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What's the latest greatest hottest trend in the world of online gambling? Websites now focused on the Canadian market. Yes Canada! And why not? Gambling911.com has been part of the Canada landscape since 2002. The country provides the second largest readership for the site. And now online sports book operators and poker rooms alike are starting to focus their eyes a little further north than the United States.
This is far from a novel idea. Sportsbooks the likes of Bowman's (one of the first established bookies to move offshore during the 1980's) enjoyed a substantial marketing niche in Canada. And it's not just hockey. Canadians bet on everything from the NFL to NBA to Golf and so forth.
Sportingbet.com was one of the first true "Canada friendly" online sports books to join the Gambling911.com fold, with plenty of success we might add.
"At first we were skeptical," explains Payton O'Brien, Senior Editor of the Gambling911 website. "Not that there were people who gambled in Canada but rather the idea that Sportingbet.com - an established British book - could really grasp this market after having to depart the US in October 2006. What we found is that most of our Euro 2008 traffic was actually coming from Canada."
It also helps that Sportingbet is giving away a 20 percent sign up bonus and Sfree $50 CDN bet to its Canadian clientele.
You don't have to convince the folks at Tiger Gaming. As part of Norways publicly traded Action Poker platform, Tiger has been among the leading online poker rooms for Canadians.
"Canada is our largest market," a spokesperson from the company told Gambling911.
Tiger Gaming does not accept US customers. They market mostly in Canada having acquired the Las Vegas From Home brand that was already established in the country.
Action Poker will be launching what we believe to be one of the more creative online poker brands very shortly - MillionDollarPokerClub.com. For online gambling affiliates, the MillionDollarPokerClub.com will fill a void that is being left from Bodog Poker's downsizing and the strangled competition between Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars. MillionDollarPokerClub.com will be attending the gaming conference in Barcelona next month with the offer to pay affiliates 100 percent of all revenues generated within the first month. Considering that some of these online poker rooms take in more than a million dollars a day, this is one promotion for serious entrepreneurs that we can find zero wrong with.
Tiger and MillionDollarPokerClub.com join the Gambling911.com family next month.
And so too does SportsInteraction.com which quietly stopped marketing in the US following passage of the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act in 2006. Make no mistake about it, SIA was affected by the UIGEA just as most other online gambling companies. They still has US players.
"We have retained our position and returns rather than grown according to our pre-UIGEA goals," a spokesperson for Sports Interaction told us.
Today SIA caters mostly to Canadians and they too are looking to make quite a splash in this market with their often "screwy" lines that gamblers in the US still long for today. This was the first online gambling site to launch in the Kahnawake stronghold outside of Montreal, Quebec, in 1999. Prior to this, Sports Interaction had been operating out of the Dominican Republic since 1997. SIA once billed itself as the "First North American Online Sportsbook". Sports Interaction essentially did for Kahnawake what "Married With Children" did for the Fox Television Network. It helped put them on the map.
There is an interesting irony that could come into play - perhaps before the end of this coming football season. BodogLife.com, which until now has never accepted bets from Canadians since its marketing offices were located in Vancouver, British Columbia, is rumored to be considering focusing almost exclusively on this market.
Why Canada has been treated like The United States red headed step child remains quite the mystery. After all, this is a nation with more than 33 million people, the language spoken is primarily English and Canadians love their sports and gambling.
"The problem is mostly with marketing," explained a spokesperson for Tiger Gaming. "The country is so vast and it's not like the US where one channel can reach the entire nation. There are many different (television) channels throughout Canada and its provinces."
Online sports books and online poker rooms for Canadians do exist and it finally appears that operators are realizing the significance of this extraordinarily important market. Gambling911.com has even brought on a new writer, Ean Lamb, who will be focusing exclusively on Canada. The website already has Canadian sports handicapper, Ron Raymond as one of its contributors.
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Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher
