The research from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) with Professor David Forrest and Professor Ian McHale of the University of Liverpool examined 140,000 online betting and gaming accounts between July 2018 and June 2019.
The 140,000 accounts came from random samples from seven different operators. The seven operators involved hold 85% of British online betting market share and 37.5% in gaming.
The research found that while 85% betting accounts spent less than £200 on betting and 90% of gaming accounts had either an overall win or loss of less than £500, a small number of accounts were responsible for a very large portion of overall losses.
It said that 0.7% of accounts used for betting and 1.2% of gaming accounts lost £5,000 or more in the year and 4% of gaming accounts lost more than £500 in a single session. This, it said, would represent 60,000 betting accounts and 47,000 gaming accounts nationally.
Similarly, the 5% of accounts with the largest losses generated 70% of overall gross gambling yield (GGY) in the sample.
Among betting accounts, 0.1% lost £20,000 or more in the year and 0.2% between £10,000 and £20,000. A further 0.4% lost between £5,000 and £10,000. The 10% of betting customers with the highest stakes generated 79% of betting GGY.
While there was not a similar breakdown of extremely large losses for gaming customers, NatCen said that 0.3% of overall customers lost between £10,000 and £20,000; 0.1% lost between £20,000 and £50,000 and less than 0.1% lost more than £50,000. 20.5% of customers were net winners.
Of the total sample, 4% received some sort of social responsibility interaction, usually by email. This included 36% of customers who spend more than £2,000, with 0.8% of this group receiving a phone call because of social responsibility reasons.
While 94% of online betting GGY was from men and 6% women, 26% of gaming GGY came from women and 74% men. Accounts which spent more than £5,000 predominantly belonged to men, with the most common age category being in the player’s 40s.
Participation in online gambling was higher in more deprived areas than less deprived areas. However, gambling spend was similar across all deprivation levels.
Football and horse racing were by far the most popular sports for betting in terms of accounts playing bet and betting yield. The majority of gaming accounts and spend were focused on slots.
“This research was able to analyse and assess an unprecedented source of information on how people in Great Britain gamble and opens up numerous opportunities to further understand people’s gambling habits. These interim findings are just the first stage and future research will provide a greater opportunity to understand the risk factors associated with gambling behaviour.”