How Much Does Betfair Pay Me? (Spoiler: Still Nothing)

Leaving a normal career

Just over two decades ago I was in a normal career and well paid, wife, three children & a mortgage. A role that most people would have happily kept.

Yet the moment I saw Betfair’s exchange in action, I recognised an opportunity too good to ignore. I left the steady pay-cheque behind, armed with nothing more than a laptop, a love of numbers, and a conviction that a transparent peer-to-peer betting model would change the game.

Betting for a living, Problems with my new job!

Before Bet Angel was born, before I had any relationship with Betfair, I went around financial market exhibitions, shows, and events and talked about the concept.

It was really simple to summarise to that particular audience because I was saying:

“Did you know that you can trade the sports market the same way that you trade the stock market”

It’s a simple line, but that got the concept across. The problem was it was pretty tricky to do in the early days because there was just a website, and you’d have to type in the orders on the website, which didn’t work very well.

Fairly quickly into my betting exchange trading career, I realised that if I wanted to do it seriously I needed to create software.

Building the Tools I Needed

To answer one question straight away, yes, I will promote Bet Angel and yes it does produce an income, though it’s much lower than you would imagine. Partly because, roughly ten years ago, I reformed it with a minority stake, to ensure it outlives me!

I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved, and it is a business, but even more proud because of WHY it was created. We didn’t turn up years after Betfair trading became popular to exploit a niche in the market. Bet Angel was created even before Betfair trading was well known and before Betfair had an API. Bet Angel originally was a screen scraping app!

Back then, the default Betfair interface felt like trading with boxing gloves on. Rather than complain, I teamed up with a like-minded developer and created Bet Angel—software.

I wasn’t chasing subscribers, as they didn’t exist; I simply needed kit that matched my trading ambitions.

During the design phase of Bet Angel, I came up with a plan with the person doing the development. If we sold subscriptions to the software, hopefully, the payments we got from that would be enough to get him out of his existing contract and to develop full-time.

I knew if I could speed up developement of Bet Angel, we could achieve something special on the trading front. We never realised back then that it would actually become a business in its own right.

But ultimately, its creation is very different from all of the other software that you see out there.

I’m very proud of Bet Angel and I am going to promote it. I make no apologies for that. It’s a great piece of software, at a great price with excellent resources with ongoing funding.

Hopefully, we can take it on to another level and, driven by the many full-timers that use it now, let it take it own shape from here into the future.

What incentive do I get from Betfair?

How much do you think that I got paid last year for all of the promotional work that I’ve done for the Betfair?

Well, the amount that I got paid last year for doing all of that work and being a software developer, promoting the concept and doing all of those wonderful things was, drumroll, please…

Zero, zilch, nada, none, I got nothing!

I didn’t get paid a penny for doing any work, no affiliate commissions, no direct funding, no fees for articles or videos or any anything like that at all. There was absolutely zero money paid to me to promote Betfair.

Of course, I have a long-term relationship with Betfair and, due to my size, I have an account manager. So, I get the odd perk, but what I’m talking about is a direct incentive to promote, a financial reward.

The reality, it works the other way round!

I know people find it difficult to come to terms with, but my core focus was and always has been trading and betting. My motivation over all these years is to do something special on that front. Everything is secondary to that.

Because of that I have paid a lot of commission over the the years. In essense, I sort of pay Betfair to promote them, which is, err…. slightly bizarre. But that’s the reality.

Thanks to overtly punitive actions by the Gambling Commission, events and freebies are a thing of the past now anyhow. So even if that was an option, it isn’t now.

Ultimately, I don’t get paid a penny for any promotion that I’ve done. I received no incentive, financial or otherwise.

Exchanges are by far the best way to bet seriously and should be everywhere and front and centre of the betting industry. They are not, so I’ll always do my best to show their benefits.

People talking about betting and not showing you an exchange are short changing you.

Do I get paid for anything else?

Over the years, I’ve begun to realise that a lot of the betting industry is funded by below-the-line contributions. So a lot of tipping sites that you see a lot of “advice sites” and people pretending to help you are actually getting a backhander via affiliate commissions from the bookmaker or the betting industry.

It’s often masked as ‘advice’, but make no bones about it. It’s a sales pitch!

The key problem here is that this creates a distorted incentive. People will say anything or get you to do things even if they know it is wrong. I’ve grown very uncomfortable with that and I’m keen to be different.

Will I get funding below the line in the future?

I’m fortunate that my trading has gone so well over time that I don’t need the hassle of pretending to offer ‘advice’. The money that I made from trading and investments keep me more than busy and on the right path.

Morally, I’d rather just be honest with you and my success gives me that opportunity.

It’s not impossible that at some point in the future, I may need to fund something, or I may need to buy into a concept where I will need funding. Certainly, I’ll be as clear as possible with anything I do, whether it’s been funded or not. There are obligations in some media to declare this anyhow, but not that many people do.

But where I have a choice, I will reject funding in favour of putting a positive light on a job that is very misunderstood and badly represented.

I have turned down funding for a number of things that I’ve done. I decided that it’s better not to have that money than to have a distorted incentive.

For example, when I went to the Matchbook Traders Conference, they offered me a fee for going there. But because it was talking positively about betting exchanges, I just did it anyway, no fee required.

I wanted a platform where I could talk openly and honestly without the fear of somebody pressuring me into saying something that I didn’t want to say.

I’ve felt that that is the most appropriate way to do things.

So, how am I incentivised to talk about the Betfair betting exchange and others?

If you asked, am I incentivised? Yes I am, because it’s been what I’ve been doing for a living for over twenty years!

It’s been a dream job, one hell of a journey and something I want to share so others can benefit from my experience in the markets and my career and life journey in general. It’s my pleasure to do that. I want people to learn from my experiences.

When I wake up in the morning, the thing that really gets me going is that I’m trying to solve a complicated problem. Something looks intractable, and I’m thinking, can I solve this issue? That’s what keeps me motivated.

Then, when I do achieve that, it’s the biggest buzz that I get.

So, who knows where that goes? Who knows where I go? I’ve no idea to be honest.

Most of the journey that I’ve had to this particular point has sort of not been preordained, I just made it up as I went along. But I’ve learned to enjoy that feeling and see where it takes you.

One mistake I made was not defining an end point. Until I work out what that is, I’ll just keep on going.

Summary

If you expect to be treated like a king in the betting industry for being a net winner, forget it. If you are treated well, then it may not be a good sign!

If you are promoting winning strategies, that’s a no as well. The industry is funded by losers!

If you want to talk clearly about winning, then that’s not ‘helpful’ to the industry. It’s much better to get somebody to stick a few quid on something and ignore the detail. Who cares if it makes money when you get paid anyway? That’s the way the industry generally works, and that doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

To clarify, I’ve received no income from Betfair for promoting them last year. I don’t get paid to promote betting exchanges, don’t need to and don’t expect to.

I hope this enlightened you on the reality as it’s very far removed from what you may suspect! But ultimately, that’s the reality.