Gambling News - July 2005 Edition

"Online Recreation"

Report shows majority of Web users see the Web as a source of fun and opportunity.

One of the fastest growing technological phenomena of this century is the World Wide Web. It is used not only for business purposes, but also for entertainment and recreational purposes. The majority of Web users look to the Web as a source of fun and opportunity for the enjoyment of personal pursuits. An estimated seventy million adult Americans are online on any given day, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project. Many activities that once were done off line, for example checking stock exchange prices, the weather forecast or catching up on the latest news, are now done online by nearly twice the number of people who did so in the year 2000. And the numbers continue to rise. The market for paid content continues to grow, with sites collecting 1.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2004.

The most popular sites that account for the largest revenues earned are firstly the dating sites followed by the entertainment sites such as music and movie downloading sites. Although these sites saw a ninety percent increase in revenue in the year 2004, they are still second to the dating sites.

There are two other sites which are not taken into account and these contain the huge number of users visiting pornography and gambling sites, two other significant sources of revenue generators. An accurate reading of their revenue generating potential is difficult because of the difficulty of monitoring these types of sites. Nielsen/NetRatings monitored site visits among a panel of surfers and found that 24 percent visited pornography sites and 18 percent visited Internet gambling sites.

It therefore doesn’t come as a surprise that there are more than 2000 million Internet porn sites and that the online gambling market is expected to exceed 24 billion dollars by the year 2010.

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