Below, he delves into the data exclusively for Gambling Insider as he assesses how much online market share is truly taken up by trending verticals like esports and crypto.
$66.72bn and a predicted growth of 11% in one year. With the ever-increasing popularity of cryptocurrency and esports, where do they stand in the igaming space?
Both cryptocurrency and esports have been in high demand and saw a rise in popularity in the past year. Cryptocurrency reached its all-time market high, exceeding $2trn.
And esports is rivalling some of the most viewed and followed sports while being on the market for only a couple of years.
The online gambling market was valued at $66.72bn for 2020. According to Fortune Business Insights, the sports betting market has been slightly ahead of online casino.
2021 Gambling Market Demand
We decided to estimate the search and demand distribution in the gambling market in 2021 to try and pinpoint where cryptocurrency gambling and esports fit in as the two 'newest' and currently in-hype sections of online gambling.
A study we performed on SimilarWeb revealed that 17% of all traffic to online gambling sites on average comes from organic search. Almost two-thirds are direct traffic, which makes sense, because once a player signs up at a gambling site, they're accessing it directly from that point on.
Adding search data from Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner returned the online gambling market share based on online search demand:
The numbers are similar to the 2020 gambling market report, where casinos take up a bigger share due to not including poker, lottery and bingo in the study. However, in online search, the demand for poker, bingo and lottery is very intertwined with casino offers as a lot of casinos offer all services, in some cases even sports betting or vice versa.
Esports currently covers around 2% of the global online gambling market and 4.5% of the whole online sports betting market.
Performing the same study for crypto gambling revealed that around 4% of all online search demand in online gambling is crypto oriented.
Although 4% might not sound much, this does not represent the online gambling market share with respect to revenue, but the online search demand.
Esports and crypto gambling a big part of the future
Both esports and cryptocurrency in online gambling are expected to grow in the coming years. Esports viewership is projected to grow to 646 million by 2023, moving even further up the top sports chart. On the other hand, casinos are reporting that fiat players converting to crypto are not going back. In an interview with AffiliateCon Virtually Live, Olle Dickson of BitStarz said: “Players who might have been sceptical about crypto at the beginning have started to adopt the use of cryptocurrencies, and we don’t see them going back to fiat."
Looking at Google Trends for all market segments, esports has shown a constant increase in popularity over the past five years, while cryptocurrency trends follow the Bitcoin price.
But above all, the online casino market has grown more than any other and still shows no signs of slowing down.
Although neither crypto gambling space or esports represent a big portion of the market, they are both growing rapidly. And with the online casino market exploding in size and popularity, exciting things are sure to come on all fronts.
Will Bitcoin prevail in the long run? Will CS:GO remain the most sought after game or will new ones take over? Let's see where iGaming takes them!
