January 22, 2024
This was always going to be the quarter to watch: The third quarter of iGaming Ontario's second year of operation. In the first seven months of year-one, iGO introduced its legal Ontario sportsbooks and online casinos gradually, not all at once. Several key operators did not move out of the "grey market" onto the legal iGaming Ontario platform until well into Q3 of the 2022/23 period. Thus, results for this crucial quarter in year-one, where most key sporting leagues return to action and drive engagement to gaming sites, were slightly dampened, purely due to circumstance. One year on, all those incumbent formerly "grey market" operators would be able to contribute fully to third quarter results in year-two. Furthermore, year-over-year for the third quarter, iGO added 13 operators and saw an increase in the number of gaming sites by a count of four.
Given the importance of seasonality in this business, we rarely look at trends quarter-over-quarter. The cyclical nature sporting seasons dictates why certain times of year always see higher volumes and player engagement levels. Given this seasonality, we want to compare given quarters year-over-year, and iGaming Ontario's year-over-year performance for Q3 showed incredible growth, for essentially every metric. Here are the Q3 results for 2022/23 and 2023/24, with their per cent increases.
While the number of Ontario gaming websites only grew from 68 to 72, and there are some brands that are leaving in future quarters, it is more important that more companies came into the market. Initially, Ontario had several operators that chose to bring many of their casino-only brand nameplates. However, most of these brands had the same look and feel as one another, and each came with the cost of a full license ($100,000). Thus, with little surprise here, we have seen some consolidation in these multi-brand operations, as owners select the two or three brands that perform best, and then funnel their existing players from their weaker brands, over to the stronger ones.
New casino-only company entrants pick up the slack with their differentiated offerings that provide a new and perhaps unique approach for customers in the province. So even though the number of sites did not increase markedly, the true level of choice for Ontario players has gone up quite a bit, year-over-year for the third quarter.
Through the three quarters of 2023/24, iGO has seen a total of $45.5 billion in wagers and $1.743 billion in revenue. For the entire year of 2022/23, iGO saw wagers of $35.5 billion in wagers and $1.4 billion in total revenue. Our own revenue estimate for iGaming Ontario this year was $2.3 billion. Given the results here for Q3, and the cumulative figures noted here which have already surpassed those from year-one, we can see that we're going to be in the ballpark with that estimate, when the full year results are announced in about three months.
The American affiliate marketing media has moved to cover this figure month-to-month, state-by-state. iGaming Ontario only provides quarterly figures, and for this quarter, iGO saw $3.1 billion in sports betting wagers. This of course does not cover the wagers placed within OLG's sports betting properties. Given the annual OLG sports betting handle of previous periods, if you were to combine numbers for iGO and OLG, with confidence, we can state that the total Ontario sports betting handle for the third quarter would be in excess of $3.6 billion. In other words, there has been at least one month, and probably two, where the Ontario sports betting handle has exceeded the billion-dollar mark.
Back to SNBET's Ontario sports betting news.