Do Free Spins and Free Bets Encourage Gambling?

One of the most controversial aspects of gambling right now is the use of free bets and free spins. The United Kingdom Gambling Commission has worked hard to ensure that companies aren’t using the word ‘free’ too liberally when they don’t actually mean it, putting a series of things in place to ensure that customers don’t feel ripped off. The Competition and Markets Authority also have guidance for gambling promotions online that companies need to ensure that they’re sticking too in order to allow customers to feel safe when taking up ‘free’ offers.

For all of the controversy, one of the big questions is around whether or not the use of free spins and free bets actually encourages an increase in gambling by consumers. That is exactly what the UKGC tried to find out, launching a survey of customers to see how they have dealt with such offers in past. They discovered that 61% of respondents believe that their gambling habits are not influenced by being on the receiving end of incentives. That being said, 31% did admit that they were encouraged to gamble more than they wanted to thanks to free bets or bonuses.

What Are We Talking About?

Before we go any further, it is important to establish exactly what it is that we’re talking about when we refer to ‘free spins’ and ‘free bets’. They are obviously different things and target the two major areas of an online bookmaker’s business, with free spins being offered to casino customers and free bets to that that use the sportsbook. Regardless of which one it is that you’re looking at, the idea is to use them either to entice new customers or else to keep loyal customers happy so they’ll continue to bet with them.

Free bets work by offering customers a specific amount of money, say £10, in free bet tokens. That bet can then be placed on a sportsbook wager, provided the odds that they’re taking are over a certain amount, which is usually Evens. If the bet is a winner then you get paid the winnings, minus the £10 stake. Free spins, meanwhile, work in a similar way, insomuch as you can spin the wheel the given number of times, like 250, without paying for it. Here, any winnings can usually only be withdrawn once you’ve turned them over a certain amount of times.

Do They Make People Gamble More?

A survey of gambling customers was carried out by Yonder Consulting on behalf of the Gambling Commission. The survey was conducted in June of 2021, focussing on the impact that people felt when they received offers and promotions, especially those for free bets. A big part of the question was whether or not receiving such an offer encouraged people to bet more than they would have done otherwise. The survey discovered that 39% of people aged between 18 and 24 felt incentivised to gamble because of such an offer.

Looking at those between 25 and 34, this number increased to 46%, suggesting that it isn’t immaturity in the bettors that led to them being encouraged to gamble more. Of the 8,000 people surveyed, 65% said that they had been offered at least some form of incentive over the previous 12 months. These were mostly via email, with 47% of them coming that way, with a similar amount coming via text message (17%) as via mobile gambling apps (16%).

Of those that had received an incentive over the previous 12 months, 58% said that the offer was for free bets.

The incentives were sportsbook-heavy in nature, given that 73% of those that took the survey said that they received such an incentive. This compared to 39% of those getting an offer for online slots and 37% getting a bingo-based incentive. The good news as far as the UKGC is concerned is the fact that 61% said that they were not influenced by getting sent such offers. The bad news is that 31% of all respondents said that getting a free bet or a bonus was enough to encourage them to bet more than they wanted to do before hand.

Things Aren’t Great When You Break It Down

When you being to look at the details of the survey more closely, you’ll see that things aren’t great for those critics of free bets and bonuses. About a third of people said that they chose to gamble for the first time as a result of receiving them, for example, with the same number saying that they gambled on a new activity. A fifth of respondents re-started betting after taking a break, whilst 35% of people began gambling with a company that they hadn’t used before as a result of receiving an offer.  The table above looks at how that breaks down.

That is based off 958 people aged 18 or over who had received an incentive to gamble within the previous 12 months.

The idea that around half of the respondents feel as though they receive too many incentives to gamble and an even larger percentage preferring not to receive such incentives will be one that catches the Gambling Commission’s attention. After all, people should not be receiving things that they don’t want to, especially if a third of people are then going to place more bets than they planned to as a result.

From the gambling companies’ point of view, of course, it shows that such incentives work. One of the most difficult things for them is getting people to switch their loyalty over to a new company when they already bet with a different one. Yet more than a third of people said that they shifted over to a new company as a result of receiving a promotion, with just shy of a third saying that they tried a new company thanks to being on the end of an offer. That means that they are doing exactly what they’ve been designed to do.

What About Different Demographics?

Knowing how people that responded to the survey found things in general is interesting, but how do things break down for different demographics? We’ll start by looking at the same sort of questions based on whether the respondent was male or female.

There are few surprises in the breakdown according to gender, given what we know about the different ways in which men and women tend to approach gambling. Across the base sample of 958, 504 of the respondents were men compared to the 454 women who replied. Women are more reluctant to receive free bets and offers, though it is interesting to note that roughly the same number of each gender say that they receive offers but are able to control their spending after using them.

Does Age Make A Difference?

The final demographic worth looking at is that of age. The survey broke down respondents into different age brackets, allowing us to gain a sense of whether people become more or less keen to receive such offers as they get older. The table above shows the breakdown of answers by age.

There are a few different aspects of the responses that are worth picking up on. For starters, the fact that the same percentage of 18 to 24-year-olds and 35 to 44-year-olds felt encouraged to gamble by free bets and bonuses suggests that it is not about the maturity of the bettors. There is, though, a definitely suggestion that they older people get, the more they are able to control their impulses. Apart from the drop to 24 to 35-year-olds, for example, there was a year-on-year increase in the number of people that don’t change how much they gamble because of promotions.