Mobile gambling users to rise by 100 million over 5-years

(US).- The number of mobile or tablet owners using their devices for gambling will increase by 100 million in the next five years, according to the latest report by Juniper Research. Projections from the research and statistics company show that 164 million people will either place a bet, visit a mobile casino or buy a lottery ticket from their devices in 2018.

"Although growth has been slow in the US since the DoJ ruling in 2011, the number of users in the region is expected to pick up sharply from 2014 onwards. This will occur as states which have not yet fully legislated on remote gambling make progress following successful services launching in Nevada and New Jersey. In addition, inter-state poker, where two players in separate, regulated markets play against each other, is likely to become a reality in the medium term, further driving mobile/tablet gambling usage," the report said. 

The paper also recognised that the majority of these users would be switching to mobile gambling from desktop services, attributing this migration to the fact that many features of gambling work better on a mobile device than a PC. In addition, as a result of this, gambling operators have been required to shift the nature of their organization away from "legacy" services such as telephone betting towards becoming a more mobile-oriented company, with the aim of achieving over half of their online revenues from mobile in the next 1-3 years.'