New research has found that the availability of online poker has a complementary effect on land-based gaming revenues, flying in the face of findings of earlier less-detailed studies.
The study by the Universities of Nevada and Hamburg compared US and Canadian offline casino revenues to estimated annual online poker revenues for each US state, the District of Columbia, and each Canadian province. A statistical analysis found that that the two markets actually complemented each other, even finding a “small but significant positive relationship between those revenues.”
The study’s conclusions set online poker apart from other casino games, given that earlier research, including that undertaken by one of the report’s two authors, Kahlil S Philander of the University of Nevada, showed that online gaming considered as a whole could have a cannibalising effect on offline gaming revenues.
According to Philander and his co-author, Ingo Fiedler of the University of Hamburg: “We found that in a market with an additional $1 million in casino revenue, we would predict an additional $2.7 thousand in online poker revenue. That means that the larger the online poker market, the larger the offline gambling market and vice versa.”
The new study also found that the comparative size of the lottery industry across the various jurisdictions had zero impact on online poker revenue, blowing a hole in the argument currently being put forward by state-owned monopolies in countries such Germany that they played an important role in cannibalising demand away from highly addictive products provided by unlicensed operators, onto more benign products with an apparently lower risk of addiction.
The report authors concluded that offline casinos “can be less wary of competition from online poker, and should be more receptive to this new form of gaming.”
