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What Are The Chances Of Winning ITV Competitions?

ITV run a huge number of competitions through the year, ranging from small prizes in their bonus tokens section and Winsday draws, up to their flagship million pound giveaways that run every couple of years.

Unfortunately, ITV don’t release much information about how many people enter, so it’s hard to know exactly what the odds are of winning. What we can confidently say though, is that they get vast numbers of entries into each competition, running into the millions for the biggest prizes.

Let’s go into more detail on the topic, with our reasoning for how many people we think enter, and why that’s only half the story.

What Are The Odds Of Winning A Huge Cash Prize With ITV?

When you see Andi Peters offering the biggest cash prizes, we’ll be seeing anything upwards of £250,000 as a single cash prize for one lucky winner.

Generally, these big cash prizes are referred to as daytime competitions on the TV shows. What they mean by that is that they’re being promoted across all four main regular shows on the weekday schedule. Those are:

In addition, the big prizes are sometimes featured on other shows too – a good example being John And Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen. That allows ITV to tap into the weekend viewers too, rather than just those catching the weekday shows.

As these are the biggest of the big when it comes to ITV’s competitions, they’re giving away cash sums in the range of £250,000 all the way up to the million pound prizes.

Do ITV Make a Profit On Competitions?

The maths is quite simple, to give away a million quid, you need to collect a million pounds in profit, otherwise you’re losing money. You can bet your bottom dollar that ITV aren’t running these prize draws all the time if they’re running at a loss.

At the very least then, with paid entries costing £2.00 on your phone bill for calls or texts, and via PayPal if you enter online, the fewest entries they need are 500,000 – that’s half a million if you’re not good with numbers.

Do ITV Get The Whole Entry Fee When Your Enter?

Of course, it also costs ITV money to process each entry – PayPal and the phone companies will be getting their cut too. As a rule of thumb, PayPal offer lower fees for micropayments than they do for most retailers, so they’re likely to be less than most businesses, but will still be a fee ITV need to factor in.

The headline rate for small transactions taken online is 5% + 5p per transaction, so a £2.00 entry would cost ITV 15p from the entry fee, leaving £1.85 for a single entry. As they’re almost certainly processing millions of payments a month, it’s likely they’re on a better deal with PayPal, but even so, it means more entries are needed to reach the break even point.

The same logic applies with collecting the entry fee from phone and text entries – with the commission going to the phone companies instead of PayPal.

It’s fair to assume that ITV will get somewhere around £1.85 to £1.90 for an online entry, and probably a little less for the phone entries.

That’s backed up by the fact that they like to offer extra entries for free when you enter multiple times online. Clearly they’re trying to push people toward the website instead of using text and phone call entries, so it would appear that online is the most profitable route.

Do Competition Have Other Costs To Run?

We’re always seeing Andi Peters and friends jetting off to foreign climbs to show you what you can have if you’re the lucky winner, and that will come at a significant cost to ITV.

When you see him in a competition trailer sat on a plane, it doesn’t look like the kind of seat I sit in when I go on holiday. At the minimum it looks like he’s upgraded to business class, and possibly first class.

If you’re a regular viewer, you’ll know he definitely qualifies as a frequent flyer, and that doesn’t come cheap – especially when you’re upgrading out of economy!

He’s also got at least one person with him too – someone’s got to operate the camera, and occasionally you see him with a few competition winners on holiday too – presumably they’re on a bonus all expenses paid trip too.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this, but hopefully the point is clear – it’s worth it for ITV to spend a fortune on promoting the competitions – and that has to be because it generates a lot more entries!

It’s entirely possible that for at least some competitions, the TV network are spending significantly more on the promotions than the prize.

If we make the assumption that the average competition costs the same amount to promote as the prize they’re giving away, that doubles the number of entries required to break even.

How Many Entries Are Needed To Break Even?

So then, if a million pound competition has an entry fee of £2.00 and ITV see about £1.90 of that (let’s work on the numbers to give a minimum number of entries required), approximately 525,000 entries are needed.

In addition, promoting the prize draw could mean the same amount are needed again – a total of 1,050,000 entries. That means if you enter just once, the odds are less than one in a million of winning, even if ITV only break even on the costs we’ve considered.

There’s plenty of other costs too, including the more fixed costs of office space and staff for Afie Ali and her team, who sometimes get wheeled out to show the there’s real people behind the website.

It’s Better Odds Than The Lottery!

Sometimes I hear people saying that the odds of winning a million from ITV Win is better than it is for people who play the lottery, and they’re probably right.

Where that logic falls down though, is that on the lottery, there are a huge number of smaller prizes to win too. In fact, you’ve got a chance of winning a prize on the Lotto draw of more than 1 in 10 (it’s roughly 1 in 9.3) of matching at least two balls for a prize.

That means that while the chance of hitting the jackpot with the Lotto game from the national lottery with a single entry is 1 in 45 million (ish), if you regularly enter Lotto and ITV’s paid competitions, you’re likely to win more (or more specifically – lose less) on Lotto.

In summary, I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t enter competitions, they can be a lot of fun and a lot of people enjoy a flutter, just be aware that the odds are fairly long!

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