is it true half of dutch 18 year olds sign up on their birthday

i saw this too but the number i read was different, something like 40 percent. still bad honestly
my colleague says in netherlands the ads are everywhere on tiktok so is not surprise
 
or people turn 18 and do a legal thing they couldn t do before 💀 shocking scenes. i signed up to like four sites the month i turned 21 and im fine
 
The number's real but it's been mangled in the retelling, and the actual figures are worth having straight.

The Dutch regulator looked at 15,761 newly opened online accounts that had betting activity in May 2025 and tracked them for three months. Of those, 5,244 belonged to people aged 18 to 24. Within that group, 2,144 accounts — 41% — were held by 18-year-olds.
So it's not half of 18-year-olds signing up. It's that 41% of all the new accounts in the 18 to 24 bracket belonged to the very youngest year in it, which is a different claim and arguably a more striking one.
The birthday figure is 11% opened on the day itself. 38% within a month of turning 18.
 
11% means one in nine of them had it planned. you don't open an account on your birthday by accident, you've been waiting right
 
That's the assumption everyone makes and this particular research doesn't support it, which I found genuinely surprising.
The regulator had its own working theory that young adults start with sports betting and progress into casino games. The account data contradicted it. 72% of those accounts began with online casino only. 11% started with sports betting. And of the ones that started on casino, 97% were still on casino products the following month. There's no visible progression from one to the other.
I'd be careful with it though. It's one regulator's account data from one market over three months, and it cuts against several widely cited studies that do trace a line from sports betting advertising into iGaming among teenagers. I haven't found anything reconciling the two.
 
well for my generation was not football and not casino. was skins
i open cases in csgo from maybe 14. is not called gambling, is called opening case, you get knife or you get nothing. then there is sites where you put skins in pot and one person take all. i trade on those long before i can legally do anything
and when i turn 18 the step to real casino was nothing. crash game looks exactly like the skin sites i already use for four years. same colors even
 
I want to flag that this is the two of you and not the study, because it's the sort of thing that gets repeated as a finding.
The loot box pathway is well documented elsewhere and there's a body of research on it. But none of these three Dutch studies looked at it as far as I can tell, so I can't tell you whether the KSA's data supports what you're both describing. It may well. I just don't have it.
 
3rd study is the one that speaks to what @gamebandit and @Greenpickle are describing, though not through games.
Research agency interviewed young people aged 16 to 21 for the regulator. What came back was that first contact with gambling typically happens between eight and twelve, usually watching an adult relative or a family friend. Independent gambling starts around twelve to fourteen and it's social - scratchcards given as presents, informal bets between mates, poker at someone's house. It isn't understood as gambling by anyone involved, including the adults handing over the scratchcards. Then between fourteen and sixteen it moves online.
So the entry point in that account isn't advertising and it isn't a product. It's the family living room.
 
my grandmother gave me scratch cards every christmas from i think seven years old. was a tradition, the whole family did it together after dinner
i never thought about it as anything until now. it was just christmas
 
nobody said she was. thats sort of the point isn't it, none of it looks like anything at the time
 
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