Monthly Archives: January 2017

South Koreans view lotteries as less speculative than casinos

Lottery activity in South Korea surged in 2016 despite, or because of, a souring economy.

Official lottery figures won’t released until February, but Monday brought the release of a survey by the Korea Lottery Commission under the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, which showed nearly 56% of participants purchased at least one lottery product in 2016. Lotto, the country’s most popular lottery product, reported sales rising 9% in 2016 to KRW 3.55t (US $3b), a new record.

Lottery participation among those making less than KRW 2m (US $1,700) per month nearly doubled to 10.2%, which critics are already slamming as an indication of the lottery preying on those with the least discretionary income.

However, Ministry officials said there was “no proven correlation between economic slowdowns and lottery sales,” and the figures showed the highest lottery participation rate (52.1%) among individuals in the highest economic bracket (over KRW 4m/month) and the second-highest participation (24.1%) among those making between KRW 3m-4m.

Google took down 17m gambling-related “bad ads” in 2016

Gambling advertisements accounted for 1% of the “bad ads’ that technology giant Google took exception with in 2016.

On Wednesday, Scott Spencer, Google’s Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads, posted a blog about how the search engine mainstay “fought bad ads, sites and scammers” in 2016. Spencer said Google took down 1.7b ads that violated its advertising policies in 2016, up from 780m ads that were found objectionable in 2015.

Among those ads earning Google’s ire were over 17m “gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate.” Spencer said Google saw “more attempts” to sneak these gambling ads past the gatekeepers in 2016 but offered no more specific comparisons with 2015’s figures.

While gambling’s bad ad number sounds massive, it pales in comparison to the 68m ads that violated Google’s healthcare policies, a 500% increase from the 12.5m in 2015.