Less than two months remain until the launch of Ontario’s competitive online gambling market on April 4, with the announcement of that go-live date at the end of January having intensified attention on arguably the global online gambling industry’s most important new market of 2022. That status is chiefly a result of Ontario’s sizeable population, exceeded by just four U.S. states, and a unique but ultimately ‘European-style’ open licensing framework for a full product suite in the wake of Canada’s historic legalization of single-event sports betting in summer 2021. Expectations of the potential size of the Ontario market have been further stoked by the stratospheric growth of legal online sports betting and internet gaming in the United States since the onset of COVID-19, with rapid consumer adoption and lofty rates of spend per adult in emerging states boding well for the prospects of licensed offerings north of the border.
Following several upward revisions made in response to stronger than anticipated momentum in U.S. states and rapid growth in the online businesses of Canada’s provincial lottery and gaming monopolies over the course of 2020 and 2021, VIXIO GamblingCompliance forecasts that the Ontario online market will yield gross gaming revenue of C$3.27bn (US$2.6bn) by 2026. Reaching such scale in its fifth year of operation would make Ontario the third-largest regulated online market in North America, surpassed only by the comparatively mature U.S. markets of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, according to VIXIO estimates.
These projections form part of VIXIO’s suite of proprietary, interactive Data Dashboards which outline our own legislative and market-size projections and allow users to produce their own custom forecasts for emerging online markets in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. According to base case forecasts outlined in the new Canada Online Data Dashboard, the latest forecasting tool to be added to the VIXIO Data Hub, overall regulated online gambling revenue across Canada will reach just under C$6bn (US$4.7bn) by 2026.
A majority C$3.85bn (US$3bn) of this total is expected to be generated in ‘re-regulated’ competitive markets under VIXIO’s base case forecast, with Ontario’s C$3bn+ fully regulated system predicted to be followed by the introduction of competitive sports-betting markets in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan over the next three years. While Ontario currently represents the sole departure from the monopoly approach to online gambling thus far favoured by Canada’s provincial lottery and gaming corporations, advocates for further liberalization will be encouraged by the rapid expansion of online sports betting, if not iGaming, across the U.S. since 2018.
VIXIO’s Data Dashboards leverage our industry-leading regulatory and market intelligence to help stakeholders underpin their business strategies and gauge the direction of travel in a broader Americas region which is projected to represent a combined US$26bn+ addressable online market by 2026. Continuously fine-tuned in response to fluid legislative developments and revenue data from existing markets, VIXIO’s Data Dashboards help executives and policy advisors track the shape and scale of regulated market opportunities emerging on the horizon as well as in the present.