REMEMBER THE RHETORICAL QUESTION?

I mentioned my concern about the accessibility of gambling in the blog regarding adLibere.

I started conducting this research at around September 15th: open-source databases, useful articles, charts, while simultaneously keeping a list for citations in the end. After Ghostnector was nearing the finish line, I started to analyze the data I collected about this topic, performing statistical and mathematical analysis, making conclusions, and writing the research.

Here are some of the most interesting findings of the research:

Moving gambling online does not necessarily mean that people gamble more overall. In Australia, online participation rose from 8.1% in 2010/11 to 17.5% in 2019, while participation in any form of gambling actually fell from 64.3% to 56.9%. So, the movement towards digital gambling and an increase in total gambling participation are two completely different things.
The amount of money going into the online gambling market grew enormously. In Spain, full-year marketing expenditure increased by about 496% between 2013 and 2025, while gross gaming revenue increased by about 643%. Interestingly, marketing expenditure per active account-month changed relatively little between the beginning and the end of the period, suggesting that much of the overall increase came with the expansion of the market itself rather than simply spending dramatically more on each active account.
Marketing and gambling revenue looked extremely connected, until I removed much of the long-term trend. In the Spanish monthly data, the correlation between marketing and GGR in levels was 0.894. However, when I compared month-to-month changes instead, the Pearson correlation fell to only 0.087, and the correlation between the previous month's marketing change and the current month's GGR change was 0.007. In other words, two variables rising together for years does not automatically mean that short-term increases in one are causing increases in the other.
Exposure among young people was already massive. In a 2025 British school survey, 79% of pupils aged 11–17 recalled seeing some form of gambling advertising. Sixteen percent followed gambling-related content, and among that subgroup, 31% reported seeing advertising from an influencer, creator, or streamer they followed. Seeing an advertisement is obviously not the same thing as gambling, but the accessibility of the content itself was hard to ignore.
The financial consequences were not distributed equally. Evidence from the United States examining the expansion of online sports betting found adverse financial effects concentrated among financially constrained households. This was one of the points I found especially important: the same access to gambling does not necessarily produce the same consequences for everybody. Someone with financial reserves and someone already struggling with expenses are not entering the same situation.

The research ended up becoming much broader than the original question I had while trying to watch a movie. It covered digital distribution, advertising, demographics, financial vulnerability, regulation, illegal markets, crime, COVID-era changes, and statistical analysis across different countries and income groups.

Funny how one horrible ad-filled movie site somehow led to a 39-page research paper.

Read the full paper: Open PDF · View on Zenodo.