Mobile Betting
It’s half time at Old Trafford. A few people scurry onto the concourse for the obligatory pie. A few for a pint. To the gents. To the ladies. Some take their phone out to check the scores across the country. Some plenty more take them out to check out how their accumulator is doing.
You see mobile betting has skyrocketed in recent years as smartphones become more and more popular, making it easier to bet in the pub, on the couch, and at 3.45pm on a Saturday afternoon when you’re 2-0 up against West Bromwich Albion.
Seven in 10 people in the UK now own a smartphone, whilst that stretches to one in five across the entire globe – a number which is continuing to rise. And following a record summer in which, according to the freebets talking mobile interview, bookmakers such as Coral received a record number of app downloads, that’s only going to progress the industry further. For more on betting mobile apps, please click here.
Since 2007, the breakthrough year in which Steve Jobs released the iPhone, setting the tempo for the progression in smartphones over the next seven years; mobile gambling has become a multi-billion pound industry which saw $13billion placed on bets via mobile in 2013 alone. With the imminent release of the iphone 6- as well as other rival models- that trend looks set to continue.
Whether that be football, cricket, basketball, baseball, tennis, and in particularly horse racing, having a punt on your favourite is now only a click away. The UK has plenty of clickers.
According to a recent study, 4.3 percent of iPhone users in the UK have a sports betting app downloaded, and when you consider there are around 10.3million iPhone users in the UK, that’s an awful lot of downloads.
Of course Android figures are likely to double that figure, creating a huge market for bookmakers, particularly the in-play market which has become one of the main draws to the industry.
Mobile Betting
Raymond Doyle, Mobile Marketing Manager for Coral has noticed the market has been particularly successful for them, saying, “Next goalscorer and final score is always popular especially for the televised games.”
And the bookmakers aren’t just targeting television punters. He added, “Companies are now providing the functionality to send push notifications to sports fans within a certain stadium/racecourse making it the ideal opportunity to hit your target mobile customer.
With Wi-Fi and network coverage providing some issues with the success of this offering, it will be fascinating to see how this method of marketing will progress in the coming months.”
Months and years. With the mobile betting industry at an all-time high – not to mention the United States slowly seeing states legalising mobile gambling – there is set to be an even bigger boom in the next few years.
Juniper Research recently forecast that by 2017 the industry will be at $45billion by 2017, and $62billion by 2018 – though we’d put money on it going way beyond.
