Top Gambling Trends of 2024

Horse racing, once a massive business, was the only legal form of gambling in the US outside of Las Vegas until 1978.

But the sport shrunk over time. Other forms of gambling later became legal and grew in popularity and the proliferation of cable TV plus the remote control meant horse racing’s slow pace cast it out of favor. As well, the lifespan of star racehorses compared to their human counterparts in other sports led to lower momentum around particular horses, and general concerns for animal cruelty made viewers less interested.

Zed Run is a rapidly growing company that brings horse racing back in digital form. Rather than focusing on gambling, Zed Run lets users breed digital racing horses. The horses have traits that affect their odds of winning races, and they can be bred to create new horses which inherit some of these traits in a partially randomized way, similar to real-life racehorse breeding. Zed Run charges a percentage of the "stud fee" for breeding, a mechanism that allows them to monetize a part of the game that both involves wagering on randomized outcomes and doesn't look like gambling.

The game hosts continuous races, where players pay to enter their digital horses and then collect prize money if the horses win. As the NFT space heats up, it’s reviving many forms of entertainment and collectibles that were previously declining in the face of more engaging digital options.

Zed Run exemplifies another modern business model: instead of selling a product directly, Zed Run operates a platform and takes a cut of other participants' economic activity. The hard part about building platforms is that they're two-sided markets, so they're useless to each side until the other has critical mass. In digital goods, it's possible to fix this by creating the goods and then encouraging users to trade them. Since it's a platform for exchanging virtual goods rather than physical ones, the default gross margin approaches 100%, meaning that Zed Run can take the kind of cut that more traditional platforms spend years to achieve.

Online gambling is an industry that's prone to explosive growth. Smaller companies operate at the periphery of the law, and grow fast enough to get unfriendly attention from regulators. And even large companies are vulnerable when the rules change. This constant churn means that there's always room for new sites to arise. Novibet, a Greek gaming site that's rapidly growing in popularity, showcases these trends.

Online gambling, compared to the real-world variety, offers fewer opportunities for some kinds of cheating and advantage play; card-counting doesn't work when shuffling is no longer imperfect, for example. The low overhead from online casinos means that they can offer higher payouts, and sign-up bonuses. A real-world casino has a near zero "bounce rate": almost everyone who shows up will bet on something. Websites in high-monetization verticals have to pay up for traffic, and they use sign-up bonuses and favorable odds to keep their bounce rate low.

Meanwhile, the low cost of software relative to hardware means that they can rapidly extend gambling to new kinds of bets. On Novibet, gamblers can wager on casino games and sports games, but they can also place bets on the outcome of reality TV shows. For example, search interest in Novibet doubled during the three-month run of Big Brother's 13th season. Flexible gambling sites can take advantage of the dynamics of TV: when sports aren't available, reality TV is an affordable source of live entertainment.

Online gambling relies on trusted payment networks, and the cost of payments is often a significant component of their cost structure. Gambling, like adult content, is a high-risk payments category where chargebacks are more common and the incidence of fraud is high, so the cost of processing payments is higher than for other kinds of commerce. For sites like Onlyfans, the payment processing fee is almost double that of Stripe's standard rate. As payment companies get more comfortable with gambling, the number of payment options has risen, which acts as an implicit subsidy to the industry.