The Gambling Commission publishes its entire business licence register as open data: four CSV files covering businesses, licences, domains and trading names, updated continuously and free to download. Almost nobody writing about online casinos uses it, which is why the same ten brands circulate across hundreds of pages.
Read properly, the register answers questions those pages cannot.
One company, many casinos
The count that matters is not the number of casino websites — it is the number of licence holders behind them. One licensed company frequently runs a dozen consumer brands on a dozen domains, all covered by a single operating licence.
That is why "how many online casinos are there" has no clean answer, and why a list of ten brands can silently be a list of four companies. The register is the only source that lets you collapse brands back into the entities actually accountable to the regulator.
Licences are not the same as sites
A remote casino operating licence does not require a consumer-facing website at all. A meaningful share of active licence holders record no domain: land-based groups whose remote licence backs an in-venue product, and B2B holders who supply other operators.
If you count licences and call the result "casinos", you overstate it. If you count domains, you overstate it differently, because one operator's ten domains are usually one product with ten front doors.
Status is a column, not a badge
Lapsed, surrendered and revoked licences remain visible in the register. That is a feature: it lets you check the history of an operator rather than only its present state. It also means a naive extract that ignores the status column produces a list of casinos that includes ones that no longer hold a licence.
Every number worth publishing from this register therefore needs its filter stated: which type, which activity, which status, and on what date. Without those four, the number cannot be reproduced — and a number nobody can reproduce is not evidence.
Why we publish the extract
Basher works on the operator side of this industry: acquisition, media buying with compliance pre-clearance, affiliates, CRM and SEO for licensed casino and sportsbook brands. Some of the companies in this register are or have been clients.
So the extract we publish at best online casinos carries no preference order, no outbound links to casinos and no ratings. It states the filter, prints the read date, and orders by licence start date — a fact rather than a commercial arrangement. If an operator wants a correction, the register settles it.
What this has to do with our work
Reading a regulator's open data properly is what separates a benchmark from a guess. We do the same thing for operators — competitive sets, market sizing and channel benchmarks built from sources anyone can re-run — in analytics and benchmarking.
Responsible gambling
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