The average British household spent £676.60 a week in the year to March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics, and recreation and culture claimed a larger share of it than the year before: up £6.70 a week, a rise of 9 per cent. So households are spending more on enjoying themselves. What the headline number doesn’t say is where that money now goes.
Not, on the whole, to the places it used to. The Night Time Industries Association counted 2,424 late-night venues still trading in Britain in June 2025, down by roughly 800 since March 2020. That works out at a 26.4 per cent contraction, or about three net closures a week. Clubs shut. Ticketed nights get thinner on the ground.
Yet the leisure budget keeps growing. The money hasn’t left it, it has moved a few feet, onto the device already in the room. Video games have taken a slice of British household spending for decades, but the range of things you can pay for online has widened enormously in the last ten years or so. The same shift shows up at the BBC, where half a million households cancelled the licence fee in a single year.
Ofcom’s most recent Online Nation report put the average adult’s non-work time online at four and a half hours a day, ten minutes more than the year before. For 18- to 24-year-olds it’s six hours twenty. Around three-quarters of that happens on a phone.
That is the whole argument in one statistic. A concert requires a date, a ticket, a train and somebody to go with. Digital entertainment requires a thumb.
Mobile gaming was a niche once. Now almost every category of entertainment has a version that fits in a pocket:
· Mobile games, from three-minute puzzlers to full role-playing titles
· Streaming, covering films, television, music and podcasts
· Digital art and music-making tools built for people who aren’t professionals
· Reading, courses and skills platforms
· Online betting and casino play
Each of these works in a four-minute gap at a bus stop and also across a four-hour evening. Downtime that used to be dead is now spendable.
Line the sectors up next to each other and a pattern shows.
British consumers spent £8.76bn on video games in 2025, according to trade body Ukie, the highest figure the industry has recorded and 7.4 per cent up on the year. Mobile alone accounted for £2.07bn of it.
Streaming tells a subtler story. Ofcom’s Media Nations research found 70 per cent of UK households had at least one subscription video service in early 2026, just two percentage points more than four years earlier. Take-up has plateaued. The growth is in how many services each household stacks up, not in how many households sign up at all.
Gambling splits along the same online and offline fault line as everything else. Gambling Commission figures for the year to March 2025 show remote betting, bingo and casino generating £7.8bn in gross gambling yield, up 13.1 per cent. Online casino games account for £5bn of that, the largest single category in the remote sector. The land-based half of the industry, meaning arcades, betting shops, bingo halls and casinos, grew 3.6 per cent to £4.8bn over the same twelve months.
Three separate industries, one shape. The offline side grows slowly or shrinks. The online side doesn’t.
Part of the pull is that online platforms are simply better at guessing. Recommendation systems narrow the field before the user has consciously thought about it, which strips out the trial and error that used to sit between wanting entertainment and finding some.
Payment has changed too. Traditional leisure ran on ownership and a handful of large transactions: the album, the season ticket, the boxed console game. Online, spending is either a monthly subscription or a run of small purchases sized to whatever somebody feels like committing that week.
Then there’s the social layer. Digital pastimes arrive with online communities already attached. Before the internet, finding fifteen other people who cared about your particular hobby took years and the classified pages of a specialist magazine. Now it takes a search box.
The same design that makes digital spending easy makes it hard to see.
A subscription here. Another one there, taken out for a single series and never cancelled. A handful of small in-app purchases on a Sunday afternoon. None of it registers as a decision, because none of it is big enough to feel like one. Added together across a year, though, it reaches a number most people would refuse outright if asked to hand it over in one go.
That is the practical difference between the old model and the new one. A season ticket announces its price once, and loudly. Digital leisure spending whispers, monthly, from a bank statement nobody reads line by line. Anyone moving a serious chunk of their entertainment budget online is better off tracking the annual total than trusting the individual amounts, which are engineered to feel trivial.
None of which means the offline version is finished. The venues that closed didn’t take live music with them, and a sold-out room still does something no recommendation engine has managed to reproduce. It’s just that the ticket for it now gets bought at eleven at night, on a phone, from the sofa, somewhere between the streaming queue and the group chat.
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