New Zealand will be the next big thing in gambling, DashTickets claims

The peaceful island of Malta is home to many gambling companies, but there's an island on the other side of the world that is claiming to be the next big thing in gambling. Our colleagues from DashTickets, the largest casino review site in the country, say that the market is ready for the next stage of development.

"It seems that everyone is ignoring the New Zealand market", the DashTickets editor-in-chief Mark Dash says. "We're an afterthought. It must be because we're a small country, but if Australia is a big market for everyone, we deserve some respect too. We may be 1/5 the population size but we've got 5x the gambling spirit!"

Indeed, various research studies show that 80% of people gamble in some way in New Zealand, with an average per-person gambling expenditure of NZ$913, per month. These numbers dwarf the much more renowned gambling markets such as the UK and practically all of Europe, except for maybe some Nordic countries.

Then it's no surprise that no country has won Mega Moolah per capita more than the Kiwis did. You'll see Canadians as the most frequent winners of this famed progressive jackpot and right behind them, you'll see the United Kingdom and the small nation of New Zealand battling it out for second place. Of these three nations that comprise the vast majority of Mega Moolah winners, Canada has 40 million people, the UK has 69 million and New Zealand has five.

It seems that New Zealand's lack of prominence in the gambling world stems from the fact that there are zero barriers to entry. If you have an online casino, you can freely accept New Zealand players regardless of your licence, or lack thereof. On the other hand, there is also no real way to advertise your casino through legal channels. You can't put a TV ad saying you're a NZ licenced casino since you can't possibly be - there's no regulatory body.

This is why most online casinos simply add NZD as a currency and some of them go as far as to promote pokies that New Zealanders like to play and this is pretty much where it ends. As there are few ways to actively promote a NZ-facing casino, most casinos simply just leave the door open and wait.

The only means of promotion are the third-party websites dedicated to gathering Kiwi gamblers, such as DashTickets. If there are strong third-party websites, then there are strong entrance points to the market.

But the editor-in-chief Dash says it's not so easy to get promoted on their pages. "We think of ourselves as the protector of the Kiwi player. We get to decide which brand gets to be featured prominently in front of the eyes of New Zealanders." When asked what are the criteria to get included, Dash said "You'd better pay winners and pay them fast - that's the number one thing we care about. No delayed payments, no pending periods and no additional player verifications. If you're an honest casino, you don't do that."

No one knows what is the size of the New Zealand online gambling market, but Te Tari Taiwhenua, which is the Department of Internal Affairs in the country, is publishing a yearly report about gambling expenditures it can track. In 2023, the gambling market was worth around NZ$2.75bn, which is a number that is neither growing nor declining. This includes land-based casinos, gaming machines outside casinos, the NZ lottery and TAB, which is New Zealand's sole racing and sports betting agency.

Of 18,000 pokies, as New Zealanders call slots, in the country, more than 80% are located in pubs and clubs, with only 20% of them being in real casinos. The online gambling market is a mystery since the numbers aren't being tracked, so the only way to get a rough estimate would be to track the operator's website visits.

It seems that the next step in New Zealand regarding the online gambling market would be to quantify it, as that's when the brands and everyone else would be able to see what kind of a good market with high player value this is. For now, it's all hidden in a shroud of mystery, but the clever brands are already using this to their advantage and are penetrating the market early. 

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