What the iGaming Sector Says About Modern eCommerce

There’s a tendency to assume that iGaming – the burgeoning industry that comprises real money experiences such as online casinos and sports betting – is tangential to the wider world of eCommerce, but to take this position is to misunderstand its central place in the history of online business.

This is because without online casinos we wouldn’t have Walmart, Amazon or Facebook Marketplace as we know them today. Why is this?

In the early years of the internet, there was little available to do other than engage with static websites. This was very much the definition of Web 1 – with Web 2.0, which we tend to associate with the rise of social media, effectively representing a pivot towards greater interactivity. But that’s not to say you could do nothing but read on the old school internet. No, if you knew where to look, you could play games. And into this early foray into online gaming came the casino industry, who began to open the doors of the first online casinos as early as 1994 – less than a year after the World Wide Web went public.

These early casinos weren’t much to look at by today’s standards, but they were a significant step and a foundational exercise in digital transformation. Before their arrival, if you wanted to play casino games, you had to go to a physical casino. Now, suddenly, you could log on from your home desktop and be up and playing in minutes.

The iGaming sector, with this innovation at its origin, has always sought to push ahead and embrace new tech trends. It was online casinos that pioneered the means of processing online payments – after all, how’re you going to place a bet without the technology required to make deposits and withdrawals.

Fast forward to today, and the world of online casinos remains a harbinger of emergent tech modalities and approaches that’re soon to take hold in the wider eCommerce sphere. In light of this, what can the iGaming of today teach us about the eCommerce industry of tomorrow?

Niche Directories and Affiliate Webrings

For the longest time, we’ve become accustomed to performing all our search and discoverability tasks on the major search engines, with Google ruling the roost. Yet the internet of today has changed in quite significant ways that hamper this process. The extent of SEO optimization today has resulted in search pages filled with meaningless high ranking links to websites designed to draw attention with targeted SEO keywords. This has made the act of searching on a classic engine challenging, and in some cases impossible.

In light of this, we are beginning to see a growing trend towards specialized niche directories and the return of the classic webring of yesterday. What this means in practice is that people can find a site, app or directory that is smaller and more expressly curated to help people discover the content they’re looking for in a given region.

Unsurprisingly, the iGaming sector is yet again well ahead of the curve here with dedicated platforms like casinobonusca now hosting comprehensive directories of online casinos for users to encounter and explore. What’s more, platforms such as these have become hotbeds for redeeming competitive bonuses, welcome offers and other cost-effective sign-up deals for use with gaming platforms, making them a great way to make savings and discover new iGaming services in one fell swoop.

Embracing the Crypto Boom

Cryptocurrencies have acquired a decidedly mixed reputation in the modern online business sector. On one side you have a busting community of advocates who are keen to espouse the many and varied benefits of decentralized finance. On the other side, you have skeptics raising valid questions of environmental concerns and the frequency of high profile fraud cases that have hit the industry in recent years.

Irrespective of where you come down on crypto, there’s no denying that eventually it will become an integrated part of how people conduct transactions online today. After all, crypto fan Elon Musk has made it possible to buy a new Tesla with Dogecoin for a number of years already, and it’s not so fanciful to imagine a world where one could get their online grocery shop done using Bitcoin.

While we’re some steps away from that yet, the iGaming sector has once again broken a path towards new approaches. Today, crypto optimized casinos are one of the largest growth areas in the sector, with people now able to access dozens – if not hundreds – of casinos where they can place wagers and collect winnings in the coin of their choosing.

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