With various states exploring online gambling possibilities, the question has come up about exactly who gambles online. Now the UK government probably does a better of job of tracking this than the US does because the UK has legal online gambling and can gather stats. You can check out all sorts of stats that the US government gathers by going here http://data/ But for the online gambling information, a lot of data is collected in university run studies. Which means, we’re paying grant money for folks to study online gambling. So far, they haven’t shown that its innately evil. But what have they found out.
Well, many online gamblers are young. Now, by young I don’t mean under-aged. But have you been to a live casino lately or on a gambling cruise leaving Florida waters and checked out the age of the average gambler? Okay, maybe the Florida cruise isn’t exactly objective. There are a lot of retirees in Florida, but visit the cruise and you’d think no one under 60 gambles. The retiree crowd is probably just more comfortable in a live casino environment than they are gambling online. The younger crowd isn’t going to drive to a live casino if they can find one online. This is perhaps an expected find of the studies.
Women are gambling online. I get the sense that the folks conducting the studies weren’t really expecting this result. There still seems to be a sort of sense that women aren’t good around technology, like computers. Maybe we need to update some stereotypes here because apparently women are more comfortable gambling online than they may be in the casino. Sites like Pinterest are showing that women really do take to social media and online communities.
As a result of this study, we’ll see the usual crowd warning against the dangers of gambling online, but I suspect we’ll also see online casinos doing more to welcome women to their sites.