You can experience all the fun people go on road trips for online, from the comfort of your own home. With online gambling, the popularity of online slots is growing.
As onlinepokerreport.com points out, the state of New Jersey in the US releases the gross revenue numbers for its regulated online poker sites and NJ’s online casinos each month. For January 2017, they racked up $18.82 million dollars, which is a 2.38% growth from the month before. The yearly growth is more impressive, that is 28.64% from January 2016’s $14.63 million. These numbers fall in line with international trends, online gambling revenues are on the rise globally as well.
What’s interesting is that according to the same source, playnj.com online poker revenue is vastly outnumbered by other online casino games.
The most popular of those games are online slots.
Just like land casinos online gambling sites offer a vast variety of different themed slots: one can play in the world of the ancient Greek gods, in outer space or far-East in contemporary China. Movies and TV shows with large fan bases are also common themes. The appealing graphics and the simplicity of the rules is what made online slot machines so popular among the gamblers and profitable for the casinos. Unlike poker, slots are non-competitive games, although some online casinos hold rakerace-like contest for their users – points can be earned by wagering real money on slots, and every week the players with the most points on the leaderboard can get a piece of the prize pool.
So, we know that slots beat poker online in terms of generated revenue. But what about online casinos versus land-based casinos?
Staying in New Jersey, the Garden State’s Division of Gaming Enforcement released the January 2017 financial report for land casinos as well, not just online revenues. The seven gambling houses in the report had a combined monthly revenue of $185,862,583. This number dwarfs the online services’ $18.82 million, but please note that the trends are quite reverse: web-based gambling profits tend to grow from year to year, but Atlantic City casinos saw a decline compared to 2015, mainly due to the closing of the Trump Taj Mahal, as pokernews.com wrote in an article in October 2016. The same piece points out the boom in online casino revenue as well: it has been growing consistently every month since New Jersey legalized online gambling in 2013.
From the same land-based casino revenue reports we can find out that slot machines generate more money than poker “on the land” as well, not just online, by a significant margin. This statement holds true across all seven casinos in the review.
Many other states have legal online gambling (NV, MI, AZ and others) but New Jersey is the one who publishes monthly financial reports, that is why the numbers in this article come from that state.
