YouGov has published the results of its annual gambling report looking into 13 markets across the globe. 

57% of Respondents Play Sports Betting for Fun

The recent International Gambling Report 2021 carried out by YouGov looks into the gambling behavior of players across 13 countries in the world. The report also examines the gambling preferences in terms of gender and across the different generations in India, the UK, Italy, Poland, Australia, Mexico, Denmark, France, Spain, the US, Germany, Sweden and Singapore. 

The results show that a global average of 63% of respondents that have tried online gambling prefer it over the traditional offline alternative. In addition, the lottery is the most popular form of regulated online product available globally. Some 42% of all respondents pointed out that they had played any form of lottery online within the last 12 months. 

The second one in the ranking is sports betting (36%), followed by online casinos (13%) and bingo (11%). The report adds that sports betting is more easily approved by legislators than the harder forms of online gaming products and is also more popular among the masses. The top motivator of lottery play is the desire to win a prize in 42% of the cases, while in sports betting, 57% of respondents said they do it for fun. 

Another interesting finding is that the percentage of respondents that gamble for fun rises to 48% among the 18-24 age group. In addition, 63% of millennials do not perceive the topic of gambling as a taboo and say they talk about it with their friends, family, and colleagues. 

The International Gambling Report breaks down online gambling participation by gender and finds out that 11% of the total population in the study are women, half the number of men (22%). The report says:

The data may reaffirm certain gender stereotypes. Participation among female gamblers is higher among many lottery games, as well as bingo and keno, while participation levels lag behind those of males for nearly every other online product type.” 

Governments Should Do More to Protect Players

The attitudes towards gambling and regulation reveal that only 23% of the respondents globally agree that online gambling should be illegal, a further 33% lacked an opinion on the matter and 44% disagreed with the statement. 

What is more, 57% of the participants in the survey think that gambling firms ignore problem gambling, while only 16% take the opposite stance. This sends a clear message to regulators, who are influenced by voters’ attitudes when taking actions to prevent gambling harm. Recently, Paddy Power’s former CEO Stewart Kenny criticized the gambling industry in an interview for Prime Time on RTE. 

When it comes to comparing the USA to the global market, it seems that American online gamblers also play more frequently, with 48% gambling multiple times monthly, compared to 42% of their global peers.