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How to play Xmas Lightning
Around 49% of the adults surveyed said they had gambled within the past four weeks, a figure consistent with previous years.
When excluding those who only played lottery draws, participation stood at 28%, implying lottery-only players comprised roughly 21% of the adult population.
Online gambling participation over four weeks reached 39% (16% excluding lottery-only players), while in-person gambling participation was 29% (18% excluding lottery-only players).
How to play Xmas Lightning
“There are about 70,000 ads every single month for illegal operators or offerings – and there’s only two or three thousand from the legal market. It’s really unbalanced and they should regulate more.
“As a trade organisation we are trying to work together with our regulator because we feel that we have a shared interest of getting a good legal market. And of course we’re talking to politicians to do something about putting illegal operators on notice. I think it is really positive at the moment in the Netherlands that the operators have really teamed up,” Petra continues.
Notably, she says competing with each other is not important at the moment, as working to fight the black market serves a bigger purpose.
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In Sweden, Spelinspektionen recently flagged affiliates and social media as key channels for black market advertising and how affiliate networks redirect search traffic towards unlicensed operators.
Regulators have so far focused mainly on monitoring paid advertising. In Germany, the GGL credited an updated Google ad policy with reducing black market visibility. Yet, it acknowledged that illegal operators could still achieve visibility in organic search through SEO manipulation.
This points to a wider shift towards addressing organic search signals and domain-level practices such as doorway pages, an issue also raised in the UK, where research has linked black market migration to search-driven promotion and SEO exploitation.
