Betfair s Free Sport Betting Business Model

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I've been using Betfair for decades now but it is only recently I've wondered just how much performs this company actually make? This question is the thing that has compelled me to publish this information. I will not receive copies of their accounts from companies house, the information will probably be all conjecture depending on what I've acquired by using the web page through the years.

What has allowed me to ponder this question will be the transparency within the Betfair site. If you consider traditional bookies including WilliamHill, Ladbrokes or Betfred, that which you have no idea of on any particular sporting event is exactly what has become bet altogether and on what particular outcome these bets were placed.

Take a regular 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 now have no idea whether everyone was backing the outsider or favourite, just how much was bet, and what kind of assist the bookmaker made.

Now consider the same race with Betfair. The total amount exchanged to the race is offered towards the top of the page, this is typically about A�200,000 for a standard horse race. Now we know that Betfair require a commission on all winnings, and for every bet exchanged there's a winner, so they're taking their 5% no matter the result - about A�10,000 in cases like this.

So now for sboarena a quick bit of 'back of fag packet' maths. Approximately 40 races a day generating A�10,000 are all A�400,000 a day 1 week a week, that's 2.8 million pounds weekly. Throw inside bigger meetings and that rounds it to say 3 million, 5% of which is A�150,000.

Now consider the Premiership football season. At least 12 games every week generating between A�200,000 plus a million pounds in exchanged bets, consider the average and workout the 5% commission understanding that's another A�350,000. On top of this there's 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 in your mind that one could (the ones do) bet on everything, golf, cricket, tennis, boxing, champions league football, International soccer, not to mention gaming. I'm beginning visit the conclusion that they must be pulling in weekly revenue inside the millions, and if it's only A�3 million per week, that's over 150 million a year.

I admit to having no idea 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 concept of what their legal fees, IT costs etc amount to. What I do see is unlike traditional bookmakers the end result of any sporting event doesn't have touching on their revenue.

To this end their main aim must be to just recruit numerous customers as you can, which poses the question; with all the numerous online bookies available offering free introductory bets as high as along with way over A�100, then how come Betfair only offer A�30. That is the topic of my next article.