iGaming Business – The Norwegian Gambling Authority has reached an agreement with YouTube for the video-sharing website to block all adverts from online gambling operators that are not licensed to operate in the Nordic country. The announcement comes after a year-long investigation by the regulatory body into videos and promotional material being placed on YouTube by such online gambling operators to target players in Norway. The organisation submitted a list of 122 examples of such material that had been placed on YouTube by marketers for companies that are not licensed in Norway. The Authority argued that as adverts were in…

Online-Casinos.com – The number of lotteries available on the internet is amazing and it is just a simple way to gamble without too much thinking and it is pure luck. Almost every country has a national lottery although in the case of the National Lottery in the United Kingdom ‘Camelot’ it is owned by The Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan. The biggest lottery prizes are mostly from the USA where a Powerball Lottery ticket worth $590.5 million dollars was held by one person, an 84 years old woman Gloria C. MacKenzie, who lived in Florida. After American taxes were paid she…

iGaming Business – The Gambling Commission, the regulatory body for the majority of gambling in Great Britain, has cited non-remote betting as the catalyst behind a 7% rise in gross gambling yield (GGY) between April 2012 and March 2013. In its Industry Statistics publication, the body said the British gambling industry generated a GGY of £6.3 billion (€7.4 billion/$10.1 billion), a rise of more than £400 million compared to the period between April 2011 and March 2012. The Commission also noted in its report that non-remote betting is proving to be the most popular form of gambling in the UK,…

Chicago Tribune – Illinois gamblers cut back on their slot machine action in 2009. In a study released Monday about slot-machine spending in four casino markets, the American Gaming Association said one-armed bandits in Illinois, Las Vegas and Atlantic City took in less revenue in 2009 than they did in 2008. In Illinois, total slot machine “win,” or how much the devices keep from the gamblers, fell by 8.4 percent to $1.2 billion. Still, that’s not as bad as the 21.7 percent revenue drop that Illinois saw in 2008. Fewer visits to Illinois casinos were a factor. In 2009, the…

Coming to a Starbucks in New Jersey: Five guys huddled around a corner table with laptops open playing poker online. That was a scenario discussed at an Internet gambling conference last month in Philadelphia. “You’re going to have an informal clustering of people,” Joe Brennan, former chairman of iMEGA, an online-gaming association, predicted at the World Regulatory Briefing. “That’s natural social functioning,” he said. Does that mean poker players and slots addicts will flood free public Wi-Fi hot spots like Wegmans and Starbucks now that online gambling is legal in New Jersey? Will retailers allow it? Some will. Some won’t….

The ban on social media gambling was legislated in 2001, through the Interactive Gambling Act and reaffirmed through a departmental reviewed released in 2013. The act made it illegal for Australian companies to offer real-money online wagering. But new poker and slot apps available on mobile devices are not considered gambling because they don’t allow players to directly wager or win real cash. Known collectively as “social casino games”, they simulate real life wagering and keep users playing, sharing, and using real money to purchase in-game currency, extra credits, expansions and gifts. Much like other social games including Candy Crush,…