The world of online casinos and iGaming has deep roots. In fact, the first online casinos date to as early as 1994 – just a few short years after the launch of the public internet. Since then, much has changed. Faster internet speeds and more capable computers have conspired to mean that today’s modern casino titles are visually dazzling and feature-packed when compared with their 90s ancestors.
The appetite for digital products has also grown in this time. When iGaming first got its start, it was considered little more than a niche or novel category, a poor cousin to the world of brick-and-mortar casinos.
But nowadays, it accounts for over 25% of all gaming revenue, and is the only existing casino said projected to continue growing into the 2020s. Why is this, and what steps has it taken to ensure it’ll remain ahead of the game for years to come?
Innovation in marketing
One of the key reasons the iGaming market has come to enjoy the scale it does today is thanks to its disruptive and innovative approach to promoting and marketing its products. In seeking to establish itself as one of the world’s leading entertainment sectors, it has employed several novel approaches.
Among these you will find the tried and tested method of leveraging social media in order to increase digital footfall. Social media platforms’ business functions on the collection of data to re-sell to brands and businesses. This data is highly valuable as it is incredibly detailed, and can be used to curate targeted ads designed to appeal to niche demographics.
In this, the iGaming industry is no different from any other modern sector advertising online today, and in zeroing in on those people most with a proven interest in table games and online casinos, the sector is able to very efficiently reach new prospective patrons.
In addition to this, the sector has emerged as a frontrunner in the affiliate promotion space. Here, dedicated platforms like the new Bonuses.com site have emerged as a means of collating the various casinos and adjoining sign-up offers available online in one easy to search directory. This benefits both gamers and platforms alike – as platforms gain visibility and affiliate connections, and gamers get to peruse a large and growing array of competitive welcome bonuses, sign-up offers and bespoke deals.
This two-pronged approach has proven very effective at promoting the iGaming industry, ensuring it can reach people at relatively low cost and with a high degree of conversion. This has resulted in it not only outcompeting its brick-and-mortar counterpart, but many related mobile-optimized entertainment categories.
Pivot to mobile
The biggest single change in iGaming’s long evolution to date has been a doubling down on mobile platforms. Whereas the earliest online casinos and associated platforms were wholly the province of desktop computers and web browsers, since 2010 the smartphone has increasingly become the most popular computing device on the planet.
In light of this, it’s crucial that online industries such as this strive to accommodate this shift. Over the past decade, over 2 billion people have ‘come online’, many of which having done so purely as a result of acquiring a low-cost smartphone. In effect, this new device category has massively increased the potential market ceiling for entertainment products like those promoted by the iGaming market.
In light of this, there has been heavy investment by the world’s leading online casinos in ensuring their services are fully optimized for mobile. In many cases, this is as simple as rebuilding websites to work on mobile browsers, as the vast majority of iGaming platforms still operate this way. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a huge surge in iGaming apps hitting the app stores, though the returns for this approach are typically lower and apps are vulnerable to regulatory controls that limit the scope and flexibility of titles in this category.
In the coming years, this situation will play further into the hands of the iGaming industry. That’s because new laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act are challenging the monopolizing influence of libraries like Apple’s App store, enabling decentralized products to compete on more equal terms.
With a further 1 billion people set to come online over the next 10 years from emerging markets, the majority of those expecting to do so via smartphones and cellular connections, the sector is primed to offer accessible and on-demand casino gaming to these new consumers.