The Italians are known for their traditions and this extends also to their sports betting culture. In fact, betting has been around in Italy for decades with its origins in 1946 when the first bets on football were legalized by the State.
We had to wait until 2002 before a new decree allowed bookmakers to accept bets via telephone or the web. Up until this moment, the Italian punters needed to visit their local brick and mortar shop to place their bet slips – a tradition that is still very much cultivated today in these modern times.
According to data (provided by Eurispes), 3 out of 10 Italians play for cash prizes of which 18.3% do so exclusively on an offline basis. The online betting community is much smaller with only 2% exclusively betting on online platforms while 7.9% confirmed that they are actively using both options. This is clear evidence that even though the betting industry is well established in Italy when it comes to online betting, we are still in the early stages.
Nonetheless, we have seen a clear shift in tide with more and more Italians now adapting their traditions and starting to open online betting accounts and utilise its benefits. To underline this point, we don’t need to look any further than comparing the total spend across all online gambling verticals in January 2020 with the corresponding month of 2019 (€153m to €197.5m). A distinctive increase of 29%.
The trend has not gone unnoticed by CEO of Leadstar Media Eskil Kvarnström, who intends to shape and guide the blooming online betting market with their affiliate site BookmakerBonus.it. Eskil Kvarnström stated:
“We always knew the potential of the Italian market and wanted to help shape this trend by providing our customers with helpful guides and detailed comparisons of the best online betting sites in Italy.”
The trend of online betting on mobile
Eskil also shared with us that the majority of their traffic comes from users on their mobile devices. As a matter of fact, around 80% of Italians prefer using their mobile phone to visit their affiliate site and one can deduct that this percentage is most likely also to be represented when placing their bets on online platforms.
Therefore it is a key factor to operate a website that is optimized to deliver a great UI to all of the mobile traffic without neglecting the desktop traffic.
What is the plus side of online betting?
What online betting cannot replace are the social factors of going to the conventional brick and mortar shops and discuss the outcomes of your bets but there are a lot of other positive factors in choosing to do your betting on online platforms rather than the local shops across the whole country.
A big plus is the ability to follow the game on the site with which you have a bet running by watching the live stream provided by the bookmaker. Several betting sites have added this feature to many of their markets and the success is visible.
An additional positive factor is a certain function called cashout, which is not yet a standard feature among the Italian bookmakers when comparing them with the rest of Europe. This function was supposed to be implemented by most bookies on a trial basis but unfortunately it never concretely happened, with Giovanni Tria having been forced out of the government last September.
Nevertheless, bookmakers offering an exchange platform can provide the cashout function to their customers. You can find a detailed guide on which these betting sites are and how it works on BookmakerBonus.it.
