Opinion: The evolving nature of industry pay
BettingJobs.com director Fiona Hickey says a change in labour demands is narrowing the jurisdictional pay gap and the value of analysts is rising fast
Online gaming is by its very nature a global industry – it was one of the first to truly embrace the power and the promise of the internet to drive a borderless business. And we are convinced the fluid nature of the sector’s talent pool – multi-national, multi-jurisdictional and multi-disciplinary – has helped drive the evolution of the industry.
Good ideas get spread quickly, and this isn’t just about job hopping. In fact, one of the findings from our recent salary survey was that candidates are now more likely to stick in a role they are happy with. Employee loyalty to the reputable brands is on the increase, due in part to the greater availability of career progression and increased responsibilities, and resulting in fewer candidates making sideways steps for more money.
Yet at the same time the talent pool that the operators are working with is very mobile – in every meaning of that word. Looking at a selection of the top jobs from our survey, we can see that though the industry has found homes in typically offshore locations, this is not now – and maybe never really was – about finding cheaper labour pools.
The table below of selected roles within the industry shows that the variation of salary levels across the eight jurisdictions covered by the survey remains relatively small.
| Job title | UK (£) | Ireland () | Malta () | IoM (£) | Gibraltar (£) | E.Europe (£) |
| Chief marketing officer | 167,000 | 137,000 | 83,000 | 175,000 | 135,000 | 83,000 |
| Country Manager | 63,000 | 52,000 | 36,000 | n/a | 63,000 | 36,000 |
| Head of analytics | 86,000 | 67,000 | 64,000 | 93,000 | 80,000 | n/a |
| IT project manager | 61,000 | 43,000 | 36,000 | 65,000 | 54,000 | 36,000 |
| Operations director | 120,000 | 90,000 | 72,000 | 120,000 | 115,000 | 83,500 |
| Director of product | 160,000 | 108,000 | 81,500 | 127,000 | 179,000 | 80,000 |
| Product manager | 65,000 | 43,000 | 42,000 | 74,000 | 47,000 | 36,000 |
Source: Betting Jobs survey
Clearly, there are lower cost locations among our list of eight jurisdictions. Malta and Eastern Europe, in particular, are the obvious standouts, but even here the variations between them and the other six jurisdictions are not uniform. While there is an understandable gap between what a chief marketing officer can command in either the UK, Ireland or the Isle of Man and the average salary for a CMO elsewhere, lower down the career rungs the gap is less dramatic and, we would argue, closing.
Take the example of analytics. Today’s online gaming businesses are evolving in line with the technology that powers them, and one trend we have identified both from the survey and the ongoing work we conduct with the sector that has particular resonance is the growth of the number-crunching departments.
This trend has been noted elsewhere. A note this week from analyst Ivor Jones at Numis spoke about how the value of data analytics had been a “repeating theme” during a recent online gaming conference.
How companies deal with big data is fast becoming one of the defining characteristics across the industry. Jones pointed out that while one-to-one marketing might be still be a way off, “companies will be able to more precisely target offers to mass-market consumers in a way which was once only possible in relation to VIPs”.
It’s not surprise, then, that out survey found the average salary for head of analytics now stands at 101k while a business analyst’s average salary is 63k. But what is interesting is that companies aren’t just filling the senior level roles in the UK and Gibraltar – the analytics departments are growing in every jurisdiction.
We think the rise of the analytics department is dramatic, and see it as a pointer to the direction that all online gaming businesses are heading. These are tech-driven businesses, handling more data than ever before, with sports-betting operations driven by automation and algorithms, seeking talented individuals from both within and outside of the industry to help them do it.
Our salary survey is only a snapshot of an industry which is seemingly forever in a transitional stage. More developments are forecast, with the current M&A merry-go-round an outward example of the degree of change we can expect in the years to come. Future salary surveys are sure to provide more evolutionary snapshots.