全球真钱扑克牌网站的在线扑克流量继续下降(2)

　　译文：

　　Global real money poker website online poker flow continue to fall

　　Independent online poker data mining website Pokerscout.com revealed that last week the global online poker traffic decreased with a significant 4.4% compared to the traffic measured during the week before.

　　The global online poker traffic continues to decline. Pokerscout reports that last week approximately 4.4% less players were participating in online poker activities compared to the week before. This drop was experienced at almost every single operator.

　　Pokerscout.com reports that "Overall, the market is down 10 percent from this time last year, despite the relaunch of Full Tilt Poker and the opening of the Spanish market."

　　Despite this, online poker revenues generated by industry leaders remained relatively stable. Major companies such as William Hill and 888 did not experience a decline in online poker revenues. At 888, online poker generated $24 million in Q4 2012, which is an increase of 31% compared to 2011.

　　The online casino market however continues to increase as it was revealed by the performance reports of gaming companies as well as studies conducted by business experts. For example, online casino technology developer Playtech managed to increase its revenues with a huge 53% in 2012.

　　Another market that continues to grow extremely fast is the mobile casino gaming and the mobile betting market. Almost every major online casino company achieved record growth in the mobile gambling and mobile betting departments in 2012.

　　A study conducted by the famous Juniper Research even claims that global mobile casino gaming and mobile gambling might even generate as much as $100 billion per year. In comparison, the regular online gambling market is believed to be generating around $32 billion per year at this moment.

　　So why is the online poker market continuing to decrease when in fact online gambling as a whole is rapidly increasing? - Experts believe it's because the weird regulatory processes going on in various countries, especially in Europe.

　　While online gambling regulation gave a huge credibility boost to online casino gaming in many countries, it also negatively influenced the online poker scene. This is because in most regulated markets, such as France and Spain, licensed poker rooms are obliged to separate their local player pool from their international player pool.

　　This in turn results in under-populated online poker tables and not enough players to launch massive tournaments. As a consequence of this, many players simply abandoned online poker as a whole or decided to relocate to smaller and lesser known operators that operate outside of the law and aren't tracked by data mining sites.

　　Some countries such as Spain and France seem to have recognized this problem. Recently the French online gambling regulator explained that it would make a proposal to allow licensed operators to merge their French player base with their international player base. Once regulated markets adopt this approach, the online poker market might finally recover.