Ladbrokes mobile betting up 400 percent

The UK online and land gambling group Ladbrokes revealed Monday that it has already taken 4 times more bets via mobile internet on the currently running 2010 World Cup than it did during the whole of the Euro 2008 football tournament.

Ciaran O’Brien, a company spokesman, said that this rapid growth has been driven by the increase in smart phone ownership, enabling swift access to betting opportunities from any location…and the upsurge has seen Ladbrokes break the 100,000 barrier for bets taken over mobile internet services on a single event for the first time.

Ladbrokes launched the first fully functional iPhone betting application in the app store during the World Cup and usage is reportedly rocketing.

The app is tailored to appeal to novice and casual bettors and uses graphics and gestures that make full use of iPhone functionality. No odds are used on the application – customers just see the return they receive for specified stakes on each World Cup betting market.

For example, if a customer selected a GBP5 bet on Carlos Tevez to score the first goal in the Argentina vs. Germany World Cup Quarter Final the app would show the potential win of GBP30. That would, by the way, have been a bad bet as Germany romped home with a 4 -0 win!

O’Brien points out that the new application has helped mobile internet overtake traditional telephone betting for the first time at a major football tournament at Ladbrokes.

He revealed that betting turnover on Ladbrokes’ mobile channels has doubled over the past 12 months and the rapid growth is set to continue as mobile internet access becomes more commonplace and the ease of access via dedicated applications like the World Cup app increases. During the same 12 month period Ladbrokes has also seen a 600 percent increase in the number of its customers that bet exclusively via mobile internet – a potent harbinger for the future direction of sports betting.

Ladbrokes has consistently been in the forefront of mobile gambling technoology, initially launching a WAP mobile betting service in 2001 and following it with a downloadable Java application in 2005. In December 2009 it launched a web application for iPhones – a service which already accounts for over a third of its mobile turnover (see previous InfoPowa reports). In addition to sports betting Ladbrokes also offers a range of mobile casino and slot games on its existing mobile platforms.

“Mobile betting and gaming is a significant growth area and smart phones, especially the iPhone, have dramatically improved the user experience,” says John O’Reilly, md of Remote Betting and Gaming at Ladbrokes. We’re delighted to be the first major bookmaker to launch a full betting application in the app store and we’ll follow this World Cup product with a range of other applications tailored to different betting and gaming audiences – the first being a tailored application for the next domestic football season.”