By comparison to the rest of the UK gambling market, the online gaming sector is still in its infancy: while man has been betting on horse for centuries he has been betting online for barely a decade. In 2005 and 2006, however, the online sector has grown into something of a child prodigy, attracting the public, media and investor spotlight as the explosion of interest in online gaming in general, and poker in particular, has caused turnover to soar and led to a succession of high-profile, high-value floatation on the London Stock Exchange.

By comparison to the rest of the UK gambling market, the online gaming sector is still in its infancy: while man has been betting on horse for centuries he has been betting online for barely a decade. In 2005 and 2006, however, the online sector has grown into something of a child prodigy, attracting the public, media and investor spotlight as the explosion of interest in online gaming in general, and poker in particular, has caused turnover to soar and led to a succession of high-profile, high-value floatation on the London Stock Exchange.

Despite the industry itself considering 2005 as marking the beginning of the next phase in the development of remote gambling, the youth and pace of growth of the industry continues to make it difficult to measure and particularly to regulate. With an estimated 2,300 gaming websites now accessible online, one spokesman for the Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) likened the expansion of the remote gambling sector to “a Wild West gold rush”. The Klondike period, however, may now be drawing to a close as a regulatory structure to legalise the basing of online gaming operations in the UK begins to take shape and the market enters another stage along the road to maturity, in which increasing mergers and acquisitions activity is expected to see more currently independent sites aggregated under the umbrella brands of the industry’s major players.

This report assesses the current state of the market, analyses consumer usage of and attitudes towards online gaming and offers some indication of likely future trends. This is the first occasion on which Mintel has examined this sector.