Interest in betting has grown 14 times in the last 10 years; check out the main bookmakers.
Present on team shirts, in stadiums and in TV advertisements, bookmakers have also multiplied their presence in Google searches. In the last ten years, interest in searching for "sports betting" has grown 14 times, according to data from Google Trends. The tool measures the popularity of terms according to the volume of searches in a given period.
Between September 2015 and 2023, there were more than 1.6 billion accesses to bookmakers, just considering the eight brands with the highest number of accesses according to the Ahrefs platform.
The growth in demand for bets was largely driven by the legalization of the market in Brazil in 2018 and the resulting increase in publicity on the subject.
Since then, major sporting events such as the World Cup have attracted new punters to the market.
Interest over time
Google Trends ranks the search popularity of a term between 0 and 100, according to the period of the search. Between January 2015 and 2024, the peak number of searches was in September last year, when the sports betting bill was passed in the House.
Demand for the term "sports betting" also peaked in November 2022, with the World Cup and the Elections. According to Marcelo Mattoso, a partner at Barcellos Tucunduva Advogados and a specialist in the gaming and technology market, Brazilians' interest in betting is cultural.
According to him, bookmakers' sponsorship of teams and increased advertising have helped the betting boom. He points out that major sporting events are important for bringing new users to bookmakers, explaining the increased interest in the search.
He believes that, with regulation, there should be an increase in interest in searches for the term this year. "When the regulations come out, marketing will probably increase and users will increase. It will be added to with the start of the Brazilian Championship, so this number will probably increase," he predicts.
Bet365 alone had 806.4 million hits between September 2015 and 2023, according to data from the Ahrefs platform. The bookmaker that came second in the number of hits was Betano, with 422.9 million.