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Can EURO 2020 Spark a Betting Boom for Britain’s Bookies?

Published

1 year ago

May 24, 2021

Can EURO 2020 Spark a Betting Boom for Britain’s Bookies?

With UEFA and football fans breathing a sigh of relief that EURO 2020 is finally to be held this summer, will UK bookmakers be celebrating too come July?

Clawing Back the Lost Pounds

The coronavirus pandemic has proved a disruption to every walk of life in the UK. Successive lockdowns, closed schools, homeworking, and furlough schemes have changed the entire country over the past 12 months.

And for sports fans and online bookmakers, the past year has been equally disruptive. 2020 should have been a bumper year for Britain’s bookies. Instead, many of the bookmakers’ most active markets were either curtailed or wiped completely from the calendar.

The English Premier League was suspended – although it eventually came to a spluttering end just before the summer – while Wimbledon was cancelled and the Grand National went virtual. By the time of the first national lockdown, gamblers were resorting to betting on the only football around – Asian Handicaps featuring actual Asian teams, and the far reaches of the Belarus Premier League.

In fact, total tax receipts for the period April 2020 to March 2021 came to “just” £2.83bn. That marked a staggering drop of £182m – or 6% – compared to the previous year.

But it was the cancellation of EURO 2020 that really hit bookies hard. Major football events are normally huge cash cows for online bookmakers. And 2020 was due to be an even bigger betting bonanza for the betting sites: Scotland had qualified for their first major tournament in over 20 years, while for England EURO 2020 would have been as close to a home tournament as they had seen since EURO 1996.

Betting Bonanza Expected This Summer

Betting companies recovered as 2020 came to a close. Most players migrated online as the continuing closure of retail betting shops and casinos continued. Indeed, poker activity and online casino gameplay helped to soften the blow.

But nothing compares to a major football tournament to turn around betting sites’ fortunes. At the last big footballing festival – the 2018 World Cup – over €136bn in bets were taken by the bookies.

And with EURO 2020 being held across multiple countries, including England, UK bookies will be looking forward to a release of cash from gamblers itching to put their bankrolls and footie knowledge to good use.

England will play all of their group games at Wembley, as well as a potential semi-final and final – if they make it that far. The better Gareth Southgate’s team does, the more money will be flowing through the UK bookies’ coffers. Simply put, England have a very real chance of winning their first major trophy since the 1966 World Cup. And that could translate into a big payday for the bookmakers.

Bonuses & Promotions for EURO 2020

To take advantage of an expected bumper EURO 2020, major brands will have exclusive offers and promos for the event. The tournament starts on June 11 but we already know the 24 teams taking part. And if the 2018 World Cup is anything to go by, bookies will be going all out with a raft of special deals.

England specials will almost certainly be on the table. Money back on losing England bets may be offered, as well as enhanced odds on the team’s home games. New players will also be able to claim free bets when they open their accounts.

Moving Forward: What’s in Store for UK Gamblers?

Despite a year of betting shop closures and delayed or cancelled sporting events, the UK sports betting industry rode the storm well. Revenues at the big betting companies like William Hill and Sky held firm.

In the case of the Sky Betting and Gaming Group (SBG), online sports betting revenue actually increased by 26%. New player acquisitions and more customers betting online seems to have helped companies weather the COVID-19 storm.

But assuming a good EURO 2020, what lies in store for the UK bookmakers? There is a review of the 2005 Gambling Act which may see some of the bookies’ powers scaled back.

Affordability checks are a definite possibility, and an ombudsman may come in to force betting forms to reduce stakes where needed. In addition, visible gambling advertising on football shirts may become a thing of the past. Indeed, more and more football clubs are terminating deals with shirt sponsors from the gambling industry.

For now, the betting companies will be concerned with the success of EURO 2020. And with football punters promised a first bonanza of football since the 2018 World Cup, expect a similar bonanza on the bookmakers’ sites.

Related Topics:Britain’s Bookies EURO 2020 Grand National

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Rightlander partners with Awin to accelerate growth into new markets

Published

2 days ago

June 28, 2022

George Miller

Affiliate and advertising compliance experts, Rightlander.com have announced an overall product enhancement to support their growth into new markets including affiliate Networks and Platforms, Digital Agencies, Forex, Telecommunications and Utilities.

The move follows Rightlander’s experience and success in the iGaming vertical, where a number of parallels can be drawn between customer challenges, marketing regulations and partner guidelines. These include the need for honest marketing as well as customer acquisition channels that marketing partners derive traffic from, such as websites, social media, search engines and email.

The new portal has been developed with input from leading brands in their sector such as Awin to help clients effectively review and rectify marketing infractions detected by Rightlander.

Alex Parmar-Yee, UK Strategy Lead at Awin, said “ We chose to work with Rightlander to enhance our ability to carry out publisher audits based on the requirements of individual advertisers. It was important to have a partner who was able to accommodate the wide variety of needs from our clients relating to areas such as content accuracy, offer intelligence and exposure monitoring. The tools provided have allowed our client teams to carry out important housekeeping more efficiently, so that even more focus can be dedicated to strategy and account management.”

New solutions have also been introduced to help save clients time, reduce risk and grow their partnership programs with confidence. These include Screen, which allows clients to evaluate the online content of new affiliate applicants as part of their suitability checks, and Verify that helps clients to ensure that their promotions are live on authorised sites and linking to the correct landing pages.

This is in addition to Rightlander’s core solutions that help clients to Discover undisclosed content and continuously Monitor partners for accurate and compliant marketing worldwide.

Rightlander’s new modular portal allows clients to segment and prioritise results by business objective and marketing channel (websites, social media, PPC ads, video streaming, Telegram and email) and offers a comprehensive list of API integrations to deliver data to a client’s systems.

The solution offers targeted scanning by frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) and compliance issue (e.g. required T&Cs or prohibited text) per URL along with cutting edge technology to reduce false positives, minimise time spent checking infractions and streamline the remediation process.

Ian Sims, founder of Rightlander.com, said “Having the opportunity to fine-tune our product with such a high profile partner has been fantastic. The evolving nature of affiliate marketing and the emergence of influencers, coupled with an ever-increasing array of regulations and advertising marketing guidelines in different consumer verticals has heaped a huge compliance workload on marketing teams.

“Awin put Rightlander through a 6 month trial period before selecting us as their marketing compliance partner and we’re delighted that our monitoring software has saved them so much time and helped them to resolve so many more compliance issues.”

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SCOTT THOMAS TEAMS UP WITH CASINO GURU TO RAISE AWARENESS OF PROBLEM GAMBLING

Published

2 days ago

June 28, 2022

George Miller

SCOTT THOMAS TEAMS UP WITH CASINO GURU TO RAISE AWARENESS OF PROBLEM GAMBLING

Scott Thomas TV personality, podcaster, the managing director of The Social PR, and co-founder of Food4Thoughts, has recently joined forces with Casino Guru to promote responsible gambling and raise awareness around safer gambling initiatives.

The successful British entrepreneur, social media influencer, and TV personality, Thomas opened up on his podcast, Mancs on the Mic, with brothers Adam and Ryan Thomas, about his personal struggles with gambling addiction at the age of 21, a period which he described as a really dark time. “I was gambling away student loans. I was borrowing money off friends, I would even wait outside the casino in the morning for it to reopen … I was constantly trying to chase whatever I lost,” confessed Thomas during a series of videos created for the campaign.

Overwhelmed with the amount of feedback he’s received after discussing the issue for the first time, Thomas and Casino Guru, the world’s largest online casino database and an established gambling authority, have collaborated on a problem gambling awareness campaign.

Casino Guru has been working towards better and safer gambling for years. Pushing online operators to become fairer and more responsible, solving thousands of complaints of players who feel deceived by an online casino, and providing honest reviews of over 4,400 online casinos are just some of the examples of that.

This mission is also reflected in many responsible gambling projects and initiatives they launched to date, including the Global Self-Exclusion Initiative and the Casino Guru Academy. However, Casino Guru has recognized that it’s getting increasingly harder to spread awareness of problem and responsible gambling and reach the desired target group: despite providing a plethora of high-quality content related to responsible gambling, the younger population simply doesn’t read it.

According to Statista, 39% of Britons aged 25 to 34 gambled in 2020. What’s more, around 25% of Britons in the same age category have reported to engage in some form of online gambling within the four weeks prior to being surveyed. In other words, one in four Britons in this age bracket are playing in online casinos. And since this is the generation that can most effectively be targeted through social media, Casino Guru‘s collaboration with Scott Thomas was a natural next step.

The campaign ran on Instagram, which gave it a big potential to reach large audiences, since Thomas’s Instagram account currently has close to 1 million followers. Both parties ultimately hope to help not only current and future people at risk of problem gambling, but also friends and family members of someone exhibiting problem gambling behaviour.

“I was in a mess at the time, and it massively affected me and my family,” Thomas confessed in one of the videos. “I’ve teamed up with Casino Guru to try and raise some awareness around this subject because clearly there’s a lot of people out there who are still struggling,” he added. “Even if it helped just one person, this Casino Guru awareness campaign has done its job. Because I wish I had a video like this when I was going through my struggles.”

Apart from Thomas’s personal story of gambling addiction, the series of videos tackles topics such as how to know if someone has a gambling problem, how to gamble responsibly, or how to approach someone who has a gambling problem.

As Daniela Kianicová, Public & External Relations Lead at Casino Guru, explains, “This awareness campaign is the first of its kind – it marks the first time that a company operating in the gambling industry uses the power of a mainstream influencer to communicate the risks of problem gambling to young adults – and we’re very proud to have the honours.”

With gambling becoming more and more accessible and widespread, it is vital that the risks of problem gambling as well as responsible gambling principles are communicated to as many players as possible. And because different generations consume content in different ways, finding new and creative alternatives to reach audiences of all ages is paramount to success of such campaigns.

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The 5th AskGamblers Awards Winners Are Here!

Published

1 week ago

June 20, 2022

George Miller

The 5th AskGamblers Awards Winners Are Here!

After several months of anticipation, on a magical night on 16 June we finally revealed the names of winners in the 5th AskGamblers Awards.

Drum Roll, Please!

After more than three months of anticipation and wholehearted support from our players, we finally know the names of the winners of the 5th AskGamblers Awards! The race was tight throughout the process, but the names you helped us choose genuinely deserve to be the next laureates of one of iGaming’s most prestigious accolades.

Without further ado, here are the winners in the fifth edition of AskGamblers Awards: