Thought Banana
Nation of Gamblers
Maybe Nietzsche was right?
For most of the country’s history, gambling was illegal and heavily stigmatized in the United States. Today, gambling is a booming industry, with 2022 putting up an all-time season for the industry as it raked in over $60bn for the year.
To state the obvious, revenues for the gambling industry will almost definitely continue to increase each year as the practice becomes legal in more states, bigger players get involved, and sports leagues lean into it as a revenue driver.
But still, $60bn is a whole lot of money, so let’s talk about it for a minute.
Excluding tribal-owned casinos, sales raked in by casinos and online betting sites alike boomed 14% higher compared to 2021 to get to that $60bn level. Now, 14% might not sound like “booming,” but when benchmarked against an overall economy that grew sub-3% in the same period, that’s about as fast as it gets for large industries.
The growth alone isn’t much of a surprise, but the narrative shift in the space is. Since that damn virus showed up, basically anything done through a WiFi connection has exploded in popularity. Naturally, online betting followed that trend, but the story at first was that the spike would fade as the world re-opened. Looking at the data for 2022 and around things like this past Super Bowl (f*ck the Eagles), safe to say online betting ain’t going anywhere.
And later this month, we’ll begin arguably the most fun annual event in sports that practically begs you to put a month’s salary on several 7-leg parlays per day: March Madness.
The college basketball tournament officially begins on March 14th, so if you’re not into the whole sports, betting, or sports betting thing, just be mindful of your gambling friend’s mental state during tourney time.
But it’s not just sports betting, either. Everyone knows Robinhood sucks and is run by scumbags, but we also know that traders on Vlad’s app are the degenerates of degenerates in the world of investing.
Like sports betting, it was theorized that activity would plummet as the world re-opened and, according to the company’s latest earnings report, that is what the kids would call huge cap.
I mean, just look at the stock. Shares are up well over 22% this year already, meaning we sure hope those investors on the app bought the app’s stock as well.
Basically, what we can learn here is that Americans love gambling. An increased willingness of a population to put “hard-earned” money at risk on random bets like $CUMMIES or Jayson Tatum’s points in a game is a sign of an economy full of people with money to spare. It might not be great, but it could be worse!
The big question: Will we see the gambling trend continue to grow in the coming years, or did the last few years wear us out? How will real-time and other styles of gambling change the fan experience of sporting events and other bet-able spectacles?
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