News

Growth in Netherlands gambling market continues at a slower pace

5 October 2023


(PRESS RELEASE) -- The legal market for online gambling has grown again in the past six months. The gross gaming result (BSR; stake minus prizes paid) has increased, but this growth is less strong than in previously measured periods. The number of player accounts that were actually played with remained virtually the same. As a result, the growth of the market seems to level off after two years.

This is evident from the fifth monitoring report on online gambling (pdf, 204 kB) published today by the Gaming Authority (Ksa). The BSR totalled 2022.2023 billion euros in the period August 1 to July 33. As a result, the market has grown again, but less strongly than before. From August 2022 to January 2023, the BSR grew by 33 percent. From January 2023 to August 2023, this was 8 percent.

René Jansen, chairman of the Gaming Authority:
"This fifth monitoring report shows that the gambling market continues to grow, even if it is levelling off. This means that the market is expected to develop. The continued growth is creating an increasing responsibility on providers. The KSA continues to strictly monitor that the Dutch player can gamble on a safe market, with sufficient attention to addiction prevention and insight into potentially problematic gaming behavior. Duty of care and addiction prevention are a crucial part of our supervision."

Number of players
The Dutch played together with 2023,826 active accounts in July. Six months earlier, in January, there were 859,000. Because players can use more than one account, the number of accounts does not directly say anything about the number of players. The Ksa estimates in its latest report that 676,000 Dutch people have gambled online in the past six months; That's 4.7 percent of the adult population. An average of 417,000 Dutch people gambled per month.

New calculation method
The previous monitoring report indicated that players lost an average of €310 per month. This number was only based on the months in which they actually played, and did not give a clear picture of a player's long-term loss. The total loss after, for example, 6 months cannot be calculated with that number. The KSA has therefore now calculated the total loss over the long term (in this case half a year). That amount is on average €1017 per player for the period January 2023 to July and converts to €170 per month.

Channeling
When opening the online market, the objective was that at least 8 in 10 players would play with legal providers after opening, in a safe environment with many guarantees in the field of addiction prevention. This target is still met: 93% of players only play via legal websites (an increase of 1% compared to the previous six months). New players, who did not play before the market opened, almost all (98%) only play with legal providers.

Young adults
The fifth monitoring report also looked specifically at the share of young adults. In July 2023, they gambled with 170,000 of the accounts used. That's 21% of the total number of accounts. This is a slight decrease compared to January, when they played with 184,000 accounts. Since young adults make up 9.4% of the total adult population, according to Statistics Netherlands, they therefore have a relatively large number of accounts per player. They do lose less money per account per month, namely €59.

Cruks
The number of registrations in the Central Register for the Exclusion of Games of Chance (Cruks) continues to increase. Registered players exclude themselves for at least six months (longer is also possible) from participating in risky games of chance with all legal providers in the Netherlands, both online and country-specific. In August (the benchmark of the monitoring report) there were more than 48,000 people in Cruks. When the report was published in September, that number has now passed 50,000.

Advertising
In the previous monitoring report, there was no mention of the ban on untargeted advertising for online gambling, but a shift from TV to online was already observed. With the introduction of the ban on 1 July, the number of television advertisements fell to zero; There are only expressions of program sponsorship on television. This is allowed until 1 July 2024.