Online Gambling Prohibition is Costing Search Engines Millions

The times are getting exciting for online gambling. Everybody has something to say on the subject. On June 10, 2009, in a crackdown on illegal gambling and suspected money laundering, the bank accounts of some 27,000 online gamers were frozen by U.S. authorities. At the same time, the European Union accused the U.S. of violations of international trade rules by banning online gambling. The EU gaming outfits are claiming a $100 billion loss because of the U.S. ban. If this wasn’t enough, the Payments System Protection Act, HR 6870, which kind of decriminalizes online gambling, was approved by a House committee and will be heading back for a vote soon.

Steve Baldwin, Editor-in-Chief for Didit, a search engine marketing and media management company based in New York, made some calculations of how much money is at stake for the online search engines. The search engines, for years, have banned paid search ads. He made a list of 200 keywords for searches, and using Google’s keyword suggestion tool, which shows the approximate monthly keyword volume, ran the sampling for the month of April 2009. While his keyword list is small, some search marketers have keyword list hundreds of thousands of words long, it will give you a small, conservative idea of how much money is being lost by the search engines.

How much you ask?? In Google’s instance, the total comes to an approximate $115 million per year. Google has a 64.2 % slice of the search market. He states that the total for all the search engines is a whopping $180 million per year. Again, this is a very conservative estimate since his keyword sampling is so small.

With this kind of money at stake, you can be sure that both sides of the issue will be watching these developments very closely.

Source found here.

Author: GamesAndCasino