Betfair s Free Sport Betting Business Model

I've been using Betfair for many years now however it is only recently I've wondered how much creates this change company make? This question is what has compelled me to write down this informative article. I will not get copies of the accounts from companies house, the information is going to be all conjecture depending on what I've grabbed from using the site in the past.

What has allowed me to ponder this question will be the transparency within the Betfair site. If you consider traditional bookies such as WilliamHill, Ladbrokes or Betfred, everything you don't know on any particular sporting event 's what has become bet in total and so 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 on to among the 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, simply how much was bet, and what type of profit the bookmaker made.

Now think about the same race with Betfair. The total amount exchanged with the race is given at the top of the page, that 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 there exists a winner, so they're taking their 5% no matter what result - about A�10,000 in this instance.

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

Now take into account the Premiership football season. At least 12 games a week generating between A�200,000 as well as a million pounds in exchanged bets, take the average and figure out the 5% commission knowning that's another A�350,000. On top of this you have the lower league and foreign games that has to generate another A�100,000 in commission so we're up to Half millions of pounds per week in revenue.

Bear planned that one could (the ones do) bet on everything, golf, cricket, tennis, boxing, champions league football, International soccer, let alone gaming. I'm beginning to arrived at in conclusion that they must be pulling in weekly revenue in the millions, of course, if it's only A�3 million per week, that's over 150 million per year.

I admit to having not a clue if my workings are drastically wrong here, if Betfair actually has annual revenue of A�1million or A�1billion. Neither do I have a concept of what their legal fees, IT costs etc total. What I do see is always that unlike traditional bookmakers the outcome associated with a sporting event has no bearing on their revenue.

To this end their main aim will be to just recruit as numerous customers as is possible, which poses the question; with the numerous online bookies out there offering free introductory bets all the way to as well as in more than A�100, then so why do Betfair offer only A�30. That may be the topic of my next article.