The Truth About Online Casinos: We Read the Accounts of the Five Biggest

The Numbers

Each company reports in its own currency and on its own definition, so the last two columns matter as much as the first. Comparisons across currencies are approximate.

What Gambling Revenue Actually Measures

For a normal business, revenue is what customers paid for goods or services. For a casino, the equivalent figure — gross gaming revenue — is defined differently:

This is not a rhetorical framing, it is the accounting definition. When Flutter reports $16.4bn, that is the amount roughly 40 million customers staked over the year and did not get back. Every dollar of it left a player's balance.

It also explains why these figures are so large relative to the amount actually wagered. A 2% house edge on $800bn of stakes produces $16bn of revenue. The operator never needs a large edge — it needs volume, and the arithmetic does the rest. That is the entire business model, and it is why the house edge on each game matters more than any individual session ever will.

The bet365 Detail Nobody Highlights

Buried in bet365's 2024/25 accounts is the most useful sentence in any of these filings. Overall revenue grew 9%. But split by product:

Casino grew five times faster than sports at the single largest privately held operator in the world. There is no mystery to it. A sports bet settles in ninety minutes and carries a margin in the low single digits. A slot spin settles in three seconds and carries a house edge of 4% to 8%. The same customer, the same deposit, produces vastly more revenue in the casino tab than in the sportsbook.

This is why every sportsbook you use pushes casino games at you the moment you deposit. It is not cross-selling for the sake of it — it is a move from a low-margin, slow product to a high-margin, fast one. The speed argument applies even harder to crypto originals, where a 1% edge is applied hundreds of times an hour.

How a Company Loses Money on $16.4 Billion

Flutter's 2025 revenue rose 17% to $16.4bn and adjusted EBITDA rose 21% to $2.8bn. The company still reported a net loss of $407m, against a $162m profit the year before.

Two things drove it. A $515m impairment charge on the closure of its Indian brand Junglee, and marketing spend of $3.7bn — up 14%, and more than bet365's entire annual revenue.

The honest conclusion cuts against the usual narrative: these are not effortless money printers. They are high-volume, thin-margin, marketing-heavy businesses in a brutally competitive market. DraftKings only reached its first positive net income in 2025, on $6bn of revenue, after years of losses.

That does not make them a good deal for the player. It means the money players lose is largely consumed by advertising, licensing, tax and the fight for market share — rather than accumulating quietly as profit.

Audited Accounts vs Estimates

The most practical thing in this entire article is the difference between the fourth row of that table and the fifth.

Flutter, Entain and DraftKings are listed companies. bet365 is private but files accounts at UK Companies House. All four are audited, and anyone can read exactly what they took, what they spent and what they were fined. That is a genuine accountability mechanism, and it exists because those companies hold licences in jurisdictions that demand it.

Stake publishes nothing comparable. It operates under a Curaçao licence, and every revenue figure attributed to it — including the one in the table above — is an outside estimate. It may well be roughly right. There is simply no way for you or for me to check.

This is worth separating from the question of whether the games are fair. Many crypto operators run provably fair systems that let you verify individual results cryptographically — a stronger guarantee on that specific point than any traditional casino offers. But provably fair verifies a roll. It says nothing about the company's solvency, its finances, or whether a large withdrawal will be honoured. Those are different questions, answered by audits and licensing rather than by hashes.

What This Means If You Play

Sources

Every figure in this article comes from a primary filing or its official announcement. Where a number could not be traced to one — the Stake estimate — that is stated in the table itself.

• Flutter Entertainment, Q4 and Full Year 2025 earnings release (26 February 2026)
• Entain plc, 2025 Full Year Results
• DraftKings Inc., Form 10-K, fiscal year 2025
• bet365 (Hillside Group), FY2024/25 accounts as reported by SBC News (23 December 2025)
• Stake.com: no published or audited financial statements. The figure shown is a third-party estimate.