By Samantha Williams
As an eventual sequence of offline gambling, like horse racing, lotteries, sports events, Bingo, casinos, slot machines, roulette and Poker and so on, the scenario changed to the inevitable Internet in 1995. The U.S. Company launched the website with comparatively a fraction of the investment needed for starting a Casino in Nevada in millions of dollars. With just 17 employees it managed the show to run with 18 different casino games. Just from this starting point there was no looking back and the proliferation of hundreds of institutions jumping the band-wagon of running websites for online gambling continued. Interestingly governments of foreign countries evinced interest on opening their own sites for conducting online lotteries in multi-various languages with an eye on the abundance of potential existing for online gambling and millions of dollars on revenue just for the taking.
In 1996, the Stock Market of U.S. announced listing of the stocks of online gambling ventures and this opened up the awareness among many others as well that what online gambling is all about and what is in it for them. A large contingent of U.S. gambling organizations running their outfits in their localities joined the stream by extending their activities on the cyber-world. The profit margins published were amazing – while the entrepreneurs were accustomed to 8 to 16% margins in their real world casinos after the laborious tasks involved being handled tactfully, the net-world gains were over 24% by the U.S. Company started the game. In the first year itself another Company netted a turnover of $48 million which was so glaring too many eyes.
The U.S. federal governments did not keep quiet, perhaps by the lobbying of the vested interests and woke up to curtail the run-away success of online gambling, for fear of loss of revenue actually due to them. Almost all the U.S. States formulated laws to regularize the online gambling transactions, declaring them illegal and transfer of funds for wagering by financial institutions inside the country was stringently curbed. The legal jargon as usual was elaborate to cripple the activities of online gambling sites.
This necessitated the online institutions to circumvent the procedures of incorporation of gambling establishments by registering in other countries and conducting financial transactions in banks of offshore and online net-banks. This made the efforts of imposition of restrictions futile and the online gambling goes on unabated with the support of netizens the world-wide and also Americans with offshore bank accounts.
Even by a conservative estimate, a staggering 20 million people take part in some of the online gambling games. Judging by the growth in the last decade in all the countries, where more and more people are fancied by the online games and also the potential existing for expansion of online gambling sites, it is estimated that by the year 2020 there will be a mammoth population of 160 million people playing online gambling. The overall market that is to be tapped in the years to come is projected to be a scintillating $49 billion.
So by any yardstick, online gambling is very healthy and will go up by leaps and bounds in the years to come.
