Welcome to the brand new issues of the Bullet Business Mobile Gambling in Europe Newsletter. Our brand new first edition takes a frank assessment of the mobile gambling space and asks; Is mobile really where the money is? Brought to you this week, courtesy of our guest editor, Charles Cohen of Probability plc.

Quick plug! The 4th Annual Mobile Gambling Summit takes place on January 21 - 22. If you haven't reserved your place yet then I urge you to do so. Visit www.bulletbusiness.com/mobilegambling for full information or email register@bulletbusiness.com with mobile in the subject line.

Is mobile really where the money is?

Charles Cohen
CEO
Probability plc.

You've seen it, of course: according to Juniper Research, more money will be spent on mobile gambling in 2012 than on drugs, music, clothes and food put together. Only the budget for the London Olympics will outstrip it, and that's because the numbers are too big for anyone to count it.

Of course nobody with any wish to get ahead in life should let themselves be seduced by market size predictions like these. Certainly, no more than one would rely on the long range weather forecast for arranging a wedding.

You may wonder why this is, and it must have something to do with the fact that anyone who actually works in the gambling industry knows that what really, truly, actually drives profit is not granny's annual flutter on the Grand National, but the occasional visit from an oligarch with a firm belief that he has a system for beating Roulette. These people are many things, but predictable they aren't.

So here's a scary thought: what if these bigger punters, the ones who keep every other gambling business profitable, decide they don't want to play on mobile after all?

If not, mobile gambling will never reach the dizzy heights predicted by the men with slide rules. It will be the country cousin, the also-ran, the last kid picked for the team, a side show to the grown ups playing Roulette into the small hours on their laptops.

Except I'm here to tell you that it won't. There are plenty of big spenders happy to gamble on their mobiles.

I can say this with absolute confidence as I look at the first few months operation of our own 'Private Room' for higher spending mobile Casino customers.

Bear in mind that an average customer is worth £70 - £80 a month in deposits to us. In the VIP area, the equivalent already is closer to £2,000. At the top end, there are some players who have spent over £15,000 with us already, usually on Blackjack or Roulette.

So the player economics of mobile casino gambling turn out to be not very different from on-line. Just as on-line has, over time, also been able to attract many much larger players (whose budgets reach seven figures) there is no reason in principle why well run mobile gambling services will not be able to do the same as the business matures.

The surprising bit is where it's coming from, because it's not being diverted from on-line.

We've asked, naturally, and many - most - of these customers have never used an on-line Casino. Our larger spending customers are not typically new to gambling, but they tend to come from the land based world rather than the on-line. They are more likely to have an old phone on pre-pay than they are to be carrying the latest gadget on a top tariff.

You may wish to know how to acquire and retain these customers, what kind of games they play, and what their risk profile looks like. Keep wishing. Here's a tip though: it's very different to what works on-line.