It only took a year and a half, but the New Jersey online gambling industry finally has some good news to report.
During the 2014 reporting period, Garden State igaming drew in $122 million in revenue. That represents some real progress from its early days and is turning into the poster child for regulated online gambling across the United States.
The biggest problem facing the US-facing industry, according to gambling attorney Gil White, is a bad reputation that’s left credit card processors and banks denying charges from legitimate sites.
At a recent online gambling conference in Atlantic City, White touched on the industry’s core problem:
The biggest challenge of Internet gambling in the U.S. is that this is an industry still looked at as having been born out of sin. The new world of Internet gambling is clearly regulated and regulatable.
Though New Jersey online gambling is starting to show some signs of life, the battle to maintain legality is still very much underway with various versions of gaming prohibition legislation popping up in Congress with some regularity. Jersey politician, and Atlantic City’s number one supporter, Ray Lesniak, says he knows who to blame for that:
The biggest problem is Sheldon Adelson. When a billionaire says he’ll spend whatever it costs to stop Internet gambling, that scares the bejeezus out of legislators.
No matter who’s at fault, US online gambling as a whole has been off to a very slow start. In Delaware, igaming only brought in around $2 million in revenue and in Nevada, it only brought in $8 million before the state stopped reporting those numbers entirely.