How Does Ontario Capture 91% of Its Online Gamblers, and Michigan Only Captures 75%?
Add gambling compliance to the list of Canadian stereotypes.
Ontario’s regulated iGaming market captures 91% of online gamblers. Michigan and New Jersey lag behind at 75% and 73%, respectively. So, why is that?
A new Ipsos study commissioned by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario found that 91.1% of Ontario players who gambled online in the past three months did so on regulated sites. That figure is up from 83.7% a year ago and represents one of the highest channelization rates ever reported in a competitive online gambling market. Only 8.9% of Ontario respondents reported gambling exclusively on unregulated sites, down from 16.3% in 2025.
Compare that to the US. Blask’s 2025 iGaming Landscape report estimated that Michigan, the strongest US channelization market, captures roughly 75% of its online gambling value through licensed operators. New Jersey, with more than a decade of legal online casino activity, captures about 73%. The national US average sits at 21% domestic capture, largely because most states haven’t legalized online casinos at all.
The two studies use different methodologies. Ipsos asked players where they gamble. Blask uses an AI-driven model of search visibility and inferred revenue to estimate dollar share. The numbers aren’t directly comparable, but the qualitative gap is real. Ontario is capturing more of its online gambling market than any US jurisdiction. The question worth examining is why.
Open Competition in Ontario vs. Restricted Licensing in the States
The most obvious structural difference is the size of the regulated marketplace. Ontario launched its competitive online gambling market in April 2022 and now has 51 licensed operators offering 89 distinct brands. The model is permissive by design. Any operator that meets AGCO’s licensing standards can compete for Ontario players. There is no cap on the number of licenses, no preferential bidding process, and no preferred-vendor relationships.
Michigan has 15 licensed iGaming operators. New Jersey has roughly 30 online casino licenses, though the actual number of distinct consumer-facing brands is smaller because several operators run multiple skins. Both states use a casino-tethered model where online licenses are tied to commercial or tribal land-based properties. The total number of brands available to a player is meaningfully smaller than what an Ontario player can choose from.
This matters because brand variety is one of the main reasons players go offshore. A player who wants a specific game, payment method, promotion structure, or live dealer experience that isn’t available domestically has a built-in reason to look elsewhere. Ontario’s open licensing minimizes those gaps. The US tethered model creates them.
Established Offshore Brands Create Serious Competition
Ontario’s online casino market is just four years old. New Jersey’s online casino market is twelve years old. Michigan is four. Channelization isn’t immediate in any of these jurisdictions, and the trajectory matters as much as the snapshot.
New Jersey’s 73% number is harder to grow because the offshore brands it competes against, Bovada, BetOnline, and MyBookie, were entrenched in the US sports-betting and casino market for two decades before legal online gambling existed. American players developed loyalty to those brands during years when they had no legal alternative. Ontario’s regulated market faced a less entrenched offshore presence. Canadian offshore brands had nothing like Bovada’s cultural foothold in the US, partly because most of the major Canadian offshore traffic was already flowing to operators that later applied for AGCO licenses.
When you look at it this way, you plainly see that Ontario’s market launched into a vacuum. New Jersey and Michigan launched into competition with established offshore brands that had spent twenty years building US market share and winning.
The Product Gap Problem Plays a Vital Role
The Blask data shows a striking divide based on what’s legal. Fully regulated US states, those with both online casino and sports betting, capture about 62% of their market on average. Betting-only states capture about 26%. States with no online gambling capture none. Ohio, which has sports betting but no online casino, sees 82% of its online gambling value go offshore.
This is the single biggest structural reason US channelization lags. American players who want slots, blackjack, or live dealer products in a state that only authorized sports betting have one option: an unregulated site. Ontario currently faces no such gap. The province authorized online casino, sports betting, poker, and live dealer products in a single regulatory framework. A player who wants any kind of online gambling can find a regulated version of it.
Michigan and New Jersey, which authorize the same range of products as Ontario, perform better than other US states. They still don’t reach Ontario’s numbers, but the structural product gap is closed.
Enforcement and the Role of the Banking System
The piece of the picture that gets the least attention is the operational environment around offshore brands. The AGCO actively prosecutes unlicensed advertising, has cease-and-desist authority over offshore operators marketing to Ontario residents, and works closely with major Canadian financial institutions to block transactions to known unregulated sites. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has assisted in the enforcement of broadcast and digital advertising. The regulated market is backed by mainstream Canadian media in a coordinated way that the US market lacks.
The US enforcement environment is more fragmented. State regulators have authority within their borders but limited reach against offshore operators. Federal statutes, including the Wire Act, UIGEA, and IGRA, exist on paper, but federal enforcement against offshore consumer gambling has been minimal for years. US banks and payment processors have inconsistent approaches to blocking offshore transactions, and crypto rails provide a workaround that no state regulator has effective jurisdiction over.
Michigan’s recent cease-and-desist orders against 45 offshore operators were among the more aggressive enforcement actions any US state has taken. Even that level of activity is modest compared to Ontario’s standing operational posture.
What the Gap Tells Us About Ontario’s Dominance
The honest read is that Ontario’s 91% number reflects a regulatory model that’s working as intended, but the model itself is doing more than the equivalent US frameworks. Open licensing creates competitive brand variety. Full-spectrum product authorization closes the product gap. Coordinated enforcement against offshore operators makes the regulated market the path of least resistance for the average player.
US states have replicated parts of this model. Michigan and New Jersey have authorized the full product range and built competitive licensed markets. The remaining gaps are mostly outside the states’ control. Federal-level enforcement against offshore operators is weak. The banking system is fragmented at best. The cultural foothold of established US offshore brands runs deeper than anything Ontario had to overcome.
The key takeaway for US regulators considering channelization isn’t that Ontario is doing anything magical. It’s that channelization requires multiple structural pieces to be in place simultaneously, and the US system has, by design, made some of those pieces harder to achieve than the Canadian system did.
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