Unfortunately, this announcement is not good news for those of you who like to follow Soccerwidow’s regular match previews published in the German Betfair blog: With immediate effect, there will be a pause until further notice.
Image: kanvag (Shutterstock)Due to continued regulatory challenges, Betfair have taken the decision to suspend their marketing programmes in Germany.
They are currently undertaking a licensing process in Germany for Sports, Games and Poker and have already been granted a Sports betting licence in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, one of 16 German states.
As it stands, they are in a promising position to become a fully licensed operator countrywide but, in order not to jeopardise their remaining applications, they have decided to pause marketing activities for new customer acquisition across all channels and products in Germany for the time being.
This affects Soccerwidow fundamentally as Betfair Germany has also suspended orders for blog articles, which includes our match previews.
Of course, “Why not continue publishing them in the Soccerwidow blog?” Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.
To write and publish a carefully researched and analysed match preview requires approximately three to four working hours; four pieces a week adds up to a considerable amount of time.
In anticipation of just such a situation, we tried a few months ago to publish match previews in Soccerwidow.com (May to July this year). These articles were immensely popular and sometimes attracted more than 1,000 readers each, but the majority came to the site purely for the picks. The increased traffic slowed down the site for genuine readers and contributed nothing in terms of additional sales (Soccerwidow’s course and spreadsheets) or numbers of clicks on ads.
We are sorry to disappoint any regular and loyal readers and we hope you understand our decision not to substitute the previously paid articles in Betfair with free match previews in Soccerwidow is purely about time and money. We wish we could, but we can’t.
Occasionally, readers suggest that we sell our value bet picks and recommendations as they are so successful, or at least introduce a premium service, offering match previews for a monthly subscription fee.
However, this has never been and never will be the goal of this Web site. Soccerwidow wants only to encourage anyone who wishes to bet to use their own intelligence and to fully understand odds calculation and the markets. The site is set up primarily for educational purposes.
Our main aim is education and training, not to provide an easy-to-use picks service for the public. The few match previews we published on Soccerwidow in the past were detailed analyses intending to guide readers into learning how to identify value bets for themselves. If the information we provide persuades some readers to give up betting altogether when they see how difficult it is to make money from gambling, then this is part of our ambit too.
Moreover, if we did start a premium service this would require an increased number of match previews and bet recommendations in order to diversify the betting portfolio sufficiently to ensure its long-term success. Consequently, this would generate a need to employ additional contributors, train them, add quality assurance procedures, and so on. Quite simply, this is not the direction we wish to follow.
We can only cross our fingers and hope that Betfair’s licensing procedure does not take too long. If and when the situation resolves itself, Soccerwidow’s match previews will immediately recommence.
Of course, another possibility is that an alternative solution may come up in the meantime, for example, a different publisher who needs professionally analysed, statistically based match previews.
To avoid confusion: This is about Betfair’s new customer marketing budget in Germany, not their existing German customer accounts.
Betfair states that there will be no impact on existing customers and on Betfair’s product offering. All products and Web sites, particularly www.betfair.com, will remain live and accessible for German customers without any restrictions.
