Online Gambling in British Columbia: a Descriptive Report on Gambling Participation on the PlayNow.com Platform

This Report describes online gambling participation on the British Columbia Lottery Corporation’s PlayNow.com platform, by BC residents in June 2015. Data were provided to the Centre for Gambling Research at UBC (PI: Dr Luke Clark) by BCLC, in a de-identified format and under a confidentiality agreement, in a project that was funded by the BC Ministry of Finance. In this Report, we describe data for five game categories: lottery, eCasino, sports betting, social games (including Keno), and bingo. We focus on behavioural variables reflecting gambling intensity (e.g. total number of bets, total monthly spend). Analyses include an examination of how participation rates vary across the five game categories, and the distribution in engagement across different game categories, including Pareto analyses that describe the proportion of overall gambling activity attributable to the top 20% most engaged gamblers.