When most of the events such as European Football Cup, La Liga, Premier League, F1 Races are cancelled due to the current situation with global pandemic, especially the people who are wagering bets online have started to shift their focus on completely new products.

In a study published on 2018, it was estimated that the global iGaming market was valued at around 45 billion euros. The real number is most likely much higher, since still during these days many of the operators are operating from offshore locations. This basically means that these operators and their full revenues are not published and added up to this number.

On a recent study about effects of Covid-19 on online betting we saw huge changes in the behavior patterns of regular gamblers.

 

Insiders estimate decrease in revenue

When insiders were interviewed about the current situation, a staggering number of them, 66% to be exact believed, that the whole year of 2020 will have lower volumes in both net and gross gaming revenue around all of their products.

This has led to huge tanking of prices in online gambling stocks. On average the biggest operators are -22% from January 2020. These numbers can be easily explained, as in Europe the amount of bets placed on football have decreased 93% within a period of one month. Most likely this number will go even lower, since all the remaining games are most likely to be cancelled within the next few weeks.

On other hand, especially e-sports seems to gaining popularity amongst the people who like to place bets online. Based on the study above, European bookers have implied that the total amount of bets made on e-sports has increased by 61%. This also includes the amount of bets placed on virtual sports.

Another benefiting party from the current situation are pay n play casinos. As they mostly rely on revenue from slot machines they are able to keep up with the current situation much better than brands that are only focusing on sports betting.

These casinos are really popular in Europe. Especially in Germany, Sweden and Finland where most of the new players are heading to these online sites instead of traditional online casinos or land based casinos.

Regarding to the USA the situation does not seem as bright. As many offices are being closed new launches of casinos in states such as New Jersey are most likely delayed. New Jersey was the first state that officially enabled legal gambling for people living in that state.

New Jersey had really strong first year when it came down to online betting. Now that the events are getting cancelled globally it seems, that this year will be a lot lower in form of revenue generated.

Once the pandemic has passed there is still light at the end of the tunnel. Luckily most of the events that have now been cancelled have been moved to future date. Once the events are open again we will most likely see a huge surge in amount of players that will race back to the betting market.