 24%, Stanley Casino with a score of 24%, William Hill Casino with a score of 13% and InterCasino 13%. The popular and award winning 32Red Casino was at 13th place with a score of 10%.

The search could not segregate casino information portals from online casinos and therefore such portals also figured in the list interspersed with the online casinos. Greenlight found that Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, was in fifth place with a score of 47% even though it has little to do with actual online casino gambling. Wikipedia scores high on Internet searches due to link liquidity.

Greenlight also revealed the most popular search terms keyed in by Internet users searching for online casinos. These were 'casino' with a score of 59%, 'online casino' with a score of 10%, 'casino games' with a score of 4%, 'online slots' with a score of 2% and 'Internet casino' with a score of 1%.

The second report estimated the revenue loss that the American search engines are incurring for refusing to take advertisements from online casinos. This financial exercise was conducted by Steve Baldwin of WebProNews. Baldwin's estimate for Google was a loss of revenue of about $9.6 million a month. According to comScore Google's share of the search engine market is 64.2%. Extrapolating this to the entire search engine market the loss works out to $15 million a month or $180 million a year.  

Baldwin used data from comScore to work out the monthly losses for the other search engines as well. According to him, Yahoo would be losing $3.0 million, Microsoft would be losing $1.2 million, Ask would be losing $0.6 million and AOL would be losing $0.5 million. The report also explained the methodology used by Baldwin to arrive at these estimates.

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