Upping the ante

The new dominance of online betting

Featured in

  • Published 20230801
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-86-3
  • Extent: 200pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

‘WELCOME TO SPORTSBET.’ This message appears on my phone screen immediately after I set up my first online betting account at home one afternoon. The process is much simpler than I expected. It takes me less than two minutes to download the free Sportsbet mobile app, submit my personal details for instant verification and deposit the first funds into my digital betting wallet. I decline the option of setting a betting limit and proceed to the homepage. 

One of nearly forty online betting companies currently operating in Australia – many of which are based in the Northern Territory for historical tax purposes – Sportsbet is a household name these days, as recognisable as Qantas and Vegemite. Now owned by the UK-based global gambling behemoth Flutter Entertainment, it has grown into Australia’s biggest online betting company since it was established in Darwin in 1993: it now has more than one million Australian customers, a current market value of $12 billion to $14 billion, and nearly a 50 per cent share of the national online betting market. 

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Hidden tracks

Non-fictionYoung and Kucyk are as good at tracking down hard-to-find people as they are at tracking down hard-to-find music, although sometimes they do reach dead ends. Their methods aren’t particularly advanced and are often helped by luck. Sometimes they’ll raid the White Pages. Sometimes they’ll search for relatives of musicians online. Sometimes – as in the case of another song on Someone Like Me – they’ll scour through five years’ worth of archived weekly newsletters from a Seventh Day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland and spot a tiny article that contains the full name of a mysterious musician they’re trying to find.

More from this edition

The geography of respect

Non-fictionStarting in 2019, Parks Victoria closed or restricted access for climbers to much of Gariwerd-Grampians while it assessed cultural heritage and worked with Traditional Owners and conservation experts to develop the Greater Gariwerd Landscape Management Plan (GGLMP). These closures drew strong reactions from many climbers. They saw Parks Victoria’s actions as impinging on their rights, and its apparent focus on climbing as a risk to cultural heritage and environmental integrity as overblown.

Oh, the shame of it

Non-fictionModern leisure emerged in the West in the early 1700s when French and English cities developed new forms of society built around urban amenities – parks, cafés, fairs and shopping districts – servicing an expanding class of people with discretionary time and income. Public museums as storehouses of national culture appeared a little later in the nineteenth century where they contributed to the development of so-called ‘rational recreation’, a species of serious leisure intended to ‘civilise the masses’.

The rise and decline of the shopping mall 

FictionPerhaps it is instructive to consider how archaeologists of the future may conceive malls. How might they seem, these empty labyrinths – like rituals that had to be endured in order to receive goods and services? As great monoliths, colosseums constructed for our entertainment? As places of worship? Or perhaps malls will seem more like pyramids do to us: mysteries to be unravelled when the tracks of global trade and communication have faded...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.