Brits Spend GBP 1.5 Billion A Year Online
Published: Friday, October 07, 2005 Online-Casinos.com
BET CRAZY BRITS SPEND GBP 1.5 BILLION A YEAR ON-LINE
New Virgin Money survey has revealed that Brit betting is on the rise.
A new survey commissioned by the Virgin Gaming Group, UK owners of Virgin Gaming shows that poker, casino, football, lottery and horseracing sites are the country’s big favourites - and Londoners have emerged as the biggest spenders.
Most Brits admit to staking between GBP 10 and GBP 20-a-week having a flutter while 40 percent of Scots spend GBP 50. But Londoners are the nation’s biggest gamblers with one in ten spending between GBP 300 and GBP 500-a-week.
Virgin Money polled more than 2,000 people to discover the scale of the nation’s online betting fascination – and an incredible 93 percent admitted they have had a crack.
More new punters are chasing the dream all the time with nearly half the people polled admitting they have started gambling online in the past six months.
Football sites are tops with men, 40 percent visiting them daily and the same number betting once a week. Lottery and casino games are men’s other big favourites.
But women provided the biggest shock. Their main gambling interest is the lottery, but second on their ‘must-bet’ list is horseracing, once regarded as a mainly male fascination.
Punters in the Midlands and East Anglia are the most frequent online betters with nearly one in three admitting to having a flutter more than once a day. People in the South West spend most time playing poker, backing horses or trying other sites on the web – one in 20 confessing to spending up to five hours online a day.
The vast majority of online punters, nearly 80 percent, will spend a minimum of one hour a week betting online – but that equates to more than a working week each year gambling on the web.
Most of the gambling population use their own computers at home to enjoy their new hobby and they pay for their fun with credit and debit cards. But up to 10 percent nationally admit to using computers at work, that figure rising to 18 percent in London and the North East.
And five per cent nationally confess to buying a PC or laptop specifically so they can bet.
The seductive power of gambling has resulted in 10 percent of the online betting community insisting that having a flutter online is now one of their main pastimes. But that figure rises to one in five of online gamblers in Scotland and East Anglia.
A spokesman for Virgin Money said: “There’s no doubt online gambling and betting has become incredibly popular across the country – and these figures prove it. “The internet – as with so many other areas of life - has simply made something people already enjoy even easier to access and new sites are springing up all the time. Gambling can be both fun and rewarding but punters should only spend what they can afford to lose.”
