The Gambling Commission said several research methods only offered limited insight into illegal online gambling in their current forms.<\/p>\n
Great Britain\u2019s Gambling Commission has said it remains uncertain as to how much players are spending with illegal operators, with current measurement and monitoring methods offering limited insight into the issue.<\/p>\n
The regulator mapped out its concerns in the fourth and final chapter<\/a> of its research into illegal online gambling. The report considered the challenges of estimating the size of the market and the commission\u2019s recommendations for further progress.<\/p>\n The report considered three approaches to estimating the scale of illegal online gambling in Britain, including dwell time approach, which converts data on engagement and \u2018time-spent-on-site\u2019 into expenditure estimates.<\/p>\n The second method is the channelisation approach, based on comparing data on legal and illegal \u2018channels\u2019 of engagement with gambling. Finally, the survey-based approach involves players responding to pre-set questions.<\/p>\n Of these three, the Gambling Commission only pursued the dwell time and channelisation methodologies in its four-part report. It said underlying data from surveys was unreliable as consumers\u2019 recall of past expenditure in gambling surveys is \u201cgenerally poor\u201d.<\/p>\n However, the regulator said neither of the other two approaches presented enough data to allow it to form an accurate view of the illegal market, saying more work is required to make progress.<\/p>\n Minimal findings from dwell time approach<\/p>\n From the data drawn from dwell time and channelisation approaches, the regulator was able to present some findings.<\/p>\n Referencing dwell time results, it looked at the activity of 117 players gambling with illegal websites. Sports betting was the most popular activity with an average of 34% of players taking part, ahead of bingo on 14% and slot and instant win, both with 13%. <\/p>\n However, the primary limitation here was the size of the sample and it not being fully representative.<\/p>\n Also within this section was \u2018Patterns of Play\u2019 research on expenditure per minute in the legal market. This showed casino as the main vertical, with \u00a31.12 gross gambling yield (GGY) per minute, ahead of slots on \u00a30.32. However, with the data coming from 2018-19, it was seen as outdated compared to the current market.<\/p>\n The final piece of research looked at online slots GGY per minute between 2020 and 2025. This remained relatively steady throughout, with the most recent rate being \u00a30.24 in March this year.<\/p>\n \u201cDwell time approach allows us to attempt to convert objective estimates of engagement data using known data from legal market,\u201d the regulator said. \u201cThis requires several assumptions to be made \u2013 each introducing additional uncertainty to these estimates. Further work on these actions is required before we will reach a position where reliable estimates can be published.\u201d<\/p>\n Channelisation rate far from clear for Gambling Commission<\/p>\n Turning to the channelisation approach, the regulator said while there is potential with this method, more work is needed to verify the accuracy of estimates of web traffic and app use in the legal market to allow reliable channelisation rates to be estimated.<\/p>\n It created a list of all websites associated with operators licensed by the commission and can use digital data company SimilarWeb for estimates of numbers of visits and duration. However, there are some limitations, including that it does not usually observe app versions of illegal websites<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the likely strong degree of app-based spend in the legal market, we also need to obtain web traffic data for both apps-based and website-based engagement with legal sites,\u201d it said. \u201cSimilarWeb provides estimates of both. Ideally, we would benefit from operators\u2019 insights to help us verify the accuracy of these estimates.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there were limitations on GGY data and using this to estimate activity within the illegal market. This, it said, related to the margins of error associated with each estimate. It gave the example of statistics covering the period April 2023 to March 2024, which showed total online GGY of \u00a36.9 billion. If channelisation rate estimate was out by just 0.5%, this would be a difference of \u00a334.5 million in the associated estimate of GGY.<\/p>\n What does the Commission plan to do?<\/p>\n