Why There so Many Online Casinos on the Web

Have you ever wondered why there are so many online casinos on the web? I have been working in the industry for about five years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how casinos are literally mushrooming by the week on the Internet. And not just on the English speaking web. Have a search around, and you´ll find the same story for German, Italian, Chinese and Turkish searches. Have you ever wondered where they all come from? When I first started looking around, I couldn´t quite get my head around it. After all, surely running an online casino is not that basic? You need to supply the games, take the bets, pay a customer service team and we haven´t even gone in to all of the legal resposibilities that you have to manage.

Well here´s my understanding of the situation.

There are the big brands of course, companies such as 888 and Party Poker, that are more often than not listed on a stock exchange. They develop and market their business much as a traditional brick and mortar retailer would. They invest in building the games, work out how to manage transactions online and employ a large staff to handle customer service, legal work and other issues. And then another team to market their products both online and offline.

Then there are software companies such as Microgaming and Playtech. And this is where it starts to get complicated. These companies would rather separate themselves from the actual business of taking bets (from someone playing roulette for example). They focus entirely on developing the latest online casino games and then license this out to other companies who then market the games under different brands and logos.

This being the Internet, it is relatively easy and cheap to design a pretty front end for the same games- in fact some companies may have 5 or 6 different designs or online casino brands that they promote, in the belief that they will get a bigger slice of the market if they have more vareities on offer (on old strategy that the chocolate manufacturers hit on many years ago). So much as you have plain Cadburys, Chocolate and Nut Cadbury´´s and Chocolate and Raisins Cadbury´s, you´ll also find Riverbelle Casino, Lucky Nugget Casino and The Gaming Club Casino, all marketed by a company called Belle Rock Gaming. All 3 casinos are essentially the same, except for the colour and graphics of course.

Now, bear in mind that the number of companies that are developing the software is also increasing, and you have a situation where you are getting exponential growth. More and more software companies are supplying multiple marketing companies who are in turn launching more and more brands.

So where does it all end? Well, while the online casino market is still experiencing stellar groth, the story is likely to remain the same. When the curve flattens out, however, people are going to start realising that it is cheaper to retain existing customers than acquire new ones, and fewer strong brands will win out in the long run. Until that time, do your research before you play- there are plenty of good casino review sites out there.

And think of the upside- with all this competition, these companies have to be generous when attracting new business with incentives and bonus give aways.

Tags: Casinos, Many, Online, There

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 25th, 2010 at 11:58 am and is filed under Online Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.