Victoria Estimates
Income from Online Gambling
March
13, 2010
The city of Victoria is
excited about their foray into gambling as it has turned out to be very
positive for them. They have been in the gambling business now for
awhile and last year they brought in $1.1 million from their gambling
interests. They are estimating that they are going to be bringing in
somewhere around $2.27 billion by the year 2012.
But not one to sit back on their laurels, they have already started
pushing more gambling as they want to ensure that those numbers hold
true. British Columbia had already started pushing the number of slot
machines that they offered to over 10,000 but they have not seen the
increase in revenue that they were hoping to see from that expansion.
Instead, they have had some increase but very minor compared to the
amount they desired.
They then turned their attention to online gambling. The province
realized that in order for them to make the kind of money that they
wanted to, they had to shift their focus to online gambling. They
created an online gambling site called PlayNow.com and ran it through
the British Columbia Lottery Corporation. Last year they brought in $3.1
million but that is only 15% of the total amount spent by British
Columbia’s players.
They realized that the majority of their players were going to online
gambling sites that were off shore because of the restrictions that they
had placed on their sites. So now they have made drastic changes to the
way that they handle online gambling. They have changed the weekly
gaming limits from $120 to $9,999. This is a huge change and a lot more
revenue can come from expanding limits such as these. They think that
they will be able to bring in $10.8 million this year, to a total of
around $40 million from online gambling revenues by 2010.
