Delaware iGambling Revenues Shrink 14% in 2015

Delaware’s online gambling industry may have struggled throughout 2015, but at least its numbers improved slightly in the last month of the year with revenues rising by 7.4% to $180,109, compared to the $169,606 generated in December 2014.
The latest results strings together two straight months of growth for the state’s iGambing market, with lottery video games reporting $129,985 in revenues, making December 2015 their best month ever. Delaware’s online poker offering also experienced a solid month, with revenues rising by 8.9% to $31,124 year-over-year, although online casinos dropped to a mere $18,999, representing their second-worst performance since regulation was introduced in November 2013.
Finally, Delaware noted an impressive improvement in the number of customers opening new accounts with one of the state’s three online gambling operators, with new signups increasing by 48% to 417 in December, from the 256 players who did so in December 2014.
Despite a slight uptick in business during the last quarter of 2015, in which monthly revenues were all above the $180,000 mark, the $1.8 million Delaware generated in 2015 was still 14% less than the $2.1 million it collected throughout the whole of 2014. When Delaware first introduced regulation, the state had anticipated annual revenues in excess of $5 million, and had implemented a system in which the first $3.75 million generated from iGambling was taxed at a rate of 100%. After more than two years of operations, Delaware’s online gambling operators have therefore yet to see a return on their investments.
iGaming Revenues by Month:
January: $132,074
February: $143,101
March: $146,188
April: $132,154
May: $133,697
June: $108,692
July: $142,083
August: $158,979
September: $156,125
October: $182,969
November: $182,664
December: $180,109
In terms of online poker, Delaware also saw its revenues contract by roughly a third to $400,000 in 2015 from $600,000 a year earlier. Despite the interstate compact enacted with Nevada, the state’s monthly iPoker revenues are currently averaging around $30,000, which is in sharp contrast to the figures noted during its first few months of operation in 2014, namely January ($88,588), February ($74,399), March ($84,476), and April ($74,153).