Smarkets Blog

We conducted a survey a few weeks ago and one of the top features you asked for was market depth. So we’ve built it!

Rather than over complicate our standard interface, at the top of every market you’ll see a link to ‘show market depth’. This will take you to a new, more advanced layout. The market depth view is a way of seeing exactly where the money is in the market so you can see exactly how much will be matched. We’ll be putting together a video to explain the market depth view in more detail once we’ve ironed out any kinks.

We’re showing three levels of depth for both bids and offers (‘for’ and ‘against’ in Smarkets terminology) and, differing from other market-based betting sites, we show the amount of money you need to place to match the bet. We’re also showing your profit and loss for each market so you can see exactly which positions you have and how much you’d stand to win/lose depending on different outcomes.

We hope you find this view useful and, as ever, we’d love to hear your feedback.

We asked a bunch of existing Smarkets members to complete a short feedback survey on how we’ve been doing. The results were really interesting. On the whole we’re going in the right direction and most of you are pleased with what we are doing. Many of you like our leaderboard and social features, but you also told us that we need to be spending time on our core product. We hear you.

We’re now focussing on market depth (we’ve sent some concepts to members to see what they think about what we’re planning) and we’re about to massively expand the number of events we cover and the number of markets within each event.

Our new bonus and refer-a-friend schemes have gone down well but we’re going to continue to experiment with the best scheme to attract members who actually want to bet rather than people who are only in it for the bonus!

Feedback is really important (I know every company says that, but we mean it!) so we’ll be running more surveys, emailing members with concepts and thoughts and conducting tests of new functionality. Please get in touch with us and let us know what we could be doing better.

And the lucky fellow to be picked out of the hat to win a £100 risk free bonus was Robert W. from London. Congratulations!

We’ve added the ‘tweet this’ button to every market (right next to the Facebook one) so you can easily share which markets you’re interested in.

We’ve also added a twitter invite button to the refer a friend page so you can tweet all your admirers with your referral code. Your follower will get a £5 risk-free bet when they make their first deposit, and you’ll get a tidy fiver for yourself. You’ll be the most popular tweeter in town.

While we’re on the subject of Twitter, you should follow @smarketsdaily if you want to be notified when we open brand new markets. Our main account (@smarkets) is for all our news, random musings and announcements. Follow both! Spoil yourself.

Exciting new feature time! I talked about the concept of ‘friends’ in the last post (a friend is a mutual follow relationship) and now it’s time to do something interesting with your friends. You now have a leaderboard on your profile page where you can compare your betting abilities between your friends. Awesome eh!

How does it work?

The Smarkets boffins put together a formula to calculate your score based on both your return on investment and the variety of markets you’ve successfully dabbled in over the last 30 days. We’ve designed it so you are comparing your predicting skills between your friends and not the amount of money you bet.

The leaderboard is then shown on your profile page with your current and best ever scores. Bragging rights abound!

Why are we doing it?

Well, we love comparing our winning streaks and best return between each other in the office and we wanted a way to do something similar between our friends. We’ll be extending the concept to create a leaderboard for all Smarkets members and we will be running competitions around custom leaderboards in the future. Find out who’s the ‘most accurate West Ham fan’ or the ‘most accurate bettor at Wimbledon’. But all that’s for the near future. At the moment it’s just a bit of fun between you and your friends.

Not keen on being on a leaderboard?

Don’t worry, you can opt out in your account settings and we only automatically added the people who already shared their visibility. So if you are set as ‘private’ we’ll never include you in new social features.

We’d love to hear what you think about features like this, so please get in touch either directly, or via the comments.

So you’ve probably noticed all those Facebook ‘like’ buttons appearing on Smarkets. Why are they important? Well, Facebook are doing something a little clever with them. They are putting together a social search engine which weights the results based on the web pages your friends ‘like’. So if you have Arsenal fans for friends (commiserations) when you ‘like’ our Arsenal matches, they’ll appear higher in your friends searches. All interesting stuff.

We’ve also tweaked the following concept a little so when two members follow each other they become ‘friends’. This extra-strength relationship means you have more control of who you share your data with and we can do some fun things like leader-boards and challenge-a-friend. The ‘followers’ concept still exists but your followers will just see your comments in their activity stream at the moment.

Lots more social stuff to come like sharing your winning streak, fan accuracy, and putting things on other sites such as Twitter and your blogs. Keep your eyes peeled for the updates and get in touch with us with feedback about what you think of all this social stuff.

* Graham Taylor would have clicked our ‘like’ buttons!

We took a look at our members this week for some insight into their ages and depositing habits, here are a few of the graphs. Everyone likes graphs right?

The majority of our members are 41 and over. This is good to see. We aim to be the simple way of betting online so having less experienced web users points to us doing something right.

We’ve also been heavily promoting our political markets around the general election, and it’s likely that these older members may be something to do with that.

The ‘deposits by age’ graph shows the highest value is coming from our 31-40 year olds (this is based on the amount of money users have deposited). Our 18-25 year olds are also providing more liquidity than expected. It’s interesting to see that the 61+ members aren’t depositing a lot of money in relation to the number we have signed up. I suspect they are watching the markets more than betting.

But when the over 50 year olds do deposit, they really do drop the big bucks! Our biggest average deposits are coming from this segment and our biggest single deposit (over £3000) also came from this age group.

Smarkets is the only betting exchange to enable users to bet with their favourite odds format. We default to percentages, but users can switch to American, decimals or fractions. Yesterday we ran a query through our users to see which format was most popular.

From the users who have deposited money and placed a bet, 65% use percentages, 25% user decimals, 9% use fractions and not a single one uses American.

Interesting stuff. I’m running a poll on this blog on the right hand side for you to give your preference too.

I’m pleased to see percentages are popular as we think they make the most sense for new bettors. We also have an excellent new feature in the pipeline which works best with percentages!

We’re pretty sure this is a industry first: Smarkets now allows you to set your own odds in the format of your choice.

There are very few betting exchanges, and the ones that we know of only allow you to bet with their house format. Betfair, for example, only allows you to use decimals. We’ve now released an update which allows you to trade using either percentages, decimals, American style or fractions.

This has been a big piece of work which involved changes across our entire system. We’ve not only updated the event and list pages, we’ve also updated the betting interface to make betting with each system as simple as possible.

Percentages still has the slider (but a better looking one!), fractions has drop down menus for each value, we’ve created a custom input box for decimal (for users familiar with the Betfair interface) and American has an input box. You can switch between formats with the ‘odds’ link at the top of every page.

Our odds explained page can give you more information on odds formats if you need it. I hope you find the new odds switcher useful. Please get in touch with any feedback.

In this video we go into a bit more detail about how betting exchanges work. There are some slightly complicated concepts in here, but they’ll help you understand how to profit on Smarkets.

There’s more information on greening up in the Smarkets help section.

Placing on a bet on Smarkets couldn’t be easier, but we’ve put a little video together explaining the process. Get betting!