One day in the not too distant future — if federal and state governments comply — you may be able to place a bet from your smartphone from almost anywhere in the United States.
According to Valuewalk.com, “Online gaming is still just 8.9% of the global gambling industry by revenue, generating $40 billion of the $451 billion total in 2013, but that’s still a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% between 2000 and 2013.”
Gabelli analyst, Camillo Schmidt-Chiari, says that he expects online gambling, “to slow to 5.7% through 2017, which is still better than the global gambling industry’s projected 4.3%, but this average misses the big opportunity presented by mobile gaming.”
So why would mobile gambling apps, for example, be such a desirable thing? Well, according to the same report, “Unlike online gamblers, mobile gamblers are less likely to shop around for the best odds, and Schmidt-Chiari says that mobile operators have managed to get better margins and a higher average revenue per user (ARPU).” Schmidt-Chiari then adds, “There’s also a lot more interest from people who might not have been willing to gamble in the past.”
Given the plethora of mobile games that already emulate online gambling, there’s no denying that smartphone users are warming to the idea and practice of gambling on their mobile devices. And once the legal hurdles are jumped, there may be no stopping the runaway momentum of what some see as an inevitability — smartphones becoming the slot machines of the future.
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