Self-Exclusion Pages Get Read 4x Longer Than Deposit Terms

Players who open a self-exclusion page on a US-licensed sportsbook or casino site spend an average of 3 minutes 42 seconds on it — roughly four times the 54 seconds they give the deposit terms and conditions they clicked through to reach the cashier. That gap comes from a 2025 analysis of 1.2 million anonymized sessions across six operators, and it says less about player diligence than about which pages are designed to be read at all.

The same dataset found that 61% of self-exclusion sessions ended with the player leaving the page without completing the form. The average deposit-terms session ended with a funded account 71% of the time. One page is built to be understood. The other is built to be survived.

What the dwell-time numbers actually measure

Session duration is a crude instrument. A long stay on a self-exclusion page can mean a player is reading carefully, or that they opened the form, got confused by a state-by-state eligibility table, and sat there. The researchers behind the analysis flagged both readings and did not resolve them.

But the comparison still holds, because the two page types are doing opposite jobs. Deposit terms exist to transfer legal risk from the operator to the player. Self-exclusion pages exist to move the player out of the product entirely. One is optimized for scroll-past. The other has no commercial reason to be optimized at all — which is precisely why regulators treat it as a compliance artifact rather than a product surface.

The 54-second deposit-terms figure is the tell. No one reads a 4,000-word bonus T&C in under a minute. They scroll to the bottom and tap. That is the intended behavior.

Why the four-minute number is fragile

Dwell time collapses the moment a player hits a wall. Several state regulators require self-exclusion requests to be submitted through a third-party portal rather than the operator's own site, which means the four-minute average is measuring a page that often cannot complete the action it describes.

• In states with a unified self-exclusion list, the operator page is a redirect. Time-on-page shrinks to seconds.
• In states without one, the operator page is the whole process, and the four-minute figure reflects form-filling, ID verification, and a cooling-off selection.
• On mobile, where roughly 7 in 10 US iGaming sessions originate, long forms convert worse. The 61% abandonment rate is likely a mobile number wearing a desktop average.

That last point matters more than the headline stat. If a player in crisis opens a self-exclusion page on a phone and abandons it at the state-eligibility dropdown, the operator has logged a session, met a disclosure requirement, and changed nothing.

The compliance incentive runs the wrong way

Operators are graded on whether the page exists, loads, and links from the footer. They are not graded on completion rate. A 2023 review of state gaming commission reports found that fewer than one in five publicly disclosed self-exclusion metrics included a completion figure at all — most tracked only page availability and uptime.

That is a measurable gap, and it is fixable with the same instrumentation operators already use for deposit funnels. Completion rate, drop-off step, time-to-confirm, and post-exclusion re-registration attempts are all trackable. None of them require new regulation to collect. They require someone to decide the number matters.

The uncomfortable question is what happens when it does. If a state publishes operator-level self-exclusion completion rates, the sites with the cleanest funnels will look best — and the fastest way to improve a completion rate is to shorten the form, not to make the decision harder. A 90-second self-exclusion flow that 95% of players finish might be worse for a problem gambler than a four-minute one that 40% finish after real reflection. Dwell time was never the goal. It was just the only number anyone bothered to pull.