Sports Betting
Sports Betting
THE RISE
OF SOCIAL BETTING
The days when the igaming sector would be revolutionised by social betting on Facebook or via peer-to-peer platforms are long gone. But features that grew out of social, such as Sky Bet’ s Request A Bet, are now being supplemented by player feeds and group betting, writes Jake Pollard
Jake Pollard is a leading journalist and content producer in the igaming sector. He has covered the industry for many years and worked on all the major business-tobusiness publications.
The rise of social features in sports betting has been one of the key trends of the igaming sector over the past two years, but it is not a re-run of the social betting model that so many start-ups tried to develop with little success five years ago.
This is visible from the current user-generated products that have proved so popular in the past two years or from features such as BetBright’ s BetFeed. This acts as a recommendation tool that enables punters to see what other players have bet on. In essence, it gives them ideas or suggestions.
Sky Bet kicked off the whole trend with( what has turned out to be) the game-changing Request A Bet. It’ s worth remembering that the product had humble beginnings: it started out on Twitter on Friday afternoons, with the bookmaker telling customers it had a trader available to price up any weekend markets they fancied. Soon enough it had more customers than it could handle and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Leeds-based bookmaker’ s latest‘ social’ feature is Group Betting, which allows punters to create a group and invite friends to join. Each player is able to add a leg to an accumulator and the group can track its progress in-play.
However, this is not a repeat of the Facebook or peer-to-peer social betting trend of circa 2012-2013. Where those companies were extolling the virtues of word of mouth, bragging rights and fantasy football leagues as prime examples of how social interactions could power them to untold fame and fortune, these days the social features launched by the likes of Sky Bet or BetBright are add-ons to existing products, rather than the main attraction.
The fact that all online bookmakers now offer some variant of the bet-request model is proof that the product works when it comes to attracting customers and will stay in its current form for some time. This explains why Sky Bet has continued to develop social features such as Group Betting. But as Brian MacSweeney, formerly of Betgenius and now a consultant for DraftKings, explains, the social factor within online betting only works up to a point.
“ The new wave of social features are more semi-private, where you are really sharing with a tight group of friends,” he says.“ You can see the genesis in Australia where they have‘ punt clubs’ and the like. Betting is a private matter, shared with trusted friends and a lot of the business failures along the way didn’ t really reflect this.” MacSweeney is right; for all the talk of players bragging about their winning bets, how often have you seen punters post on Facebook or Instagram to brag about their winnings?
The counter to this argument is that the power of recommendations and seeing what other people bet on acts as a conduit for players to look around and potentially bet on the same or related markets.
“ Across e-commerce,‘ most read’ or‘ most popular’ are powerful features,” adds MacSweeney,“ so I’ ve been surprised we’ ve not seen
42 iGamingBusiness | Issue 112 | September / October 2018