Betfair s Free Sport Betting Business Model

I've been using Betfair for many years now but it's only recently I've wondered simply how much can this company actually make? This question 's what has compelled me to publish this article. I will not be getting copies of the accounts from companies house, the information will be all conjecture depending on what I've found while using your website over the years.

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, what you don't know on any particular sporting event is exactly what has been bet as a 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 on one of many traditional bookmakers websites and backing the various horses. The outcome is say the second favourite winning, we've got no idea whether everyone was backing the outsider or favourite, just how much was bet, and what are the assist the bookmaker made.

Now consider the same race with Betfair. The total amount exchanged with the race emerged at the top of the page, this is typically about A�200,000 to get a standard horse race. Now we realize that Betfair have a commission on all winnings, as well as every bet exchanged there exists a winner, so they're taking their 5% whatever the result - about A�10,000 in cases like this.

So now for any quick little bit of 'back of fag packet' maths. Approximately 40 races a day generating A�10,000 are all A�400,000 every day one week a week, that's 2.8 million pounds a week. Throw inside the bigger meetings and that rounds up to state 3 million, 5% which 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, go ahead and take average and work out the 5% commission and that's another A�350,000. On top of this there is 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 you could (and individuals do) bet on everything, golf, cricket, tennis, sboarena boxing, champions league football, International soccer, not forgetting gaming. I'm starting to arrived at in conclusion that they must be pulling in weekly revenue in the millions, and when it's only A�3 million a week, that's over 150 million annually.

I admit to getting not a clue if my workings are drastically wrong here, and when Betfair actually has annual revenue of A�1million or A�1billion. Neither do I have a solid idea of what their attorney's fees, IT costs etc amount to. What I do see is unlike traditional bookmakers the end result of any sporting event has no bearing on their revenue.

To this end their main aim is always to just recruit as numerous customers as possible, which poses the question; with the numerous online bookies available offering free introductory bets all the way to along with excess of A�100, then so why do Betfair just offer A�30. That could be the topic of my next article.