Bet365
Encyclopedia
bet365 Group Limited, is a United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 based gambling
Gambling
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...

 company. bet365 is one of the world’s leading online gambling groups with over 6 million customers in 200 different countries. The Group employs over 1,700 people and is the largest private employer in the city of Stoke-On-Trent .

Overview

bet365 is an online gambling company offering sports betting, poker, casino, games, and bingo, as well as video streams on sporting events. bet365 also offers an on-course bookmaking service.

For sports betting, bet365 are licensed and regulated by the UK Gambling Commission. bet365's casino, games and poker operations are licensed and regulated by the government of Gibraltar
Gibraltar
Gibraltar is a British overseas territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean. A peninsula with an area of , it has a northern border with Andalusia, Spain. The Rock of Gibraltar is the major landmark of the region...

.

bet365's site is available in 17 different languages and supports a variety of payment methods including credit/debit cards and Neovia
Neteller
Optimal Payments PLC, formerly known as Neovia Financial PLC, is a British global payments company based in the Isle of Man and regulated in the United Kingdom...

.

bet365 also owns the Premier League football club Stoke City through one of its subsidiaries Stoke Holdings Limited.

History

bet365 was founded in 2000 in a portakabin in Stoke-on-Trent by Denise Coates. Denise developed a sports betting platform and trading team to launch the business online in March 2001. The business borrowed £15 million from RBS against the family's betting shop estate which had been started by Peter Coates in 1974 and had been run by Denise Coates as Managing Director from 1995. bet365 sold its betting shop chain in 2005 for £40 million and paid off its loan to RBS .

bet365 has grown into one of the world’s largest online gambling companies with its reported figures to March 2010 showing amounts wagered on Sports at £5.4 billion, revenues of £358 million, and an operating profit of £104 million.

Denise Coates, Joint Chief Executive, continues to run bet365 and is the majority shareholder with 50.1% of the shares. Her brother John, Joint Chief Executive, runs the business alongside her, with her father Peter holding the position of Chairman.

Live Betting

bet365’s In Play Product allows customers to bet on events as they are taking place, with a large range of live markets available. bet365 are continually improving their In Play Product, with the most recent update being the implementation of its vFabric private cloud. By using this technology, bet365 are able to handle thousands of changes per second, and the data latency has decreased to less than two seconds. This development has enabled bet365 to deliver a continuous stream of real-time information whilst simultaneously receiving and processing large amounts of incoming customer data .

In addition, bet365 currently provides a comprehensive Live Streaming service for their customers, broadcasting over 20,000 live sporting events each year. bet365 managed to secure the rights to stream the first ever England football match which was exclusively shown on the internet, in October 2009. The match, England v Ukraine, was a World Cup Qualifier and was available for bet365 customers with a funded account to view for free.

Controversial donations

Peter Coates, director of Bet365, is a lifelong supporter of the British Labour party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

 who has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to the party. One particularly large donation coincided with the relaxation of gambling legislation and the lifting of a ban on television advertising by the Labour government.

bet365 are one of the only major online gambling companies who have made the decision to keep their Sportsbook based in the UK. Many of bet365’s competitors have decided to move their operations off shore, to Gibraltar for example, in order to avoid paying full tax and levy contributions .

bet365 Affiliates

bet365 offers an online Affiliate Program where webmasters and marketing persons have the ability to earn commissions on the players they refer to bet365. The online affiliate program allows affiliates to earn commissions as a set percent which is inline with other affiliate programs on online bingo
Online bingo
Online bingo is the game of bingo played on the Internet. It is estimated that the global gross gaming yield of bingo was US$500 million in 2006, and it is forecasted to grow to $1,000 million by 2010....

, sports betting
Sports betting
Sports betting is the activity of predicting sports results and placing a wager on the outcome.-United States of America:Aside from simple wagers such as betting a friend that one's favorite baseball team will win its division or buying a football "square" for the Super Bowl, sports betting is...

, online poker
Online poker
Online poker is the game of poker played over the Internet. It has been partly responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of poker players worldwide...

 and online casinos.

Awards and Achievements

At the eGaming Review Operator Awards 2010 organized by eGaming Review
Egaming Review
eGaming Review Magazine and EGRmagazine.com are related online gambling publishing brands covering online gambling industry news and regulation topics....

 magazine, bet365 won the "Operator of the Year" award.

bet365 ranked third in The Sunday Times Profit Track 100 league table, which ranks private companies in the UK based on profit growth rate. In addition, bet365 was ranked as one of the fastest growing privately owned technology, media and telecoms companies in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 league table .

eGaming Review
Egaming Review
eGaming Review Magazine and EGRmagazine.com are related online gambling publishing brands covering online gambling industry news and regulation topics....

magazine has ranked bet365 the number one Internet gaming company in both 2010 and 2011 as part of its annual Power 50 list of the top 50 most influential Internet gaming companies .
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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