New Jersey Online Casino Industry Growth Continues

In 2015 - the second full year of legal online casino gaming in New Jersey - operators took in a total of $148.9 million in revenue.

In the months of March, April, and now May 2023, operators took in more money in each month than they did in that entire calendar year.

The May figure of $161.4 million just announced by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement has been topped in state history only by March 2023, when $165.7 million was collected. The April number of $158.9 million is almost in line with both.

Assuming June follows along similar lines, the first half total in 2023 will come close to the $970.3 million collected in all of 2020 - which itself was a doubling of the 2019 mark of just $482.7 million.

It appears that not only did the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020 turn thousands of Atlantic City casino visitors on to the online version which, in the first few months, might have served as a mere consolation, but gamblers kept on playing their online games even as the casino properties reopened their doors.

The $1.37 billion taken in by online casinos in 2021 was an increase of just over 40% year-over-year. And in 2022, the figure of $1.66 billion marked a jump of another 22%.

While it might seem reasonable to expect growth to fade at some point, that point is not yet here. The year-to-date figures of January-May from 2022 to 2023 show an increase of nearly 15%.

Where New Jerseyans Are Playing Online Casinos

There are three primary sets of places that New Jersey go to play online casino.

One is the Borgata-run sites, where $44 million in revenue came in the month of May. That barely nosed out Golden Nugget ($43.4 million) and Resorts Digital ($41.7 million). None of the other Atlantic City casinos took in as much as $10 million.

For the year, the "race" shows that Borgata ($211.6 million) again has a slim lead over Golden Nugget ($205 million) and Resorts ($204.4 million).

The same pecking order is seen in the full-year 2022 and 2021 figures, as Golden Nugget ceded its previous dominance in this betting sector.

There are 10 online casino sites that make up the total revenue listed for Borgata, including borgatacasino.com, a pair of BetMGM-branded sites, and casino.wheeloffortunecasino.com.

The Golden Nugget "family" consists of six sites and features partnerships with FanDuel, BetRivers, and Betway.

Resorts Digital's five sites include familiar gambling names such as DraftKings, Barstool Sports, and Mohegan Sun.

Each online casino operator must reach a partnership with an Atlantic City casino, with the latter tending to keep somewhere between 25% and 35% of the total revenue. Those agreements helped keep the retail casinos afloat during the hard times of the pandemic; casinos in states such as New York have no online casino offerings, so their shuttering during the COVID-19 era left them with no alternative revenue stream.

The New Jersey legislature is expected to approve a 10-year extension of the initial approval of online casino gaming within the next two weeks.

After all, those lawmakers have about 250 million reasons to do so – that’s how much the state took in as taxes from online casino revenue in 2022.