Online Casinos More Popular than Racetracks

April 20, 2009 | News Category: Online Casinos

0 Comments Racetracks, legal in many places where online casinos may or may not be legal are finding the competition very steep. Recently, horse racing tracks have been struggling to keep their profits up in both Canada and the United States. Many of the track insiders feel that the drop in revenue is due, in the most part, to online casinos.

Although many horse racing tracks have installed slot machines and video lottery terminals to subsidize the tracks, this has not restored the level of revenues to what they used to be. It seems that, just as land-based casinos have been hit by the recession, so have the horse racing tracks and their token slot games.

In Toronto, it was reported that one of the local horse racing tracks, Woodbine Racetrack, is losing around $200 million each year to online gambling. In 2008, the track's betting income was $866 million. In simple terms, it seems that one in every five dollars that used to be gambled at Woodbine Racetrack is now being gambled on the Internet.

Racetracks complain and try to get online gambling banned. They simply cannot keep up with the competition, and instead of finding a way to make what they offer into a much more attractive alternative for those who enjoy betting, they complain like petulant children who have just had their candy stolen!

Consumers should be offered choice as choice is what makes a free market thrive. Land-based casinos and racetracks need to accept that there has been a general shift in which consumers often prefer to spend their time online. There would be an outcry if clothing stores and supermarkets tried to get the government to intervene and prevent consumers from ordering clothing online or placing their grocery orders online. Imagine if one of the leading online bookstores was told that they had to stop selling to online customers, and that only land-based bookstores were legal!

There will always be those that prefer to do their gambling, or shopping for that matter, in a store while others simply prefer to be able to make use of the facilities that are available to them from the comfort of their own homes.

For those that prefer online casinos to land-based casinos and horse races, they benefit from the convenience, since online casinos are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They also have no traveling or parking fees and smokers can smoke without bothering others. Online casinos also offer better payouts than many forms of land-based gambling as the overhead costs are very low.

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