How do gamblers choose casinos? What do they value most: fast payments, large bonuses or something else? And where do they search for information about iGaming platforms?

To answer these questions, CoinsPaid recently polled over 3,300 gamblers from 44 countries – and we'd like to share the most interesting insights with you.

How do users pick a casino – and how to make them choose yours?

1) Preferred information sources: Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube

Most gamblers look for information about casinos on Twitter and Twitch, followed by reviews by YouTube influencers. Regular online media (such as gambling news portals) are far less important.

Insight: allocate more of your marketing budget towards influencer integrations and reviews on Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube, and don't focus too much on press releases and PR articles.

2) Key choice factors: payment speed and bonuses

We asked the survey participants to name the single crucial factor that determines their choice of a casino. As it turned out, what matters most to users is transaction speed (38.4%), followed by the size of the bonuses (33.6%).

Interestingly, only 1.6% chose the quality and variety of games as the most important factor.

Insight: when it comes to gambling payments, instant is best. Do what you can to minimize the processing times – and advertise the speed in your marketing communications. The other focus should be large and varied bonuses – but remember that fast deposits and withdrawals are more important.

Why do so many switch to crypto?

One of the payment trends in the iGaming space is the switch from bank cards to cryptocurrency. Here at CoinsPaid, we've had over 100 such requests from gambling operators in 2020 alone. Naturally, we wanted to find out what drives the high interest in crypto.

As it turned out, it all boils down to speed: 58% prefer to pay with crypto on iGaming sites because the processing times are lower than for cards and e-wallets.

This can seem counterintuitive at first, since a Bitcoin transaction normally takes up to one hour to confirm on the blockchain. However, leading casinos use crypto gateways that allow for instant processing of payments in BTC, BCH, and ETH (CoinsPaid has this feature, for example).

Another interesting fact is that 32.8% of crypto gamblers said that their reason to use cryptocurrency in casinos is simply that they earn revenue in BTC, ETH, etc. – be it from trading, investments, freelancing in IT, and so forth. This leads to an important insight:

Crypto users should be treated as a separate (and large) target audience. They earn crypto and consciously look for places where they can spend it. Moreover, a high percentage of cryptocurrency users engage in gambling: indeed, according to a report by the British Financial Conduct Authority, the most common reason for buying Bitcoin is to make a gamble that can make or lose money.

It's interesting to note that anonymity is far more important to the crypto-paying audience than for the general gambling community (43.2% vs. 8.8%). This is probably due to the fact that crypto users value their privacy in general. However, since cryptocurrency payments are anonymous by default, casinos that accept Bitcoin don't have to focus much attention on the anonymity aspect in their marketing communication.

We also found out that more than half (56.9%) of crypto users only gamble in crypto casinos; the remaining 43.1% also use fiat online casinos (i.e. those that don't support Bitcoin payments).

The main reason for not using fiat casinos is the unwillingness to be 'traced by the government' (46.5%), followed by online casinos being illegal in the respondent's country (45%).

Insight: by implementing crypto payments, casinos can tap into a large audience of users who don't play in fiat casinos at all.

Experiment: are users prepared to pass a KYC?

We ran a simulation in which users were offered to buy crypto through the casino website. Like almost any real service of this type, our dummy crypto purchasing tool included a KYC (identity verification). A total of 212 gamblers from the UK, Russia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark took part in the experiment.

Insight: the majority of respondents (71.4%) felt neutral about the KYC, saying that it's a sign that the casino isn't a scam. They also didn't mind paying a 5% fee, as long as both the casino and the payment provider had a reliable reputation.

Main insights at a glance:

• Prioritize Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube in your marketing strategy (especially influencer integrations);
  
• Offer instant transactions (e.g. in crypto);
  
• Focus the attention on the speed of deposits and withdrawals and on bonuses;
  
• Adding crypto payments will allow you to target a separate gambling audience that doesn't use fiat casinos;
  
• Users don't mind passing a KYC and paying a fee to buy crypto on the casino website, as long as both the site and the processing services are reputable.