The UK Gambling Commission has released new figures on the gambling industry of the country, which show that online gambling has taken the top spot as far as the most popular form of gambling. The gambling market report was released this week and showed that from April of last year through March of this year, online gambling was the activity that most gamblers decided to take part in.

The report was actually the first to cover an entire year of data since the United Kingdom required all online operators in the UK to have a license with the UKGC, which began in November of 2014. During the time frame within the report, online gambling operators licensed in the UK generated revenues of slightly under £4.5b. This amount was one-third of the overall gambling market and more than what was generated from the National Lottery as well as land based casinos and high street bookmakers.

The National Lottery brought in £3.4b while bookmakers earned just a bit less at £3.3b. Land based casinos were only able to earn £1b. The top online gambling vertical for the UK remains casino gaming which created £2.6b in revenues. Slots provided £1.75b of this number. Poker is included in the casino category and was able to generate £99m.

As far as remote sports betting is concerned, the UK earned £1.8b while bingo brought in only £152.6m. For online betting related to sports, football brought in 37% of the revenues while horseracing contributed to 22%. The ‘other’ category came in at 9.9%.

During the reporting period, online gamblers who choose to self-exclude from gaming came in at 611k. This number is quite larger than the 180,000 who self-excluded from a six month time frame, covered from November 2014 to March of 2015.

The land based casino gaming industry has not done so well during the year in which the UKGC covered in their report. Of the non-remote betting revenues, 95% was claimed by high street bookmakers while pool betting operators took in only 4%. This left the on-course racing bookies with 1%. By September of this year, there were 8,709 betting shops located in the UK which is almost 2% less than what existed during the last reporting period.

The main operators of the betting shops includes Betfred, Ladbrokes, William Hill and Gala Coral. In these shops, the electronic gaming machine numbers were down by 1% to just over 34,760. The revenues of such machines improved by 3.5% for the year reported.

For land based casino gaming, there were 148 venues in the UK as of March of this year, with Rank Group holding 63 and Genting UK having 41 in operation. Revenues were down by 14% to the £1b mark and the only category in the UK to see a decrease in the report.