Delaware Finds Online Gaming Not an Easy Source of Revenue

Written By Janice Doughtrey

The state of Delaware has discovered that state-regulated online gaming sites are not a simple source of instant revenue to fill their coffers. They have also discovered that a land based real-life casino is not a simple and guaranteed source of revenue as well.

Going back a couple of decades it became common knowledge that the state of Nevada was bringing in serious revenue from gambling, or gaming as the most of them categorize it now, and a lot of other states started to look for what seemed like an easy way to increase the income of their state.

When New Jersey legalized casinos in 1978 for Atlantic City, reports indicate that the state of New Jersey received a total revenue increase from 1980 to 1986 from approximately 1 million dollars to 2.5 million dollars

As numerous states worked to take advantage of this, a lot of silly ‘Rules’ were created to circumvent federal laws and regulations. This lead to the ‘Off-shore Set up’ with a cruise ship going more than 12 miles offshore to be in ‘International Waters’ and now gambling on the ship was legal. After that, there was a wave of states parking an old barge on a river and this was somehow legal for a casino to operate.

And then along came the internet with loads of online gaming sites and it seemed that easy money was just waiting to be had.

However, with the constant changing of federal laws and regulation plus an extremely high level of competition; suddenly it wasn’t so easy.

Delaware has three officially sanctioned online gaming operations based out of their land based casinos; Dover Downs, Harrington Raceway and Delaware Park. But Delaware, like a lot of states and a lot of online gaming companies, has found out how fast the landscape for the online gaming world can change.

Online gaming revenue for Delaware experienced a 42% decline; in real dollars, that’s from about 2.6 million down to just 1.5 million, in just one year period from March of 2016 through March of 2017 (Reference: https://www.casino.org/news/delaware-online-gaming-revenue-plummets-market-doesnt-follow-new-jersey)(Reference: http://focusgn.com/delawares-online-gaming-revenue-falls

Within the same time period, New Jersey experienced an increase of almost 40%.

Delaware has a population of less than 1 million people. The population of New Jersey is approximately 8.8 Million people. Comparing revenue generated by online gaming between Delaware ond New Jersey is useless if you’re thinking gross profit; but when a neighboring state doing the same type of business is increasing revenue while yours is spiraling downwards at a fast rate you might want to see if they’re doing anything different.