It is no surprise that online gambling is a popular activity in the UK, one of the few countries that openly supports the industry. What is shocking, however, is that online casino market has seen a 40% increase in traffic in just one year.

A study conducted by Neilson has revealed that there were 3.2 million more visitors at various online gambling websites across the web. This tops popular social networking site Facebook, which only saw 2.2 million new visitors from 2009 to 2010.

The casino operator with the most growth was Camelot, which saw a stagger 114% increase in 2010, going from having a population of 4.4 million to 9.4 million in just one year. This is partially due to the fact that Camelot runs the UK’s national lottery. However, solely-online based companies like Party Gaming brought in almost 900 000 new visitors.

The online gambling industry can only go up from here. While it struggled during its inception, online gambling is now one of the internet’s most popular attractions.

Party Casino kicked off this Monday with an awesome promotion for the amazing prize of attending the biggest event of the football season, the Champions League final in May.
 
Each prize is valued at $7,800. Five lucky winners, along with a friend will be sent to the big game in Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. Each prize package oozes with VIP perks, such as a pair of fantastic tickets in the stadium, two nights at a luxury hotel, and $2,000 spending money.
 
To win this VIP Champions Weekend, all you need to do is play Party Casinos’ slots and jackpot slots games. From there, you have to earn as many points as you can to be one of the top five earners. Check on your progress by checking the leader board every hour to see how you rank. This promotion ends April 30th.
 
This promotion is available only to the Palladium Lounge players. Registration is required in order to take part in this contest. Points can only be earned at PartyCasino.com slots and jackpot slots from now until April 30th. The prize package is not transferable, and there is no cash alternative being offered. Winners will have to make their own travel arrangements to and from the event, as well as cover any other expenses such as travel insurance.

Launched April 6th, the Race to the Top promotion is in celebration of the newly launched and highly original role-playing slot game Circus. The prize pool of $150,000 will be rewarded across two leader boards at the end of the promotion on April 20th.

One of the two leader boards are the Palladium VIPs who will compete for $95,000 on their leader board. The other leader board is for regular players, and they’ll be able to compete for their share of $60,000.

To get started, collect as many PartyPoints as you can by playing any slot games including Circus from the April 6th to 20th. The higher the amount of points you have, the higher up you’ll be on the leader board, and the bigger the prize! Earn double the points by playing Circus! All extra points will not be counted towards the Race to the Top competition, but will help you become a Palladium VIP member if you collect enough PartyPoints.

Circus is the first ever slot game combined with role playing. This unique game allows you to choose one of four characters, each with their own storyline. These characters include a clown, an acrobat, a magician, and a lion tamer. At the end of each gaming session, the game saves a player’s progress and they can start up again later and continue where they left off. They can also try starting an adventure with a different character.

The publicly traded Party Gaming is happy to report that the first week in March showed some incredible rises in stock price as the stock climbed from an already nice number of $301 dollars to $321.90 dollars by the end of the week! Investors were happy to see this happening and said that the growth in the stock price had a direct relation to the numbers of success that were reported from the company earlier in the week that said Party Gaming as a whole had a strong finish in the last quarter of 2009 especially with regards to their Party Poker division.
 
The company is hoping that this continue into next week as everyone is happy when these type of results are displayed!
 
There are many reasons that the company as whole has reason to believe that they will continue growing. While online gambling continues to grow in popularity around the world, they are also happy to announce that the government law suit between the US and PartyGaming was concluded last year and they are free of the legal battle.
 
The company had also spent last year making some acquisitions into smaller online casinos that turned out to be a worthwhile investment and making a bigger name and brand presence for themselves. In turn this is all paying off and the online gambling company is on route for another great year.
 
The rise of this online casino gaming stock is bringing up the prices of other online casinos that trade on the London Stock exchange. It will be interesting to see what happens next week and if the trend in the rise of the prices continues!

There are many waiting the results that the financial report from Party Gaming will bring. The forecasters are waiting to hear from the financial officers of the company as reports of the final earnings are due out this week. It is rumoured that the company finished strong and so investors will be happy to hear the latest earnings and in turn will be lucky to watch their investments climb.
 
Of course there have been disappointments before so many are hesitant top up their holdings before they hear any news and some are even hedging their investments. Las year was a slower year for some online casino companies as many lost several hundreds of thousands of US based players due to several reasons such as laws by the government as well as the recession. The online casino industry does has some publicly traded members such as Party Gaming which actually the largest traded online casino on the London Stock Exchange.
 
It will be interesting to see what this year brings out in performance because it will also be an indicator for the next quarter to follow and party gaming is hoping to rise ahead of the competition and show their players and investors that they are the best in the industry be it to play at their online casino or poker room or to invest in the stock as part of your investment portfolio.
 
Stay tuned to our news sections as we will report the information once it is released and we will have our fingers crossed that the online gambling group had as good a year as some have hoped.