The headline: 2,585 new competitions and a month that never sat still

Across Monday 11 May to Wednesday 10 June, Find Competitions listed 2,585 new competitions. None ended during that measurement window, so this is very much a picture of the market ramping up rather than paying out.

Behind that headline, two things stand out:

• Ticket volumes were huge and lumpy. On the busiest day in the period, a shade over 846 million tickets were sold (Sunday 17 May). On the quietest full day, tickets sold fell to around 142 million (Thursday 28 May). That is not a gentle curve; it’s more rollercoaster.
• Average ticket prices swung from “cheap flutter” to “think twice”. The daily average ticket price touched a low of £1.68 (Monday 18 May) and a high of £3.64 (Saturday 6 June). That’s more than a 2x difference in what entrants were paying on a typical ticket from one part of the month to another.

In other words, June wasn’t one steady market. It was several different markets stitched together: low-cost weekday draws, expensive weekend pushes, and a noticeable mid-month wobble as operators experimented with higher price points.

Before getting into categories, it’s worth saying: averages like this hide the spread. A day with a £3+ average will have some very pricey draws to drag it up, and probably a decent tail of sub-£1 entries underneath. The trick for entrants is spotting when the whole market is drifting “up a gear” on price, versus when only a handful of mega comps are skewing the numbers.

Category winners and losers: cars loud, tech and vouchers quietly huge

The platform’s own top active by prize value list for this period tells you a lot about where operators think the big money is:

• Cars: an Audi RS6 headline prize, ticket price £0.49, in the Cars category.
• Quasi-cash credit: a VW Tiguan + fuel + site credit build, categorised as Site Credit, at £0.25 per ticket.
• Vouchers: a ‘£70k MEGA LEGO’ competition, classed under Vouchers, at £0.49.
• Tech: a ‘£50k MEGA PC’ draw in the Tech category, also at £0.49.
• Cash: a ‘£10,000 Wheel Spin Instant Win’ in the Cash category with free entry (£0).

Across those top slots you can see the pecking order in June:

• Cars still dominate the marketing. A tuned Audi RS6 is not a subtle prize, and operators clearly think it pulls clicks. The ticket price at 49p, though, suggests they still want it to feel accessible rather than “high-roller”.
• Tech and vouchers are where the sheer prize value quietly lives. £70k in LEGO and £50k in PC hardware sounds absurd on paper, but they were both priced at 49p a ticket. That’s a huge prize-per-ticket headline compared with, say, a mid-range SUV.
• Cash is being used as bait, not the main product. The top cash draw in this period is free to enter. That tells you operators think cash is so universally appealing that they can afford to use it to pull people in, then cross-sell them into paid draws.

What we don’t have yet is a full breakdown of how many of the 2,585 new competitions sat in each category. But judging by the highest-value live draws, the tug of war looks like this:

• Volume likely heavy in lower-ticket tech, vouchers and site credit – it’s easier and cheaper for operators to run yet another gadget, LEGO or “credit bundle” draw than it is to reliably source, insure and promote big car prizes.
• Visibility skewed to cars and giant prize pools – those get the hero imagery and ad spend, even if they’re a smaller share by count.

If you’re an entrant who mostly sees Audis, SUVs and chunky cash pots in your feed, that’s not the full story. Vouchers, tech bundles and credit-based comps were doing a lot of quiet heavy lifting in June on total prize value.

Ticket prices: weekends got expensive, weekdays held the bargains

The neat way to look at June is by what the daily average ticket price did:

• Early period (11–21 May): mostly in the £1.79–£2.07 band, with a cheap dip to £1.68 on Monday 18 May.
• Bank Holiday and just after (22–31 May): a sharp move upwards, peaking at £2.88 on Saturday 23 May and holding in the £2.30–£2.60 area over that long-weekend window.
• Early June (1–5 June): a calmer run mostly between £1.76 and £2.27.
• First June weekend (6–7 June): a very clear jump, with £3.64 on Saturday 6 June and £3.44 on Sunday 7 June.

The pattern is blunt:

• Saturdays and Sundays trend expensive. Every weekend in the period saw the average price creep up, with the first June weekend a particular outlier. You were paying roughly double per ticket on that Saturday compared with the cheapest Monday in the run.
• Midweek is where the entry-level stuff clusters. Monday 18 May (£1.68), Tuesday 19 May (£1.79) and Wednesday 20 May (£1.79) all sat clearly below the £2 mark, and early June weekdays behaved similarly.

We don’t have the full distribution by band (under £1, £1–£2, £2–£5 and so on), so anyone claiming “most tickets were under a quid” or “everything’s £3 now” is guessing. The data we do have is still enough to shape a simple strategy:

• If you like a lot of small, cheap stabs, do more of your browsing Monday to Wednesday. The lower averages suggest a higher mix of low-cost entries.
• If you’re tempted by big-ticket, splashy draws, they’re being pushed harder at weekends and Bank Holiday-style peaks – but you’ll pay for the privilege.

The sharp hike to £3.64 on Saturday 6 June deserves a raised eyebrow. Either a handful of expensive mega draws were hoovering up sales, or a broad swathe of operators collectively decided the weekend would bear higher prices. Neither is fantastic news for anyone who instinctively taps ‘buy’ on a Saturday night scroll.

Entry caps and odds: small caps for cars, swollen pools for mega prize pots

The brief asked about entry caps – how many tickets can be sold into a draw – and how they differ by category. There’s a snag: the raw dataset for June doesn’t include cap sizes for every competition, only ticket volumes and a handful of headline draws. So anyone pretending to have a precise “average odds per category” figure for June is bluffing.

We can still piece together a few grounded observations from what is visible:

• The huge daily ticket counts in mid to late May – 700–850 million tickets per day – imply either very high caps or a lot of instant-win style traffic on top of normal draws.
• The top-listed comps – things like the £70k LEGO and £50k PC – are branded as ‘MEGA’ competitions with instant wins layered in. Those almost always run high caps, because the operator is paying out a spread of smaller instant prizes alongside the big one.
• By contrast, the car prize (Audi RS6) is priced at 49p, not £2–£3, suggesting the operator is relying on volume at a lower price point. That usually partners with a defined ticket cap to keep the odds saleable.

Put another way:

• Cars are the spiritual home of “low-ish odds” language. You’ll often see ticket caps pushed in the marketing: X tickets only, draw regardless. June’s data is consistent with that – cars are prominent but not driving the exotic £3+ average prices.
• Tech, vouchers and big prize pools lean into very high caps. They create eye-watering headline values and bake in instant wins to keep people buying, with much fatter total ticket numbers sitting behind them.

If you care most about odds per pound rather than the sheer size of the prize, it’s a fair bet that mid-range car and home-style draws with clear caps beat the mega-tech and mega-voucher pools that pushed the numbers up in June. Just don’t confuse “visible cap” with “small pool” – a cap of 200,000 tickets is technically a limit, but it won’t feel generous on draw night.

Cash alternatives: heavily implied, rarely spelled out

The brief also raises how many draws offered a cash alternative. The awkward answer is: the June dataset doesn’t say. Prize descriptions are summarised, not fully contractual, so there’s no reliable tick-box saying “this prize can be swapped for cash”.

Take the top prizes we do see:

• Cars: an Audi RS6 as the lead prize.
• Tech: £50k of PC kit.
• Vouchers: £70k worth of LEGO as an effective shopping spree.
• Site credit: VW Tiguan themed comp sitting in a credit category.
• Cash: an upfront £10,000 wheel-spin style instant win.

In categories like cars, home and tech it’s very common for operators to structure their terms in ways that allow some form of flexibility if, say, a winner doesn’t drive or lives in a flat with nowhere to stick a performance estate. But that’s a matter for each set of terms and conditions, not something the platform tracks centrally in the data.

The useful takeaway for June is less about precise counts and more about how often “cash” was front-and-centre at all. Here, it actually wasn’t: only one of the top-value active draws in the period is explicitly categorised as Cash. Everything else dresses itself up as physical goods or credit, even when the structure is essentially “a very large spending pot”.

If your instinct is to equate “non-cash” with “poor value”, June’s top-of-market data argues against that. Vouchers and tech bundles were carrying some of the largest prize values on the site, often at sub-50p ticket prices, and doing it without slapping ‘cash’ on the front.

Low-odds vs mega draws: how operators played it in June

With 2,585 new competitions and daily ticket totals swinging into the hundreds of millions, June was clearly a month where operators leaned hard into mega structures – big prize pools, instant wins, and long-running campaigns designed to soak up a lot of small spends.

The top five active draws by prize value tell their own story:

• All of them bar the £10k free cash promo have tens of thousands of pounds of value attached.
• Three – the Audi RS6, the £70k LEGO comp and the £50k PC comp – sit at 49p a ticket, a classic mega-comp price point.
• The VW Tiguan credit-based comp is cheaper still at 25p a ticket, again the sort of pricing you see when the operator expects very high ticket volumes.

Low-odds “boutique” draws – limited-ticket comps for a modest prize – clearly existed in the 2,585 total, but they did not define June’s sales numbers. The gigantic ticket counts and the presence of multiple £50k–£70k headline draws suggest the serious traffic was funnelled towards high-cap, high-value structures.

If you mentally split the market into two:

• Low-odds, smaller prize: Think niche gadgets, modest homeware, smaller cash pots. Lower caps, usually a bit higher per-ticket price relative to the prize value.
• High-odds, mega prize/instant-win hybrids: Massive bundle values, cheap tickets, instant win layers, often running for weeks.

June’s data says the second group was steering the ship. For an everyday entrant, the danger is drifting towards those mega draws by habit because they’re so visible, and gradually normalising the idea that a “standard” comp involves hundreds of thousands or millions of tickets in play.

The smarter use of June’s pattern would have been to treat mega comps as the occasional punt and put most of your budget into smaller, less hyped draws where the cap is clearly stated and sits in a range you can comfortably explain to yourself without needing a spreadsheet.

Timing quirks: Bank Holiday hangover and pricey June weekends

Timing matters more than most people think. June’s numbers make that quite plain.

Across the period there’s a clear pattern in both tickets sold and average price:

• Sunday 17 May: the single biggest ticket day, roughly 846.7 million tickets sold at an average of £1.87. Plenty of volume, but still under the £2 mark on price.
• Friday 22 to Sunday 24 May (Bank Holiday window): averages jump from £2.46 on the Friday to £2.88 on Saturday and £2.58 on Sunday. Ticket volumes stay high – 726–764 million a day – but you’re clearly paying more per stab.
• End of May and early June weekdays: ticket volumes settle back towards the mid–high 100 millions, and average price drifts into the £1.76–£2.15 area.
• First June weekend (6–7 June): volume actually drops compared with mid-May, but prices jump to £3.64 on Saturday and £3.44 on Sunday.

What does that mean in practice?

• Bank Holiday weekends are treated as harvest time. Operators know people are off work, on their phones and in a spending mood. Prices creep up, and the mix of comps promoted leans towards the expensive end.
• By early June the habit stuck, even without a Bank Holiday. That first full weekend of June delivered the highest prices of the whole period despite lower ticket volumes. Someone, somewhere, decided to see how far the weekend price elastic would stretch.

If you’re on a fixed monthly budget, the dull but effective move is to flip your instinct: browse new draws after the weekend, not during it. The data from June suggests you’ll see more of the cheaper stuff and fewer of the “oh go on then, it’s only £3.50” entries that add up fast.

So where was the value in June – and what should you do now?

June on Find Competitions was noisy: 2,585 new competitions, huge daily ticket volumes and a very visible push towards mega prize pools with instant wins. Once you strip away the gloss, a few simple patterns emerge.

• Weekend browsing was bad for your wallet. Average ticket prices were consistently higher on Saturdays and Sundays, spiking to £3.64 and £3.44 on the first June weekend. If you like to enter lots of draws, shifting most of your activity to Mondays–Wednesdays would have saved you money for the same number of entries.
• The “real” prize value often sat in tech and voucher categories. Whilst cars and cash promos shouted the loudest, the largest headline values in the data were £70k LEGO and £50k PC bundles at 49p a ticket. If you’re only ever chasing cars, you’re ignoring a chunk of the value.
• Odds and caps quietly worsened at the top end. The explosion in daily ticket volumes and the trend towards big bundle comps means more of the market’s energy is going into very high-cap draws. If you care about your chance per entry more than the size of the prize, June was a month to favour smaller, clearly capped draws hiding beneath the mega campaigns.
• Free entries were bait, not the main course. The £10k free cash instant win is a perfect example: great if you hit it, but designed to feed attention into a broader slate of paid draws. Use those promos on your terms – take the free roll, then close the tab.

For the next time you dip into /competitions, June’s data suggests a few practical ground rules:

• Pick your days. Treat weekends and Bank Holiday periods as “premium pricing” windows. If you must enter draws then, do it with a firmer budget and more scrutiny of ticket price versus prize.
• Don’t let cars and giant cash pots set your expectations. Make a habit of checking tech, vouchers and home categories too. That’s where some of the best prize-per-quid ratios actually live.
• Ask yourself one blunt question before each spend: “Would I still be happy with these odds if I knew the ticket cap and total tickets sold?” If the honest answer is no, skip it and look for something smaller.

The market will keep shifting; the June numbers show operators are clearly willing to experiment on price and structure. Your job is simpler: know when they’re doing it, and adjust your habits so you’re getting the fun of entering without quietly funding everyone’s latest ‘MEGA’ experiment.