The Euro 2016 tournament led to a surge in Russian football betting in Q2, yet basketball enjoyed the greatest spike in average amounts wagered.
According to stats published by Russian bookmaker Rub90, football accounted for 43.7% of all wagers in the three months ending June 30. That’s up sharply from 32.3% of the overall pie in Q1.
Tennis ranked second in Q2 wagering share at 18.4%, up from fourth place in Q1. Basketball slipped one place to third at 15.5%, while volleyball ranked fourth at 9.9% and hockey slipped two spots to fifth at 7.6%.
The size of the average Q2 wager fell $0.41 from Q1 to $11.80. Basketball continued to lead the pack with an average wager of $14, followed by hockey ($12.80), football ($12.70), handball ($12.40) and tennis ($10.70). Only football and handball enjoyed average wager increases from Q1.
Betting Business Russia crunched SimilarWeb data regarding Russia’s online betting site traffic, which showed Fonbet.com in the lead with nearly 639k visits from Russian punters in the month of June, up 17.5% from May. Second place went to a Fonbet mirror, bkfonbet.com, which reported 464k visits. BetCity’s betsbc.com was a distant third (264k) while two William Hill domains ranked fourth (261k) and fifth (242k).
Fonbet’s high visibility is a double-edged sword, as the company was one of three betting sites that had their Twitter accounts suspended earlier this week. Championat reported that Winlinebet and Parimatch were also affected, for reasons that Twitter has yet to formally articulate.
It’s entirely possible that Russian telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor had a quiet word with Twitter. Roskomnadzor has been on the warpath against unauthorized gambling sites as well as sites that merely promote or facilitate gambling.
Roskomnadzor has blocked over 6k gambling-related domains since it was handed new powers last October and websites aren’t the agency’s only target. In the month of July, Roskomnadzor purged 41 gambling apps from Russia’s App Store and Google Play.
