Good day. I'm Barney Evans, not Benjie. Welcome to Sportsbet's Investor Day. Thanks for taking the time to join us. Personally, I've been in Sportsbet for 10 years now, initially in marketing and commercial roles before becoming CEO in 2018.
Before joining Sportsbet, I spent 10 years as Paddy Power's Marketing Director. Now our key goal today is to brief you on what's been driving Sportsbet's recent performance. To do that, you'll meet the entire leadership team. They're an awesome bunch, and I hope you'll enjoy hearing how they and their teams work together to create exciting outcomes for our customers and ultimately drive market leading performance for the business. Of course, in ordinary times, We'd be in Europe now, so you could meet us face to face.
Thanks to COVID, it seems like we'll be stuck in Australia for a few more months at least, hence doing the event virtually. In fact, Thanks to ongoing lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne, the 6 of us can't even be in the same place. But given that we've been running the business virtually for the last 18 months, I'm confident we'll get through the next couple of hours. This investor event is split into 2 parts. The first is the prerecorded presentation you're watching now, in which we'll walk you through our strategic pillars and the key enablers that have driven our strong track record to date.
Secondly, we'll host a live Q and A session at 10 am British Summer Time for any questions you've got. The whole team will be available to answer your questions at that time. Before we get into it, I want to set the scene and give you a sense as to why I'm so bullish about the ongoing opportunity for Flutter in Australia. Ultimately, my confidence for the business stems from 2 key points. Firstly, we're in a growing market and secondly, we have a great opportunity to further increase our share of that market.
The overall sports betting market has grown steadily with more than 10% annual growth over the last 5 years, but the excitement obviously comes in the online space, which continues to grow at double the rate of the overall market, 21% per year, and it continues to expand today. Secondly, as fast as it's grown, Sports betting is still only 17% of the overall gambling market in Australia, creating a great opportunity to capture more share of the gambling wallet. Thirdly, there's very healthy competition in our market. We like that. It keeps us on our toes and critically drives great choice for customers, which in turn continues to grow the market.
And finally, as we've observed globally, the structure of the Australian market has changed over the last 18 months. This has created barriers to entry for new operators and complexities for subscale businesses. And of course, that change creates favorable market conditions for Strong online operators like Sportsbet. And then, of course, within that growing market, we're bullish about our ability to continue growing share. The scale we've achieved drives superior economics, which enables continuous investment.
Secondly, the age profile of our recreational customer base Gives us an opportunity for material organic growth into the future. As part of the Flutter family, we get to leverage assets that give us competitive advantage, especially versus our biggest competitor, which is effectively a domestic only operator. And finally, over the years, we've built a phenomenal team, Not just the people you'll meet today, but right the way through the organization who could not be more focused on delivering great outcomes for our customers. Now Turning to Slide 7. Given those market conditions, what do we actually do?
How do we approach the task of growing market share? Well, it's actually pretty straightforward. We focus very hard on winning 3 key battles. Firstly, we believe you have to start by building incredible products that punters love. Secondly, you need to augment that product experience with brilliant value for money, hence personalized value.
And finally, There's no point having the best product and the best value if it's not delivered by a brand that customers know, like and trust. That's where the true entertainment brand and marketing machine that sits behind it come in. But success in those areas doesn't come at the flick of a switch. A lot of hard work goes on behind the scenes through the key enablers of our business, which are outlined below. 1, Creating an organization in which talented people can thrive and deliver brilliant customer outcomes 2, maintaining a real focus on looking after our customers to ensure a sustainable future.
And 3, of course, building technology platforms, which enable intuitive and exciting customer experiences, Fast and reliably and capable of handling the massive volumes that we've grown to. In addition to those enablers, Our capabilities are also underpinned by being part of the Flutter family. The support of Peter and Jonathan and the wider Flutter team, Together with the exceptional Sportsbet crew I've just introduced you to create a symbiotic relationship with both Flutter and Sportsbet benefiting. Flutter brings together the world's experts in online gambling with more than 2 decades of operating experience and thousands of years experience in aggregate across the teams globally. We in Sportsbet couldn't perform the way we do if we weren't part of Flutter.
And I'm sure my colleagues elsewhere would recognize Sportsbet gives plenty back into the group. It really is a symbiotic relationship. On the slide are just three examples of the kind of leverage we get. Pricing and risk management obviously sit at the very core of
what we
do. Innovation gives us an edge over our local competitors and our global customer base is a massive source of insight Driving so much of what we do. But these are just three examples and you'll see more detail in the coming slides. On a practical note, the value I get personally From sharing experiences and insight with the other divisional CEOs is invaluable and yet another example of the benefit of being part of Flutter. When you successfully combine everything I've spoken about, you create what we call the flywheel effect.
Now many of you will have heard this before from Jonathan and Peter, But I make no apologies for reusing the diagram here because Australia is the perfect example of how this comes to life. As we generate higher revenues, This enables reinvestment in the proposition we offer our customers. This reinvestment drives higher customer retention and engagement, which further drives the revenue growth creating that all important virtuous circle. It doesn't happen overnight, And it's not easy to replicate, but we've got our flywheel well and truly motoring, thanks to a brilliant team focused on brilliant execution of the right strategy over multiple years. Now I'll be back shortly, but right now, I'm going to hand to Nathan.
He's going to walk you through some context on the Australian market.
Thanks, Barney. Hello, everyone. My name is Nathan Arundel, I'm the Chief Financial Officer of Sportsbet. I've been with the group for 14.5 years now, the last 3.5 as CFO. In that time, I've seen Sportsbet grow from being very much in start up mode to being Australia's number one sports betting operator today.
I've also seen significant change in the Australian sports betting market during this time. And it's that change that I'd like to take you through now. Starting on Slide 12, the competitive environment in online sports betting has evolved significantly in recent years with changes to the regulatory and tax landscape Indirectly leading to consolidation within the market. I would highlight 2 notable introductions in particular. The first is the introduction The National Consumer Protection Framework or as we refer to it, the NCPF in 2018.
Sportsbet is fully supportive of and indeed advocated for and was consulted on some of the key measures in the development and implementation Of the MCPF, it has led to improved consumer protection standards across the industry and brought much needed consistency and The second key change was the introduction of state based point of consumption taxes, Which are levied at rates of between 10% 15% of gross gaming revenue, the majority of which were introduced in 2019. These new taxes, coupled with ongoing increases in product fees, have materially increased the cost of operating in Australia, Meaning that it's become increasingly difficult for subscale operators to compete. This has resulted in significant consolidation As can be seen on the bottom of the slide, we've just 6 main operators left in the market versus a total of 10 back in 2,009. We believe that Sportsbet has demonstrated that it is well placed to respond to future changes, having achieved significant scale through organic growth And further cementing its market leading position with the integration of BetEasy in 2020. Slide 13 looks at the regulatory and tax landscape in more detail.
Although increased regulatory consistency from a national perspective has been a welcome outcome at the NCBF, each state in Australia continues to have own unique betting regulations with significant variation by jurisdiction on matters such as the treatment of advertising and promotions. This is in addition to a complex licensing and integrity environment, requiring agreements with 28 racing and sporting codes across Australia. On the right of the slide, the introduction of point in consumption tax has been significant for the sector. With the addition of point in consumption tax To already significant product fees and goods and services tax, Sports Bet's fee and tax contributions have nearly doubled since 2017 To 43.3 percent of net revenue in 2020, there remains the risk of rates increasing over time. As we have seen with Victoria's decision to raise its point of consumption tax rate from 8% to 10% effective 1 July this year.
And as I've already touched on, these cost increases underlie the importance of scale in the sector. Sportsbet's scale Allows us to deal with these increased fees and taxes, while still being able to invest in generosity, marketing and other strategic opportunities. This makes us confident in our position to grow in the future through any additional change. Now moving on to Slide 14 to look at the Australian sports betting market. The pie chart on the left shows the total Australian gambling market.
It is important to note that sports betting only makes up 17% of the total gambling market today. Therefore, a significant opportunity continues to exist to convert customers who enjoy other products to sports betting in the future. The graph on the right hand side shows that the sports betting market continues to grow strongly with compound growth in excess of 10% Over the last 5 years. Looking at the online market in which Sportsbet operates, that growth has been over 21%. Of course, some of this growth has come at the expense of retail sports betting, which saw significant periods of closure with stay at home restrictions in place for part of 2020.
Later in the presentation, I'll talk to the accelerated retail migration that we have seen and the confidence that Sportsbet has of retaining these retail customers. Overall, you can see the Australian sports betting market remains in a healthy growth phase with a good runway for further migration From retail and other gambling channels. Now on Slide 15, we look at Sportsbet's pro form a market share position Within the combined online and retail sports betting market, this includes BetEasy in all periods and it's worth mentioning at this point That in most instances throughout this presentation, when we refer to financial metrics, we are referring to pro form a metrics. In some cases, due to the lack of BetEasy data in prior periods, we may present Sportsbet only. And in all instances, We have included footnotes to confirm the basis of which data has been compiled.
As you can see from the chart, Our market share has more than doubled in the past 6 years to 42.6% at the end of June 2021. This makes Sportsbet the largest operator today in the entire market with a significant 51% share Of the online only market. You can also see from the chart that 2020 saw a step change in the scale of the business Sportsbet benefited from 2 key factors. Firstly, the accelerated migration of retail customers during periods of closure. Secondly, increased engagement from our existing customers because of the additional discretionary time available to people during the lockdown periods.
Based on what we have experienced in half 1 this year, when there were minimal stay at home restrictions in place for much of the period, We believe this market share gain may prove to be more structural in nature than we originally anticipated. Looking to the future on Slide 16, Our customer base provides a runway for growth. This slide shows Sportsbet's penetration of population by age. The Sportsbet brand appeals strongly to the younger cohorts. More than 1 in 4 Australians aged 18 to 34 have a Sportsbet account.
Retaining these younger cohorts into the future provides substantial headroom for growth. As the yellow line shows, Staking per customer is more than 2x higher amongst the more mature cohorts. This suggests there is material growth yet to come from our existing base As their spending power increases. On Slide 17, we set out the opportunity to grow our customer base. This slide shows Australian adults engagement with sports and betting.
There are compelling growth opportunities for Sportsbet right throughout this funnel. We know at the top, nearly 10,000,000 sports fans pay to watch sports. At the bottom, 2,100,000 customers were active with Sportsbet in the last 12 months. And in the middle, 1,700,000 had a Sportsbet account But we're not active, suggesting an opportunity to reengage with these customers and a further 3,000,000 abettors, But don't yet have a Sportsbet account. This leaves Sportsbet with the opportunity to tap into nearly 8,000,000 highly engaged sports and racing fans But do not have an active account with us.
And this does not include the additional pool of 5,000,000 sports fans who we are categorizing as less engaged Because they don't currently pay to watch sport. In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with 4 key points. Firstly, The Australian sports betting market continues to grow strongly. Secondly, due to the structural changes, we believe that the economics within the market will Continue to flow to the scale operators, that is the operators who can invest and adapt quickly to the ever changing regulatory environment. Thirdly, Sportsbet has a history of delivery and taking market share.
We are the number one operator within the market Due to our superior customer proposition, and you're going to hear a lot more about that throughout today's presentation. And finally, there continues to be A significant runway for future growth, whether that growth is from the Sportsbet customer base, the broader Australian gambling market Or those sports fans who are currently not active with Sportsbet. And with that, I'll pass over to Ben Chan, our Chief Product and Data Officer, We will take you through Sportsbet's product development, a key differentiator for our business today.
Thanks, Nathan. Hello, everybody. My name is Ben Chan. I'm Sportsbet's Chief Product and Data Officer, And I'm the newest member of the Sportsbet leadership team. Prior to joining Sportsbet, I worked in a range of industries, including digital, Financial and Professional Services across Australia, Asia, Europe and the U.
S. Over the next few pages, I'll take you through the 4 pillars that underpin Sports Bet's product leadership. These pillars have been developed through a detailed and intimate understanding of our customers, Which enables us to focus on delivering what they want. The 4 pillars are as follows: 1st, Industry leading pricing and risk management that gives customers a great deal and creates structural margin advantage. 2nd, relentless improvement on our core experience.
3rd, rich content that transforms Sports Betting into an entertainment experience. 4th, innovation that keeps exciting and attracting our customers. It's the combination of these 4 pillars that create a product with a sustainable competitive advantage. You have heard Nate And Barnie talk about the flywheel and product lies at the heart of this. The product is the primary way our customers interact with us.
It determines how quickly they can get a bet on, the type of bets they can bet on and how much they're able to win. The superior product we offer our customers keeps them coming back for more, which leads to greater revenues And enables us to reinvest more to keep those customers happy. It is a perfect example of that flywheel in action. Let's move on to Slide 21, where I explore the first of our 4 pillars. Key to delivery of our product is our pricing and risk Management.
Flutter is the industry leader here and we have the benefit of being part of the Flutter family, as Bonnie mentioned, And leveraging all the skills and expertise that the combined group provides. Our traders operate a global model And who better to explain just how we do this than our General Manager of Risk and Trading, Raf Luzke. Hi. I'm Raf Luski. I've been leading the risk and trading team at Sportsbet for the past 6 years, and I've been part of
the Sportsbet family for some 17 years now. During this time, the risk and trading team at Sportsbet has evolved a great deal and is a crucial part of the global operating model across the Futter Group. The Futter Group has circa 20 years of experience in pricing and risk management, Which is an integral part of offering the best product in the market to our customers. Our risk and trading team generates the sports betting odds, innovates on bet types and markets, Leases with marketing teams to create compelling customer promotions and manages the segmentation of customers and our overall trading We do this by leveraging the powerful combination of our proprietary models and our experienced trading team. Our proprietary models allow us to offer the widest array of betting options, Give us confidence to take bigger bets and enable seamless betting experience for customers.
Our in house models are a critical enabler of our leading same game multi offering Same game parlay for our U. S. Audience. By accurately computing complex pricing across the widest array of player front markets. Later, Ben Chan will bring you through just how popular this product is with our customers.
As the world's largest sports betting operator, We have access to the largest betting data pool in the industry. Our systems and traders are tuned to know what information to listen to And what to ignore. This allows us to price markets more accurately than the competition, generating industry leading margins Whilst offering great value to customers, the Flutter Group has over 700 employees working across pricing, risk management and Aus distribution, And we are investing further to build new models for additional sports, further iterate the accuracy of existing models and work on the next generation of same game multis. So what does this all provide for Sportsbet? We have the market leading product for all major sporting codes.
We have a structural margin advantage over the competition by being able to satisfy customer demand for higher margin multi and same game multi products, And we can then reinvest this margin upside into the next generation of compelling sports product for our customers. The group operates a follow the sun model, Providing round the clock risk management and live trading across our teams in Melbourne, New Jersey and Dublin. Let's look at this in action as firstly, Adam will run you through what pricing and risk management looks like for the team here in Melbourne.
Thanks, Raf. I'm Adam Cox. I've been in the group for 12 years now, and I'm the NBA team lead here at Sportsbet. My team are responsible for the pricing and growth of the NBA product for the Flutter Group, including Fanjul. We provide the training for roughly 80% of the NBA games that are played mostly during the Australian working hours.
Last year, we were first to market with Prices for over 50% of NBA games, including being ahead of the Vegas books, which means we're first to price certain games globally and help shape the market. My team here in Australia is responsible for trading around 80% of the live matches via our in house trading model. And we manually pass up a wide array of player prop markets, We provide and power our enormously popular same game multi and same game parlay products. Those prices are then distributed globally, including to FanDuel, Which leverages Sportsbet's pricing to provide a market leading proposition to its enormous American customer base. I'll now pass over to Matt in New Jersey.
Thanks, Adam. I'm Matt Kebedas, and I've been with the group for 8 years. The Melbourne team do a great job for us on the NBA, but here at FanDuel, we help them out too. We trade sports that are very popular with Sports Bet customers like NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL. Our team manages odds for all of the key U.
S. Sports And leverage is the size and scale of the American customer base to shape prices as accurately as possible. Our NFL traders price games multiple weeks out In advance of all the competitors and use that to produce the best NFL product, including same game multi. Like Adam said, our prices Which gives Sportsbet all the benefits of FanDuel's local expertise and knowledge. I'll now pass you over to Jason Murphy in Dublin.
Thanks, Matt. I'm Jason Murphy, and I'm based in Dublin and I've been in the group for 4 years. I head up soccer pricing for the group and Sports Bet customers Love to bet on the Premier League. Sports Bet offers a market leading soccer betting product with high price confidence by leveraging our global capabilities. Highly automated soccer live trading models developed in Dublin allows us to trade up to 18 games simultaneously from leagues across the world, Allow us to deliver operational efficiency.
The soccer auto trailer developed in Dublin utilizing Flutter's global betting information, Flutter's European bet information particularly beneficial allows us to continually improve our pricing accuracy. Dublin based soccer trading expertise to price key model inputs, which power Sports Bet's Expensive same multi product offer. Plus, because of our global business, we constantly talk with each other across continents To understand trends that might impact one another, thereby growing each respective division. I'll now pass back to you, Rhett, at Sportsbet.
Thanks for that, Jason. Here at Sportsbet, we contribute to and leverage from the market leading products that our pricing and risk management teams enable. This provides Sportsbet with a sustainable product and pricing advantage in the Australian marketplace. Ben Chan will now bring you through the remaining pillars of our product proposition.
Thanks to the trading teams for helping to bring such an important component of our business to life. At Sportsbet, offering great prices on a massive range of bets to our customers is just the starting point. How we deliver those bets is absolutely critical, and that's why we're relentless in seeking to improve the core customer experience on our platforms. We never stop trying to make things faster and easier for our customers. So let me take you through a few examples on this page.
Speed. We've implemented 1 step QuickBet where our customers can place a bet with just one tap. And we've also reduced the time it takes our promotions to be paid out by a massive 92%. My next example comes from the middle of the slide where we describe some of our content features and it is our intelligent, personalized, dual homepage, which helps customers get to the event they want faster. This means that if you are an avid football fan, The content that will load on your homepage will be the upcoming Aussie Rules and Rugby League matches, whereas if you're an avid Greyhound punter, Then you'll get the next to jump Greyhound races.
And my third example is about what happens after the bet. We've provided our customers with a rich pending bets experience, our most visited page outside of the homepage, where we have added a Tweet of options for customers to engage with, including cash out, share a bet, event reminders and the ability to track the progress of their bets, Which is a critical feature to have in multi bets. While these little 1%ers only make a small difference on a standalone basis, When you continuously improve and refine the product year after year and pull it all together seamlessly, The cumulative benefit is an experience customers love. So that's all the core e commerce stuff, which we absolutely have to get right. But of course, Hunters want more.
That's where our range of value added content comes in, which are highlighted here on Slide 23. The little nuggets of information that help customers make a choice right the way through to free games that add entertainment value, We're constantly investing to make the experience even better. This rich content experience Combined with seamless customer features I've taken you through starts to build a really sticky relationship with the brand. That compelling experience is key to the retention and engagement of customers and ultimately increases lifetime values and revenue. All of that is great stuff, but we're always looking for the major innovation.
The thing that reminds existing customers why they choose Sportsbet And prompts them to tell their friends to give us a try too. As you know, we kick started the multi revolution in 2016 When we launched the new globally renowned same game multi in Australia, and it's known by our FanDuel customers as same game parlay. Since then, far from resting on our laurels, we've continued to invest in every facet of the product, bringing incremental benefits to the experience every year Since then. As you can see by the growth trajectory we have been on, our customers absolutely love the product With more than half of them using same game multis in the first half of twenty twenty one. In our execution of same game multis, We've really differentiated ourselves.
It's not just about having the same game multi product, it's about how we present it. And the work we've done makes our product experience irreplicable. A great example is popular same game multi, Which you can see in the middle of the screen. This caters brilliantly for the casual hunter who really wants to enjoy the excitement of having a same game multi during a match, But doesn't want to do the legwork of making their own selections. We build and own all of our models for same game multis.
This means we're completely in control of our process, driving margin advantage. By owning our models, It gives us flexibility and innovation ahead of our competitors. And we don't share revenue with 3rd parties. Although competitors are following us, you can see on the right how 5 years in, we're continuing to own the product space With customers rating Sportsbet significantly higher than our competitors for ease of placing a multi bet. Moving on to Slide 26, where I can't leave you without a quick mention of Bet With Mates.
You've heard how our customers love same game multis, But it's never better than when it's done socially as part of a group of mates. We saw a great opportunity to tap into this And make it easy for mates to bet together. We have created the industry's 1st shared wallet technology. This incredibly complex platform allows for simple and seamless group betting between friends. It's early days, But we're really happy with the product so far.
More importantly, so are our customers, as you can see from the quotes on the right hand side. And the genius part here is that it leverages the network effect, which when you've got the market's biggest recreational customer base, It creates a significant opportunity for customer acquisition and retention. Let's see how we bring this to life for our customers.
I think they're about to make contact. We should roll
them out of the sky
right now. But they can hold the key to our future. They're sending a message.
Sorry, everyone. This
is the west still alive on the So what does all this product advantage deliver for Sportsbet? On Slide 27, we summarize how our product mix Has evolved how our recreational customer base has grown and how our risk management and pricing models have developed, All of which combines to deliver a substantial increase in the gross win margins of our business over time. Between 2,009 and first half twenty twenty one, We have seen our margins increase by 9 percentage points. Whilst the margins in the first half have benefited by 60 basis points from favorable results, The structural trend is clear. These high margins enable us to reinvest in further product development, generosity and marketing, Keeping our flywheel turning and increasing our advantage.
This margin advantage gives us the war chest we need to invest in player generosity and marketing, Both of which Doug Brown will now take you through. Doug, over to you. Thanks, Ben.
Hi. I'm Doug Brown, Chief Growth Officer at Sportsbet. During my 6 years at Sportsbet, had the opportunity to lead a few functions, including online marketing, products, risk and trade and data science. And I've been on the leadership team now for 3 years. Prior to joining Sportsbet, I worked across Europe and Australia in industries such as financial services, health care and advertising.
Today, I'm really excited to be able to share with you The unique contributions we're bringing to our customers through marketing and generosity. We're going to start with generosity on Slide 30. As you heard from Ben, we aspire to always have the best product in market. The consumers don't make choices based on the product experience alone. They also care deeply about value for money, which means we need to win in the promotions arena too.
And that arena has changed significantly over the last few years. Looking back, Generosity was a very blunt tool. It was a one size fits all approach. It was easy to copy and increasingly inefficient for operators. We set out to change that.
So what have we achieved? Over the past 5 years, we've materially invested in innovating the Sports Bet proposition, leveraging a number of scale advantages. We now leverage the largest customer base in the category and at scale gives us superior customer insight and the ability to build genuinely targeted propositions The unique cohorts of customers. We've invested in building a sophisticated specialist team and that team focuses exclusively on generosity and nothing else. The data science team deliver personalized insights through machine learning to improve decisioning and continuously enhance the offers our customers receive.
Our technology platforms handle huge volumes of personalized offers with superfast allocation and settlement in real time. And all of this combines to offer the most innovative range of promotional value available in market today. But we don't stop there. We designed superior merchandising on our platforms, making it easy for our customers to find and use great value. And critically, we leveraged the scale of the Sports Bet marketing machine to shout the loudest to the widest audience about our great offers.
Today, our promos are highly personalized, hard to copy and incredibly efficient. A great example of our continued commitment to leveraging our scale to deliver brilliant value to our customers is the recent launch of Sportsbet Powerprice. PowerPress gives our customers enhanced odds on the markets they love. How does it work? While sophisticated proprietary customer preference model Picks approximately 10,000 daily selections from a possible 500,000 market choices across the site and then offers customers a handful of personalized selections.
Sportsbet punters receive those selections of daily boosted prices on the markets and selections they love. The more this is used by our customers, The smarter the model gets, another scale advantage. It's underpinned by a highly performing technology platform that ensures we can deliver a personalized pricing experience to hundreds of thousands of customers. And our product design once again ensures it's easy to find and it's exciting and easy to use, Delivering brilliant odds every day. We're delivering model driven personalized promotional pricing at scale.
Moving to Slide 32, Another way we're ensuring customers get more back with Sportsbet is through the expansion of tokenized value, giving customers more choice more often. As a brief explanation, MoneyBack tokens refund customers' stake in the event of losing bet. With over 22,000,000 tokens allocated in a month, Across all racing codes, our money back tokens offer outstanding range. But it's not just the range that matters, it's that customers get more of what they like. Each configuration of tokens allocated is personalized based on customer preferences.
Flexible tokens give customers the freedom to choose when and where they use them, Whether it's the Fave in a Group 1 Saturday feature race or Greyhound same race multi on a regional dirt track every day of the week, The frequency range and ease of use means our customers increasingly place a real premium on the value they get back through MoneyBack tokens, adding more excitement to betting the Sports Bet. Our scale gives us the ability to invest in a sophisticated system that ensures we're delivering value to our loyal customers. And our ability to do that in an efficient way Means we can keep reinvesting to give more back to those customers. Keeping it easy counts and speed and ease matters. Building automated systems means the average token settlement time It's now less than 3 seconds.
That's money back in customers' accounts. Choice, speed and ease at scale is a winning combination. Finally, our ability to target at customer cohort level ensures we can deliver more value to customers whilst improving the efficiency of our promotional investments. Moving on to Slide 33. As good as the science of generosity gets, nothing beats good old fashioned empathy.
And it's our customer first culture that ultimately makes a difference to our customers And sets us apart in a crowded marketplace. We're passionate about ensuring we truly understand our customers. What excites them, what frustrates them, the big wins, the close calls, The game ending injury in the Q1, the after the buzz winning 3 pointer. Our people know the highs and lows of being a fan and a punter, And they're always on the lookout for moments that demonstrate that we get it. And so we're relentlessly looking for new ways to give back to our customers in the moments that really count.
And whilst there's empathy in everything we do, that's not enough. We've also made sure our teams are empowered to act to make decisions at pace. Our Quality Saver promo and our always on Justice refunds are great examples of this. Let's take a quick look at our latest Quality Saver TVC as an example. Because of this empathy, we're able to inject ourselves in the moments that matter to our customers.
We become part of the conversation through social and through our market leading reach. This cuts through the noise in a busy marketplace and transforms our more than 2,000,000 customers into advocates. A culture of customer first empathy with empowered teams delivering great value at speed in the moments that matter. Taking a look at Slide 34, as you saw in Ben's section, Sports Bet's GGR margin has grown significantly in recent years, hitting 16.1% in H1 this year. Ben also made the point that this enables reinvestments in products, marketing and generosity.
And this slide demonstrates the last of those. We're now investing more than a quarter of revenue back into customer generosity, more than double the level from just 5 years ago. And as we've explained, we're investing in a far more Targeted and customer centric way than ever before. We're confident that we're leading the industry in value return to customers, and we continue to focus on ensuring we maintain that position. I'd like to leave you with 3 key takeaways and generosity.
We have an unparalleled suite of sophisticated generosity mechanics, appealing to a broad range of unique customer needs, and it's delivered in a way that gives them real choice, a choice that they truly value. 2nd, our relentless focus on customer empathy and empowered teams Means we're able to deliver that value in the moments that matter. And finally, we're leveraging our scale advantage To continue to create the most advanced generosity ecosystem, which in turn enables us to continue to reinvest in generosity, both efficiently and importantly sustainably. So we've heard from Ben on product, and we've talked about value. To round out our 3 strategic pillars, let's now take a look at marketing, starting on Slide 36.
As Bonnie mentioned, it's great to have the best product and the best value for money, But that needs to be brought to life in unique and distinctive and memorable ways and wrapped up in a brand that customers love. You've already seen a few great examples. Sportsbet is a genuine entertainment brand, and it's a vehicle that enables us to connect authentically with punters all around Australia. The aim of our storytelling is to really capture the experience of being a fan and a punter, both for now and well into the future. We're passionate about creating an iconic Aussie brand that will bring excitement to life for generations to come.
Here's some recent credit that helps bring the Sportsbet brand to life.
Australia's Gary Flynn went into the 200 meter wheelie bin final, the rank outsider. What happened next? Made Elite Average Games history. Quickly into the bench. Oh, no.
The Dutchmans hit the deck. There's a fire. Paula Counsell wins at the front. We don't mind that, boys.
I should move my car, I think.
Come, mate. Plenty of singles out there. Stop
Hopefully, that just gives you a little sense of how we bring the Sports Bet personality to life. Now moving on to Slide 37. We're very focused on innovative ways to ensure our creative connects with our over 2,000,000 existing customers As well as new audiences across Australia. We've talked a fair bit already about leveraging scale advantages, and our leadership in marketing is a perfect example of that. As you can see from the chart on the left, our media spend in 2020 is 78% higher than our nearest competitor.
What does that actually look like from a customer's perspective? Well, the middle chart shows the 10 most watched TV shows in Australia last year. As you can see, sport is very well represented with the top four positions on the charts. And pleasingly, Sportsbet had sponsorship around all 6 sports events on this list. We've established that position over time, building strong relationships with key partners.
If you're a sports fan in Australia, you definitely know who Sportsbet is. With such a large media footprint in place, we're able to drive strong levels of brand affinity and consideration, Attracting and converting new customers to the platform, but also ensuring that we retain and grow the largest customer base in Australia. And on the right, you can see that as big as our investment in marketing is, Relative to our revenues, we're able to demonstrate the most efficient ratios, reinforcing our ability to capture the benefits of scale. In an increasingly competitive market, We are significantly investing to grow our brand, reaching audiences at scale and with market leading efficiency. On Slide 38, I'll show you that our campaigns are executed to ensure that our unique brand, product and promotional messaging is seamlessly connected across all channels.
To achieve this, one of our key strategies is to leverage Tier 1 partnerships to bring our products and value to life. Let's use the AFL as an example. The AFL is Australia's iconic and much loved footy code. We leverage our partnership with the AFL to promote our same game multi products, Deeply integrating content to reach footy fans across a number of touch points. I'll take you through how we do that, starting top right and then moving clockwise.
As an exclusive TV broadcast partner, we're able to reach a mass audience of engaged fans by promoting same game multi pre game during the major breaks and after the game. We promote the product and TV broadcast match integrations with well known talent featuring key same game multi markets and demonstrating how easy it is to place a bet. We integrate into bespoke sporting variety shows like Channel 7's primetime show, The Front Bar, and the show airs weekly during the football season, Taking a lighthearted tongue in cheek review of the week's footy, our product is deeply integrated into one of the show segments called mix multi, which Presents Maltese in a way that's strongly aligned with Sports Bet's brand personality. Here's an example clip which brings it to life.
Time now for the 1 and only, Nick Maltese. During the recent past, have you seen this, Woody? Oh, Blake. Yes. Between England, the pitch in the Bay to hold a play with a unique approach to staying on the field.
Watch him. He's dressed as one of the players, Snuck onto the ground and actually started moving the field around. It's just astonishing. There he is. And they eventually got asked Jabo to leave.
I'd like to wager That guy has spent more time out in the middle than Mitch Marsh has for Australia. No, Mickey, but how about you take the camera? Right, it's at the line, $6.5 a start against Mainland, I'll give you $1.90 What do you reckon? I'll have it. Don't you worry about that.
Right. For the night of nights, I'd call $54.54
Thanks, Mick. And finally, we leverage the AFL's digital platform itself to promote the product via digital display banners alongside our matched ARs, while also integrating into their social assets. It's the deeply integrated content across multiple touch points that ensures we connect with our audience. And importantly, we replicate this model across all of our Tier 1 partnerships to achieve similar outcomes for other sporting and racing codes. Moving to Slide 39, we'll talk about how we are harnessing automation and digital smarts to maximize reach.
Our marketing doesn't just perform as a loud megaphone. There's a real sophistication behind the scenes. The collaboration between our data, technology and marketing teams continues to deliver Innovative solutions that improve the efficiency and the impact of our marketing investment. And here's just one example of that. By leveraging our data and digital smarts, We've extended our game changing popular same game multi product experience into Snapchat and Facebook feeds, publishing popular punter markets in real time To audiences off platform, this capability is powered by Sportsbet's in house technology.
Importantly, We also enable Sportsbet to extend its reach into scaled social environments, where we can actively connect with sporting fans with relevant content based on their preferences. Think Think back to that customer funnel that Nathan took us through on Slide 17. Our scale enables us to invest in these types of innovation in marketing technology, improving our reach, our conversion our customer engagement across the fragmented media landscape. And so in conclusion, what you should take away from the marketing portion of today's presentation is three things. Firstly, our brand is unique and distinctive and is continuing to evolve through original and relevant content.
2nd, we have a stable of Tier 1 partnerships and that enables us to reach fans in the moment integrated across multiple platforms. And And finally, our marketing technology investments enable us to connect with customers in meaningful ways in real time. Overall, A combination of brilliant products, unrivaled generosity and outstanding market efficiency is delivering exceptional results for Sportsbet. I am going to hand you over to Bonnie to take you through them.
Thanks, Ben and Doug. Hopefully, now you have an appreciation of what Ben, Doug and their teams are achieving. That is a relentlessly improved product, which includes the Flutter Group's pricing expertise that Ralf showcased. More value, which is targeted more efficiently to the right customers at scale, all of which is brought to life by the Sportsbet brand and our marketing teams. And the key output from all of that is simply more recreational As you can see here, our average monthly players or AMPS, as Peter likes to call them, continue their Their relationship with Sportsbet is getting even better.
As you can see on Slide 42, a huge 59% of them now choose to bet only with Sportsbet, Up from 47% in 2018. That's significantly higher than our nearest competitor at 39%, which means we're getting far higher share of wallet. And given that we've got so many customers, we should really consider them to be our best marketing asset, and that's exactly what's happening. Sportsbet customers are far more likely to recommend us to their friends than the customers of any other brand. So to sum all of that up, our continuous improvement In product, generosity and brand is delivering 3 key results: more customers, higher share of wallet And higher levels of recommendation underpinning our strategic pillars are our 3 key enablers without which Sportsbet couldn't achieve the success that we have.
These enablers, namely people and culture, safer gambling and technology, form the bedrock of our mission to create a sustainable business for the long term, not just at Sportsbet, but right across the wider Flutter Group. So in this section, we'll take a look behind the scenes to show you we're investing for sustainable success in OZ. The first enabler of our long term strategy is our people. I'm really proud to work with the talented and motivated teams that we have in Sportsbet. With that, let me hand over to Tanya, who will walk you through how our teams are delivering such amazing results.
Thanks, Bonnie. Hi, everyone. I'm Tanya Roboto, Sportsbet's Chief Customer and People Officer. In my 9 years at Sportsbet, I led the Growth, Strategy, safer gambling, customer and people functions. And in 2020, I led the integration of Sportsbet and BetEasy.
Prior to joining Sportsbet, I worked in retail, telecommunications and professional services for many years. Throughout the presentation, you will have heard references To the capability, ambition and achievements of Sportsbet People. I'll take a few moments now to share our approach to the first of our enablers on Slide 46, people and culture and how that facilitates our results. As you can see on the top left of the slide, Principally, a deep connection to purpose and a transparent strategy create alignment across our team. This alignment allows every person and team, Irrespective of role, to direct their effort to where it matters and ultimately, delivers unwavering momentum towards the goals we set out to achieve.
Most commonly seen in smaller businesses, despite our scale, this connection remains as true today as it did a decade ago. Over the last number of years, we have had lots of Paddy Power and Betfair colleagues join us in Melbourne, including our Chief, Barney, Bringing that expertise from more mature markets in the U. K. We've also sent some of our team to work in other divisions such as Conor Farum, who now heads up Fanjul, Pricing and risk management teams. This means our leadership team bring a diverse set of experiences and a deep understanding of the sports betting market in Australia and across the globe, With average tenure exceeding 6 years across our top 50 leaders.
This creates the confidence to drive long term growth through innovation And the ability to effectively navigate industry complexity and organizational change. We have invested and continue to materially invest In specialist centers of expertise in technology and data, both locally and globally. In key areas of specialization in the last 12 months, We've almost doubled the size of our teams. Beyond the alignment and capability of our team, our culture is undeniably a differentiator. This isn't by accident.
Our culture has been actively architected to support our purpose and strategy. Today, Our culture is most strongly characterized by 3 things: a deep customer empathy and a passion for exciting our customers through every experience An ambition to innovate and the curiosity to always be better and finally, the resilience and flexibility Thrive in the face of ever changing customer needs and organizational scale. The combination of these factors results in exceptional team member advocacy As evidenced through the incredibly positive feedback, you can see on the top right hand side of this slide. The most important thing to take out here is that it's this kind of alignment, Culture and engagement from our teams that's allowed us to achieve remarkable things over the last year. These include migrating BetEasy customers to Sportsbet in 89 days, Growing our core business throughout a tumultuous period and finally, attracting more than our fair share of retail customers who migrated online.
And don't forget, all of that was achieved while working remotely as we've been unable to physically work together for most of the last 18 months. Let's now move on to our 2nd enabler, Safer Gambling, on Slide 48. We in Sportsbet, like our colleagues elsewhere in the Florida Group, have held the ambition to continuously improve safer gambling standards for our customers. From our launch of new self exclusion tools, including deposit limits under the Take or Break banner long before it was mandatory in Australia To our role in founding Responsible Wagering Australia, we're driving a focus on key customer segments, including younger adults under 25 And most recently, advocating for credit card bans alongside our industry peers. We're proud of what we've done, but we recognize this is a perpetual responsibility And we remain focused on keeping our customers safe.
So what do we do in this space? There are 4 broad elements to our approach on safer gambling. I'll talk to the first of those people centered on this slide, then bring more color to the remaining 3 in subsequent slides. By people centric, We mean that to drive continuous improvement in safer gambling standards, every team member must play a role, not just an isolated few. To that end, every single Sportsbet team member is financially incentivized to improve our safer gambling practice.
We've also removed commissions from our account management teams To ensure that they focus on customer satisfaction and safety, not on sales. But People Centric goes further than that. We recognize the need to keep improving our expertise By investing in the growth of our dedicated team of safer gambling specialists and improving safer gambling literacy across all teams. By doing this, we ensure that all decisions in Sportsbet benefit from the right mindset and capability to put customer safety at the heart of what we do. The other critical components of safer gambling and Sportsbet are: Firstly, a data led approach secondly, creating elevated awareness And finally, systematic design of our products, communication and experiences with safer gambling in mind.
Let's take a look at each of those in turn. On Slide 50, let's start with how we're elevating awareness. As we all know, prevention is better than cure. So, we've put a lot of effort into educating customers and other stakeholders about what good behavior looks like in this space. Recognizing the gambling harm continuum and taking feedback from academics in this area, we believe one of the most important components of safer gambling is having players set a sensible limit Before they bet, this is the rationale that underpins our latest and biggest safer gambling campaign.
The campaign is currently live and will run until the end of the year We'll show you the video now and draw your attention to 2 elements: take a sec before you bet Set a deposit limit by which we seek to normalize and encourage positive behavior and whoever you bet with, by which we hope to raise the standards for all sports betters, Whether they bet with Sports Bet or not.
Here he is, the statue of David.
Greg was in pretty good nick back then, mate.
Well, I sat on the bench 1st grade that year.
Why, guys, it's the lost keys of the long weekend.
Hold up. Did you guys pay me back for
From when we won the quarter on Kofford Cup Day.
Yes. I remember I gave it all back and then some.
We're incredibly proud of this campaign and firmly believe in the prevention strategy, but we know this won't protect every customer. And that leads us to the 3rd aspect of the safer gambling strategy, A data led approach to the identification and intervention on the right hand side of this slide. You've heard from Ben and Doug how data underpins our commercial performance Through product, value and marketing and data is equally vital in the safer gambling space. Using proprietary models first developed in Flutter, We use machine learning to determine risk scores for every individual customer on a daily basis. We also have a range of real time alerts Based on a series of behavioral thresholds, both the risk scores and the real time alerts then feed into our intervention program.
This intervention takes many forms, from the highly scalable digital communication on the left to the more intrusive human contact of an outbound call on the right. There are 2 key takeaways here. 1, we're normalizing preventative behaviors by actively stepping into the conversation and leading the charge on awareness. And 2, we're leveraging our most advanced data capabilities and emergent technology to deliver truly progressive early intervention strategies. Now on to Slide 51.
We know that safer gambling is not a set and forget exercise. Customer behavior and therefore customer risk Varies according to a wide range of factors. We need to ensure customers are seeing appropriate messages throughout their betting journey. To achieve this, we take a systematic end to end view of safer gambling across every product, marketing and customer engagement touch point. This is the final aspect of our safer gambling approach.
Our proactive customer communication on safer gambling is always on And exists across all platforms and channels to raise awareness and encourage the use of safer gambling tools. Moreover, Leveraging our predictive model, we exclude customers identified as potentially at risk from targeted marketing communication to ensure they continue to safely enjoy our products. The key thing to take away here is that we have a multidimensional strategy and that each component of that strategy comes together to create a framework Within which, our customers can enjoy our products safely. Key to delivering our safer gambling approach alongside our overall Sports Bet strategy and our best in class technology capabilities. I'll hand you over to Simon now, who'll talk you through the 3rd of our enablers.
Hi. I'm Simon Noonan, Sportsbet's Chief Information Officer. I joined Sportsbet in 2013 as the Technology Director In 2014, became the CIO. Prior to joining Sportsbet, I had a long stint in the banking industry, where I delivered digital channels and digital platforms We're leading Australian bank ANZ in both Australia and in Asia. I want to walk you through the journey we've been on these past few years To ensure our technology continues to enable all great things in product, value and marketing, especially as we keep growing our volumes.
Key to that journey has been a continual optimization of technology stack, building our technology team and bringing key elements in house, So we have more control over our own destiny. That's been a continual and very deliberate journey. For example, in 2015, we improved our product delivery capability and bought in house the software engineering of our customer facing channels. Another big development was in 2019. We moved our entire technology stack to the cloud To enable personalization, improve our platform performance and to handle the types of volumes never before seen in Australian sports betting.
And obviously, We're not done. As the business keeps evolving, so too does the Sportsbet technology practice, particularly through the use of data And working with our Flutter colleagues to exploit our global scale and intellectual property. Slide 55 Focuses on the changes we've made to our technology stack. We have strategically built proprietary tech, where it's important to own our intellectual property. And at the same time, leveraging our global best practices and capabilities.
In doing so, We have materially reduced our reliance on 3rd parties. As you can see, as of 2020, in blue, we own all of our customer facing channels: Pricing, risk management, generosity, customer operations and analytics technology, either locally in Sportsbet or with Flutter globally. There are many benefits derived from this technology evolution. To highlight 2 critical ones, 1, we have greater flexibility and can deliver more products to market Faster than ever, as you can see by the 40% on the right. We can scale our platforms in real time to cope with the massive spikes in volume We're on key events.
So we are there for our customers when they need the seamless experience they've come to expect. You heard earlier from Raf about the global divestitures We derive in the pricing and risk management space. I want to briefly give you some insight as to the technology that sits behind that. We continue to build and deploy in house sports models. These models sit at the very core of our trading and pricing capability.
And we continue to build capabilities that enable us to leverage Splatter's scale through shared code repositories and standardized engineering practices. And our platforms continue to improve and scale with the growing demand through cloud enablement, aligned architecture and faster networks. But we're not doing this because it's neater to have global alignment. It generates significant benefits. The models that drive the prices we offer This all means our pricing is automated, is more accurate and generating better returns, Which can be reinvested.
Yet another contributor to the flywheel Barney and Nathan have mentioned. Providing our pricing and risk colleagues with the best capabilities is one example of how technology is driving business success. But another example, One I get really excited by is how we keep improving customer experiences. I mentioned a couple of slides ago how we are more in control of our tech stack.
So let's look at the benefit
that affords us. Once we are in control, we can reengineer platforms that are flexible And suit our specific needs. Now if you're a technologist, in the left hand box, we'll get to pulse racing. But more importantly, The right hand box shows the benefit to Sportsbet and to our customers. For example, by reusing code, we save resources and are more efficient.
We get to merchandise more content, as you can see from the graphic. And despite the greater choice, Core customer journeys stay lightning fast. In fact, it's around 60% faster than they were 2 years ago. And customers recognize these benefits with a 25% jump in customers rating us positively for ease of use. Probably the simplest way I can show you how the developments we've delivered in technology continue to give Sportsbet a competitive advantage is on Slide 58.
We are now able to support volumes around major events like the Melbourne Cup in excess of 62,000 bets per minute, Peaking at 11.90 bps per second and simultaneously improving the reliability of our service, With uptime reaching 99.7 percent, putting that another way, we've been able to reduce downtime by 72% in the last 3 years. Now before I hand you across to Nathan to take you through what this means for the all important numbers, I just want to leave you with some key takeaways. Firstly, we have been on a journey here at Sportsbet to optimize our technology stack. This has led to a reduction in 3rd party components And significant improvements in product delivery and scalability. Secondly, our proprietary pricing and risk management technology It's a core driver of Sports Bet's success and indeed that of the wider defutter group.
And finally, we're not finished. We will continue to have a relentless focus on improvement and innovation, enabling Sportsbet's future success. Over to you, Nathan.
Thanks, Simon. Now that you've heard all the Sportsbet secrets, I'd like to wrap up by showing you how all this great work translates into superior financial results. On Slide 60, just a recap on some key points. Underlying growth in the Australian sports betting market has been strong with the total market growing in excess of 10% And the online market growing in excess of 20% per annum. Within the market, how Sportsbet is continuing to take market share In claiming the gold medal position with 42.6% share overall in half one twenty twenty one, You can see on the right hand side chart that this has resulted in Sportsbet achieving unprecedented scale in the Australian sports betting market, With gross gaming revenue growing at an average of 32% per annum over the last 5 years to a total of 2.8 $1,000,000,000 in 2020.
Moving along to Slide 61. In the market section earlier, you heard me talk about Sportsbet appealing to the younger customer cohorts and the fact that we believe that this would lead to further organic growth in our business as these customers mature financially. Well, these charts hopefully bring this to life. The chart on the left shows our gross gaming revenue by year of acquisition. The steady state of revenue shows how we have achieved a high level of customer retention and loyalty.
The chart on the right breaks this example out even further. This is the 2013 cohort, and as you can see, the revenue from these customers is increasing over time. The orange line shows that there is some initial churn with once a year punches falling away, but the blue line shows increased GGR per active over time, Which more than compensates for any churn. This clearly shows the impact of spending power increases from our customers over time. It is worth noting these charts stop at 2019 because we wanted to show a clean set of data pre the events of the last 18 months.
2020 was obviously a transformational year for Sportsbet. And over the next two slides, I'll discuss what has occurred in greater detail. On to Slide 62. Firstly, like everywhere in the world, Australia was impacted by coronavirus in 2020, With large parts of the country having stay at home restrictions implemented for much of the year, this resulted in 2 significant changes for Sportsbet. Firstly, we saw accelerated retail migration due to retail closures.
And secondly, we also saw increased engagement of our existing customer base because of the additional discretionary time available to them. These factors have resulted in Extraordinary customer growth in the period post Q1 2020. The yellow line shows our customer numbers or AMPS During 2020, and you can see there is a substantial increase from April 2020 onwards. Most pleasingly, as the blue line on the chart demonstrates, These elevated customer volumes have been maintained into half 1, twenty twenty one, a period of when Australia was largely unaffected by stay at home restrictions. Finally, we are really looking forward to our peak season with the footy finals and spring racing carnival fast approaching, But obviously, we'll have some tough year on year comparables.
The 2nd step change in the business is highlighted on Slide 63, Namely the successful migration of the BetEasy customer base over to Sportsbet. The decision was taken to double down on the Sportsbet brand And pursue a single brand strategy here in Australia. As the slide suggests, the migration of the BetEasy customer base onto the Sportsbet platform In September 2020, we're seamless. In the 12 months post migration, not only have we retained an amazing 89% of the BetEasy active customer base, but we've also actually increased the total net revenue from migrated customers by 6%. While the customer migration was undoubtedly the highlight of the BetEasy integration, the merger also brought the added benefits Firstly, more than $100,000,000 in cost synergies due to the single brand strategy, additional value and product innovation that the BetEasy customers enjoyed, Now the Sportsbet customers love them as well and a number of key partnerships and specialized capabilities to complement the partnerships and capabilities Overall, the BetEasy integration was a resounding success.
Moving on to Slide 64, Not only have we seen significant growth in our staking volumes, but as Ben described in the product section, we have also seen a significant increase in our gross win margins Rising by 3 30 basis points in the last 6 years. This increase was primarily driven by 2 things. The first, growth in our recreational customer base and secondly, the continued move in customer preference for higher margin multi products. As we heard Doug explain in the value section, this increased gross win margin has allowed us to give more back to customers Through targeted generosity, with our generosity as a percentage of GGR more than doubling in the past 5 years. Importantly, we believe our net revenue margins are sustainable into the future.
We've heard about increased taking volumes, Expanding margin and now for the part that makes me a popular CFO. The scale that we have created just gives us more ability to invest In the things that matter. A couple of examples on this slide to bring this to life. Doug spoke about all the things that we're doing in generosity and marketing. To put some numbers to this, over the past 4 years, we have more than doubled the amount that we spend on generosity and marketing To drive top line growth and market share gains, that level of spend is unparalleled in the Australian sports betting market.
Secondly, we've heard from Simon about the growth in volumes that our technology systems need to cater for. This doesn't come free of charge, And we have invested heavily in scalable technology platforms. As the example shows, we have nearly doubled our technology spend in the last 4 years. While we've increased our investment in these important areas, we have also been really focused on making sure the efficiency of our spend is as high as it can be And that we are optimizing return on investment. In short, we believe that we have become far more sophisticated in how we invest, Whether that's moving marketing budgets to generosity to increase ROI, looking at the rate of return on our marketing assets and dropping lower performing assets in favor of higher We're continually rebalancing our workforce in the areas where we need specialized capabilities and bandwidth.
The graph on the right hand side of the page Shows what all this has added up to. You can see how taxes and product fees largely outside of our control Have gone from being 26.8 percent of our revenues in half one twenty seventeen to 47% in half one this year. And yet through the economies of scale that we have achieved and our relentless focus on returning investment, we have been able to increase our EBITDA margins From an already impressive 30.8% to over 34% in that same time frame. We believe this demonstrates how scale operators can respond to adverse regulatory and taxation changes over time. Sportsbet has really got the flywheel working in overdrive.
Slide 67 shows the results of everything that we've gone through today. The outtake is that Sportsbet is very profitable and that profitability continues to increase. Even in years like 2019, When we incurred over $140,000,000 in additional point of consumption taxes, profitability didn't decline Because of the scale of the business and the flywheel effect that we've been able to implement, the graph shows that 2020 has really been a step change year for Sportsbet, With EBITDA nearly doubling 2019 profitability, but I think the most important thing to take away from this slide is the current momentum in the business. 2021 has started very strongly, even though we were lapping periods of stay at home restrictions in 2020, So strongly that in half one twenty twenty one, we made more EBITDA than the whole of 2019. On that positive note, I will conclude the financial performance section and hand back to Barney for some closing comments.
Thanks, Nate, and thanks to the whole team. I hope by now my summary will be entirely predictable to you. But for the avoidance of doubt, I hope that what you've seen today is the following. Within the key battlegrounds of product, value, brand and marketing, Sportsbet continues to excel. But this performance continues to attract more recreational customers, giving us a really attractive customer profile.
But as obsessed as we are about our local customers, we are continuing to exploit the advantage afforded us by being part of the Flutter family And that we've managed to grow our top line significantly ahead of the market, while simultaneously creating a more efficient business. I hope you share my conviction that as we look to the future, our runway for growth is a long one, thanks to the market expansion we've observed and our track record in growing share. That our market position and the superior economics it gives us create a significant competitive advantage as we continue to reinvest in our business. But our focus on growth is not for the short term, but through our focus on safer gambling and how we think about the business in general, we're investing for sustainable growth. And finally, as much as you can discern from a prerecorded video, that as a team, we know what we're doing and that we're really up for the next phase of Sportsbet's future.
All in all, I hope we've given you sufficient insight to understand how we've become both the biggest and the fastest growing operator in Australia. And I hope by now you recognize we're not done. Thanks again for your time. I look forward to answering your questions with the team and our live Q and A starting shortly.