Online gambling web traffic down 3% in March, 2020.
In a world gone indoors, the internet has become the outdoor playground of a global population. People are accessing certain types of websites more than ever before. On the opposing end of that spectrum, some formerly popular digital industries are performing much more poorly.
With entertainment being among the most highly sought resources during this pandemic, it was initially believed that online casinos, poker rooms, bingo sites, etc., would see a remarkable boost in traffic. As it turns out, iGaming is on the decline, but not by much.
Online Gambling Web Traffic Down 3% in March
According to information coming from researchers at Imperva, online gambling isn’t suffering the way its terrestrial cousin is. As land-based casinos see stock value falling an average of 50% per mega-corporation, internet casinos are still attracting a good number of customers. However, the state of the economy has taken a small bite out of traffic numbers.
Researchers compared internet gambling traffic from March 1, 2020 to March 22, 2020, with the weekly averages from a previous reporting period ending January 19, 2020. The January averages are considered the “normal” rate, whereas the numbers in the first three weeks of March indicate the traffic rates of web-based industries as the impact of the global pandemic set in. At that point in time (March 22), a vast majority of the world had already entered into either mandatory or self-imposed quarantine.
In that period of time, traffic to online gambling websites fell just -3%. That’s far better than the sports industry, which lost -46% of its online traffic in the same time period. The second worst effected has been the adult industry, experiencing a -42% decline in traffic. Travel and automotive came in third and fourth with -41% and -35% respectively.
Conversely, some internet businesses saw an influx of traffic. You can surely guess some of them. News resources came in the number one spot, rising +64%. Food and beverage related websites have seen a +34% spike in traffic. Retail and gaming websites tied for third with +28% boosts.
Impact of Pandemic on Global Big-Business Web Traffic
| Industry | Impact +/- % |
| News | +64% |
| Food and Beverage | +34% |
| Retail | +28% |
| Gaming | +28% |
| Law & Government | +17% |
| Education | +17% |
| Healthcare | -3% |
| Gambling | -3% |
| Financial Services | -7% |
| Automotive | -35% |
| Travel | -41% |
| Adult | -42% |
| Sports | -46% |
Who is Imperva, and why are they tracking web traffic anyway?
Imperva is an international cyber security company specializing in securing websites, apps, data and other resources for their digital clientele. Each month, Imperva publishes a Cyber Threat Index, detailing which industries are at greatest threat, and how they are being threatened. In performing their security research, they collect data on web traffic from all over the globe.
Imperva’s researches scrutinize “over 25 petabytes of network traffic passing through the Imperva CDN per month”. A single petabyte is equal to 250 bytes; 1,024 terrabytes, or about one million gigabites. The general population is not familiar with the word petabytes because quite frankly, our brains could hardly fathom the amount of information detailed in that much data.
Think of it this way… the high-end MacBook Pro laptop has a hard drive capacity of 500GB. You would have to download enough files and programs to max out the hard drive space of 50,000 MacBook Pros to equal the amount of data Imperva scours each and every month. Mind blown, right? And to think, all you wanted to know was how much online gambling web traffic had changed in the last month. You’re welcome.
