Angie Flores

The online casino industry has grown rapidly over the course of the final ten years. While at the end of the 20th century there were only several dozen online casinos available to gamblers, over the last a decade their numbers have grown exponentially and today gamblers have a choice of over a thousand online casinos. Land-based casinos, especially in the US, have always promoted themselves as fun-filled places where men, and at a later date also women, can gamble and have the best time and if they gamble enough their hotel rooms will be comped through the casino to encourage high rollers to come and wager at their establishment. In Las Vegas, Nevada the casinos have realized, shortly after their establishment that should they want to attract the men to gamble they should provide entertainment to women. Free drinks were offered to the ladies waiting for their husbands or lovers who were at the tables playing. When slot machines were introduced the game mainly drew bored women who had nothing better to do in the casino. The casino owners have quickly identified a further source of income and started heavily promoting the game to women. During the late 20th century Las Vegas got revamped from a mobsters-run town and turned more corporate. Huge casinos were built and offered non-gambling related entertainment to attract vacationing families and additionally started hosting large conventions which turned Las Vegas to the convention capital of the united states. Tourism flourished, but profits from gambling have slowly started declining and places like Macau have started competing with Las Vegas as the city whose profits most from gambling. The introduction of online casinos in the late 90's have served as another blow to places for example Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Monte Carlo. Suddenly people were given the option of gambling from the comfort of their own homes with a click of a button. However in those years not everybody had a personal computer and those who did had to surf the internet using dial-up connections which were slow and patchy. This proved to be an issue and in retrospect we can see that both of these factors caused a delay in the burst of online casinos. Over the course of several short years an increasing number of people have gained access to personal computers, as mass production of personal computer have caused prices to decline, this corresponded with vast improvements in internet connections as well as the increase of internet surfing speed. At this point it became much easier for the regular Joe to own a computer and surf the net at a reasonable speed. Once this was possible online casinos could not be stopped. It became easier and quicker to download and install casino software, and at a later date with the creation of Flash technology many casinos could offer players to play their favorite casino games directly from their web browsers without the need to download any heavy software on to their computers. The rapid growth in the gaming industry of software providers and gambling brands has created a welcomed competition between the businesses as well as have forced online casino to take another approach from land-based casinos to marketing and promotion. Online casinos were not able to offer their patrons free drinks and hotel rooms therefore they had to come up with other means of promotion to be able to attract gamblers. This signaled the birth of online casino bonuses and merchandize promotions. Online casino have started competing with land-based casinos as well as other online casinos by offering free cash bonuses to new players joining them. They have also developed players' rewards programs that awarded top players with expensive branded merchandize.