Betfair s Free Sport Betting Business Model

I've been using Betfair for years now yet it's only recently I've wondered simply how much can this company make? This question is exactly what has compelled me to write down this information. I will not be getting copies of their accounts from companies house, this article will probably be all conjecture depending on what I've found by using the web page in the past.

What has allowed me to ponder this question could be the transparency inside the Betfair site. If you consider traditional bookies including WilliamHill, Ladbrokes or Betfred, that which you don't know on any particular sporting event is what has been bet in whole and on what particular outcome these bets were placed.

Take an everyday Friday afternoon race meeting at say Ascot. It's the 2.30 and 5 horses are racing; the punters are logging onto one of the traditional bookmakers websites and backing the many horses. The outcome is the second favourite winning, we've got no clue whether everyone was backing the outsider or favourite, the amount was bet, and what sort of assist the bookmaker made.

Now think about the same race with Betfair. The total amount exchanged to the race emerges at the top of the page, that is typically about A�200,000 to get a standard horse race. Now we all know that Betfair please take a commission on all winnings, and sbobet for every bet exchanged there is a winner, so they're taking their 5% regardless of the result - about A�10,000 in this instance.

So now to get a quick little bit of 'back of fag packet' maths. Approximately 40 races each day generating A�10,000 each is A�400,000 a day 7 days weekly, that's 2.8 million pounds every week. Throw inside the bigger meetings which rounds it to express 3 million, 5% of which is A�150,000.

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

Bear at heart you could (and people do) bet on everything, golf, cricket, tennis, boxing, champions league football, International soccer, not forgetting gaming. I'm needs to arrive at in conclusion that they must be attracting weekly revenue inside millions, of course, if it's only A�3 million a week, that's over 150 million annually.

I admit to presenting 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 attorney's fees, IT costs etc figure to. What I do see is the fact that unlike traditional bookmakers the outcome of any sporting event does not have any effect on their revenue.

To this end their main aim must be to just recruit as many customers as you possibly can, which poses the question; with all the numerous online bookies out there offering free introductory bets up to as well as in way over A�100, then why do Betfair just offer A�30. That may be the topic of my next article.