Legal czech online betting launched. God bless Miroslav Kalousek:)
On January 5th, 5 Czech betting companies obtained an official licence to provide online betting services in the Czech Republic. They now are allowed to compete with other bookies like bwin or Expekt, who operates on European market upon licences based in other countries (Great Britain, Gibraltar, Slovakia, Malta). It is a huge impulse for Czech online advertising market, as betting companies are ready to invest millions of crowns in their marketing activities. Those, who make their living in online advertising, should praise Czech Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek for this huge gift. He even approved online betting despite his mother Christian-democratic party refused this as a devilish:) Or should it be read as an unexpected activity to overcome current crisis? 
Despite all 5 major Czech betting companies (Sazka, Tipsport, Fortuna, Chance and Synot Tip) stated they were prepared for the launch of the legal internet betting in the country, reality seems different. Czech law, upon which this licences were issued, demands to identify a registered user by his ID with his presence at any of the betting office. At the Sazka, they seemed to think about “usability” of the process: you just need to fill out your registration form online, print out your registration number or even just a barcode and have it approved at any of the 6500 terminals of Sazka. On the other hand, Synot Tip requires your to fill out the registration form, than you need to wait until you receive some kind of betting card via post in about a week and then finally you’ll have it approved at their branch and receive username and password.
Affiliate system for third-party revenue driven advertising offers only Sazka, which seem really odd as this is common at almost every online betting bookmakers. Sazka offers 25% revenue of the net profit of user recruited by your site. Synot Tip claimed that they are working on it, but they should work on their product at first by my opinion.
And what about advertising? This is a huge boost for Czech online market. Current “old” online bookmakers had to increase their activity as well and as a result you could have seen up to 6 different online betting ads at sport.idnes.cz, sport section of major online portal iDnes.cz, in recent days.
New players on this market are ready to invest a really huge sums of money. Even homepage of Seznam.cz, the page which gets the most pageviews among all Czech sites and which has been ad-free for several years, is now again available for small banner (418×120 px) for 800 000 CZK per week (32 000 euro). And this banner has been bought by Sazka, they also have a bunch of banners on iDnes.cz. Synot Tip had an interstitials around the sport websites, Fortuna flooded iHned.cz with their banners, Tipsport joined bwin as a main partner of Sport.cz and Chance has their banners at Nova Sport. This means really millions of crowns in online advertising, which hasn’t been present before.
Bad for Sazka, that according to their spokesman Zdenek Zikmund they are not planning to run their popular numeric games like Sportka online. That would be a huge money making machine by my opinion – now you have to visit Sazka terminal every week (or at least every month, if you pre-pay some rounds) to place a bet for their jackpots. Online app would make it as easy as possible – login, select random numbers for each round, set this for next 6 months, in case of any profit forward those money on my bank account. And please, inform me via SMS or email every week – Sazka now just made 800 CZK, which is a minimal bet for this amount of rounds.
Czech bookmakers and officials always stated that foreign companies who operates on Czech market (illegally by their opinions) does not pay taxes or any fees in the Czech Republic and thus all their profits goes abroad. Apart from fact, that this occurs every time any foreign company offers their services without having any legal activities on the country and European union allows this, foreign betting companies runs their marketing activities here and this brings a lot of money, especially into Czech sport. Sponsorships contracts, both online and offline, could be valued as more than 400 millions CZK per year (my own estimate), not including affiliate profits. And this brings sponsorships money not only into football and ice hockey as two most popular sport in the nation, but also to minor activities. For example, bwin supports sledge hockey and one of the main sponsors of upcoming Nordic Ski World Championships in Liberec is Bet-at-home.com.
Despite crisis, several upcoming months seems to be secured in our business. Once again, thank you Mr.Kalousek
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