New Research from Roy Morgan shows that 49.1% of adult Australians gambled in an average three-month period in the 12 months to March 2018, down from 50.6% a year ago, following a gradually decreasing trend in the gambling industry across all categories. This decline is despite the growing proliferation of gambling options, such as online and mobile betting.
These are the latest findings from the Roy Morgan Single Source database, built from surveys of over 50,000 consumers per annum, including detailed in-depth questioning of over 7,000 gamblers in person within their own homes.
Gambling takes many forms, from rolling the dice on the craps table, to sitting in a pub with a sports betting app open on your phone, or just buying scratchies for the Christmas crackers over the holidays. Using Roy Morgan’s in-depth gambling data, we’re able to observe not only which gambling categories a person participates in, but also those which they do not participate.
The Venn diagram below shows the complexity of the gambling ecosystem. In an average three month period:
- 7.8 million Australians play Lottery or Scratchies (for 5.1 million Australians that is the only gambling that they do)
- 1.9 million Australians bet (for 405,000 of them it is the only gambling they do)
- 3.1 million Australians engage in some level of gaming, such as poker, roulette and other casino games (for 907,000 it is the only gambling which they do)
As well as those who only gamble within their own categories, the data allows us to explore further, and observe that:
- 722,000 engage in both betting and lotteries/scratchies, but not gaming
- 241,000 engage with betting and gaming but not lotteries/scratchies
- 1.4 million engage in gaming and lotteries but not betting
- 568,000 people, or 3% of the Australian population, engage in all three types of gambling, as represented in the centre of the chart
Michele Levine, CEO of Roy Morgan, said: “Gambling is now an activity which nearly half of all Australians participate in within a 3-month period, but this statistic alone does not do justice to the varying behaviours of those millions of gamblers. They vary from casual scratchie buyers to