There is a fair bit of gloom and doom out there. Out of the $700 or $800 billion dollar skill-game market (poker, sports betting etc), horse racing sits at around $15B of it. But reading the Betfair annual report I came across this gem: Betfair is the only online bookmaker which has racing as its Number One product: most others rank football, tennis, golf and cricket above it.
I know we are not them; I know our business thinks cheaper takeout is something they get at Dominos on two for one Sunday's, I know we are run by the same business model that was used when people listened to Dion and the Belmonts on the radio while driving to Belmont. But heck, is that not really encouraging? A company that is new, that is 2.0, that offers players 24 hour a day world wide racing, at as low as 4% takeouts in a neat way actually wants to offer racing and calls it their number one sport.
No slots, no sports betting, no asking for a handout from government, no ADW fights, no horseman fights. Just racing. 24 hours a day of racing from all over the world. And they like it. As an added bonus they will contribute more to purses than the traditional bookmakers do.
It is why here on the blog I say the glass is not half empty, it barely has a drop in it. We just have a lot of work to do.
By the way when speaking of them in the past I used to say they have "over one million customers." I have to start correcting that. They just signed their 2 millionth customer. It only took them about 20 months to go from one to two million. Well done.
2 comments:
We can't really say that Betfair charges a 4% commission, since it only applies to when you win. If 100k was matched at an average price of even money. Betfair would only get 2k of the total money bet.
Actually, I am wrong (admitting I'm wrong means I'm not a racing exec btw).
The winner has to pay approximately 4% on all the winnings, which means the 50,000 bet plus the 50,000 won.
As we know, the rates can be lower than 4%-4.5% based on action.
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