Blask: Melbourne Cup lifts Australian betting demand 34% in a week

Australia’s biggest race day pushed betting search to its highest level of the spring. The demand went almost entirely to locally licensed brands. Blask Index for betting brands in Australia rose 34% week over week in November 2–8, according to Blask Index (a brand search demand metric built from Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends signals). Locally licensed (onshore) brands grew 50%, while offshore brands fell 35%. The jump came from the Melbourne Cup on Tuesday, November 3, won by Point of Law for trainer Ciaron Maher in front of 97 112 people at Flemington, the race day’s largest crowd since 2016, according to Nine. Daily Blask Index by licence, Australia, October 1 – November 8, 2026. A carnival that peaks on one Tuesday Each Saturday of the spring racing carnival added a spike, from the Caulfield Cup on October 17 to Derby Day on October 31, but none came close to Cup day, when demand ran more than two and a half times October’s daily average. Onshore brands took 96% of it. Sportsbet alone accounted for 47% of the day’s demand, more than five times its own October average, and TAB followed with 18%. This was also the first Melbourne Cup run on Tabcorp’s One Pool, the national tote launched on October 2 that merged the NSW TAB, SuperTAB and UniTAB pools, so punters in every state bet into the same pool for the first time, Just Horse Racing reported. Official 2026 turnover figures have not been published yet. Last year’s Cup set a record of $247.4M, up 16.4% on 2024. Same peak, higher floor Compared with the same set of brands a year earlier, Cup-day demand barely moved, while the October baseline rose by about a quarter. Cup day vs average October day, 2025 and 2026, same set of betting brands. The offshore decline started before Cup week. Offshore brands’ daily demand has been falling since mid-October and in the first week of November averaged about a quarter of its level in the second week of October. Their share of weekly demand halved, to under 10%. Bottom line The Melbourne Cup still produces Australia’s biggest betting day of the year, and that day belongs to locally licensed bookmakers. The question for the weeks after the carnival is whether offshore demand recovers once racing quietens down, or whether its October slide continues without the Cup to explain it.