The Gambling Commission has published its Q2 report (July to September, which is traditionally Q3 but is the Commission's Q2 period) covering data from both land-based and online operators in the United Kingdom.

Notably, regarding the data, the Gambling Commission said: “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.”

The first piece of data was the online gross gambling yield (GGY), which totalled £1.2bn ($1.46bn) in Q2 2023 and reflected a 0.6% increase when compared year-on-year.

Despite online GGY increasing by only 0.6%, the overall number of bets and spins increased by 10% and the amount of active users increased by 7%.

The GGY from licensed betting operators (LBOs) found on Britain's high streets decreased by 0.4% to £539m in Q2 2023, while the total bets and spins decreased by 1% to 3.1 billion.

Real event betting GGY also decreased by 5% to £428m, with total bets decreasing by 1%.

The betting brought in from slots saw the GGY increase by 8% when compared to Q2 2022, to a total of £589m.

Both the number of spins on slots and the active monthly users increased by 11%, with the total number of bets placed on slots reaching 6.7 billion.

In comparison, the number of bets placed on virtual betting was 9 million.

The length of online slot sessions decreased overall to 17 minutes on average - although while only 7% of all sessions last more than one hour, this increased by 4% year-on-year to 9.3 million sessions.