B2B Economics: GGR, NGR & the Metrics

The industry runs on a small set of financial metrics — handle, gross gaming revenue, hold, net gaming revenue, and the player-economics figures LTV and CAC. GGR is the central one: stakes minus winnings, the pool from which the entire supply chain and the tax authority are paid. Every other ratio measures, forecasts or divides up that same pool, which is identical to what players lose.

Every business in the iGaming supply chain — platform providers, games studios, payment firms, affiliates, the tax authority and the operator itself — is paid out of one pool of money. That pool has a name: gross gaming revenue. Before you can follow the money through the value chain, you have to learn the vocabulary the chain uses to measure it. Four numbers do most of the work. Handle is everything wagered. GGR is what the operator keeps once winnings are paid back. Hold is GGR as a share of handle. NGR is GGR after the operator's own bonus and tax costs. Around these sit the player-economics metrics — bonus cost, lifetime value and customer acquisition cost — that decide how much an operator will spend to recruit a player. None of these figures is exotic; they are simple subtraction and division. But together they describe exactly one thing: how much players lose, and how that loss is forecast, measured and shared out.

Handle — also called turnover, wagers or drop — is the total amount staked across every bet, spin or hand. It is a gross flow, not a profit: the same £10 recycled through ten spins counts as £100 of handle. Because winnings are constantly paid back and re-staked, handle is usually far larger than any money the operator actually keeps. Gross gaming revenue isolates the operator's take: stakes received minus winnings paid out over a period. If players wager £1,000,000 and are paid £950,000 in winnings, GGR is £50,000. Note what GGR is on the other side of the ledger — precisely the amount players did not get back, their aggregate net loss. GGR and player losses are the same number viewed from opposite ends. In UK regulatory language the near-equivalent term is gross gambling yield (GGY); the Gambling Commission reports the Great Britain market at £16.8 billion for April 2024 to March 2025 on that basis.

Hold percentage — also called margin, win rate or, in slots, the realised house edge — is GGR divided by handle. In the worked example, £50,000 ÷ £1,000,000 is a 5% hold: the operator retained five pence of every pound wagered and returned the other ninety-five. For machine-style games, hold is the mirror image of return to player (RTP): a game paying 95% RTP holds 5%. Sportsbook hold behaves the same way but is driven by the overround built into the odds rather than a fixed RTP. Hold matters because it turns a huge, recycling handle into a predictable revenue line. A small change in hold moves GGR sharply: on £1,000,000 of handle, lifting hold from 5% to 6% raises GGR from £50,000 to £60,000 — a fifth more revenue from the same wagering. That leverage is why operators watch hold closely, and why product mix, which shifts the blended hold, is a commercial decision as much as a gameplay one.

GGR is revenue before the operator's own costs. The first deductions bring it down to net gaming revenue. Bonus cost is the value handed back to players as free bets, deposit matches, free spins and cashback — marketing spend paid in the operator's own product rather than cash. If the £50,000 GGR carried £15,000 of bonuses, NGR falls to £35,000. Operators also owe gaming taxes or duties on their revenue: in Great Britain, remote gaming is charged Remote Gaming Duty at 40% of GGR (raised from 21% on 1 April 2026), so a further £20,000 would leave £15,000. Depending on the definition used, some processing and gaming-tax fees are netted here too. NGR is the figure closer to what the operator actually earns before staffing, technology and the rest of the supply chain are paid. There is no single global standard for NGR — different jurisdictions and companies deduct different items — so when comparing operators or reading a set of accounts, it always pays to check exactly what has been taken out.

Once revenue is defined, marketing runs on two projections. Lifetime value (LTV) is the total NGR an operator expects a player to generate across their whole relationship — a forecast built from how much a typical player loses per month and how long they stay. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total marketing and bonus spend to recruit one paying player: an affiliate commission, an ad-network fee, a welcome bonus. The governing rule is that an operator will spend up to some fraction of expected LTV to acquire a player. If a player's projected LTV is £200 and the operator caps acquisition at 40% of it, the most it will pay is £80 in CAC. Get that ratio wrong — CAC above the value a player returns — and growth loses money on every sign-up. This is why acquisition budgets, affiliate deals and bonus generosity are all set by a single forecast: how much this player is expected to lose. LTV is not engagement dressed up; it is projected net loss, discounted to today.

Read the vocabulary back in one line and the structure is plain. Handle is what players risk. GGR is what they lose — the pool from which platform fees, games revenue shares, affiliate commissions, gaming duty and every salary in the business are paid. Hold is the rate at which wagering converts into that loss. NGR is the loss after the operator has spent some of it back as bonuses and handed a share to the tax authority. LTV is the same loss projected forward for one player; CAC is what the operator will pay, out of that forecast loss, to acquire them. None of these numbers is hidden or dishonest — they are the ordinary accounting of a legal industry, and regulators require many of them to be reported. But they all measure, forecast or divide up the same thing. Understanding the metrics is understanding whose money funds the industry: every figure in the chain resolves, sooner or later, to money that players did not get back.