Betfair s Free Sport Betting Business Model

I've been using Betfair for a long time now but it is only recently I've wondered how much creates this change company make? This question 's what has compelled me to write this article. I will not be getting copies of these accounts from companies house, this article is going to be all conjecture according to what I've found while using the site over time.

What has allowed me to ponder this question may be the transparency within the Betfair site. If you consider traditional bookies for example WilliamHill, Ladbrokes or Betfred, whatever you don't know on any particular sporting event is exactly what has become bet in whole and also on what particular outcome these bets were placed.

Take a consistent Friday afternoon race meeting at say Ascot. It's the 2.30 and 5 horses are racing; the punters are logging onto one of many traditional bookmakers websites and backing various horses. The outcome is the second favourite winning, we've got no idea whether people were backing the outsider or favourite, just how much was bet, and what type of assist the bookmaker made.

Now look at the same race with Betfair. The total amount exchanged with the race emerged at the top of the page, this really is typically about A�200,000 to get a standard horse race. Now we know that Betfair take a commission on all winnings, and for every bet exchanged you will find there's winner, so they're taking their 5% whatever the result - about A�10,000 in cases like this.

So now for any quick amount of 'back of fag packet' maths. Approximately 40 races every day generating A�10,000 are all A�400,000 each day one week weekly, that's 2.8 million pounds weekly. Throw within the bigger meetings knowning that rounds it to state 3 million, 5% that is A�150,000.

Now think about the Premiership football season. At least 12 games weekly generating between A�200,000 along with a million pounds in exchanged bets, take the average and exercise the 5% commission and that's another A�350,000. On top of this there is the lower league and sbobet foreign games that must generate another A�100,000 in commission so we're up to Half a million pounds a week in revenue.

Bear at heart you could (and people do) bet on everything, golf, cricket, tennis, boxing, champions league football, International soccer, as well as gaming. I'm starting to come to concluding that they must be attracting weekly revenue inside the millions, of course, if it's only A�3 million per week, that's over 150 million 12 months.

I admit to having not a clue if my workings are drastically wrong here, and if Betfair actually has annual revenue of A�1million or A�1billion. Neither do I have a sense of what their legal fees, IT costs etc total. What I do see is that unlike traditional bookmakers the result from a sporting event doesn't have any effect on their revenue.

To this end their main aim is always to just recruit as much customers as is possible, which poses the question; with the numerous online bookies around offering free introductory bets of up to plus more than A�100, then why do Betfair offer only A�30. That could be the topic of my next article.