Making a big bet on sports betting content? Here's what you should know.
There's more to sports betting than making picks
Back in 2018 when the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited sports betting in most states it opened up an extremely lucrative coverage opportunity for media companies. As sports books like Draft Kings and FanDuel rushed to acquire users, they crafted partnerships with sports sites to help drive readers at sites like ESPN and Yahoo! to sign up for accounts with that partnering sports book. Such partnerships provided millions in revenue in exchange for the exclusive funneling of traffic to a particular sports book.
Those days of easy partnership revenue appear to be dwindling as the biggest sports books have more or less defined their user base, but the money in the sports betting remains significant as interest and the audience for this topic continues to grow.
Sports betting produced a staggering $10.92 billion in revenue in 2023, according to the American Gaming Association. And with the market steadily growing as more and more states legalize sports betting (and people continuing to reach legal betting age), there is an opportunity for media outlets to begin, or bolster, the creation betting content. The question is what form that coverage takes.
Ben Fawkes is an old colleague of mine from ESPN Insider. There, Fawkes worked with Chad Millman to start the first real in-depth sports betting content at the Worldwide Leader, moving beyond the usual rundown of Sunday morning NFL picks to look at the betting industry more holistically. Fawkes left ESPN to oversee sports betting content for VSIN (Vegas Stats and Information Network) and now authors his own sports betting Substack, while also writing for USA Today.
Yesterday we spoke on the opportunities and challenges of starting sports betting content in 2024 and what the key lessons are for publishers seeking some of that soaring sports betting revenue. Here are his tips.
Target the right audience tier
Fawkes sees the sports betting audience in three distinct tiers that become increasingly narrow: The casual bettors, the savvy bettors and the true sharps. He also believes content providers can forget about that last tier. Why?
“They don’t need your help,” Fawkes said. “They’re already succeeding and likely have their own systems and spreadsheets. If anything, they’ll be critical of your coverage far more often than they’ll find use for it.”
The casual bettors are the biggest audience segment and are also the most easily served. Of course that means lots of sites, with basics like line information, picks pieces and score info, are able to meet those users’ simple needs. So, if this is the audience you’re after, the existing competition is both massive and established.
It’s with the savvy bettors where he believes the audience opportunity lies. These are the users who want to understand why a prognosticator is backing a certain bet and what goes into making smart bets. There are not a lot of places that can do this well — Fawkes noted Action Network, Unabated and Covers.com as standing out to savvy bettors — leaving room for other sites to serve up smart content.
Define your terms of success
It’s important for publishers to be honest (hopefully to their audience, but at least to themselves) about their motivations for diving into betting coverage. If it’s to chase partnership revenue, that’s fine, but the approach looks far different than trying to best serve actual sports bettors.
The former is going to craft content with the primary goal of funneling users to their betting partner, earning affiliate marketing revenue for the creation of new accounts at the book. Volume and visibility are paramount to that approach. Quality and smart content far less so.
The affiliate approach can be extremely low-lift, publishing regular betting lines and linking out to the sports book as widely as possible. So long as you’re driving traffic to the book, you’re accomplishing your goal. The big caveat there is that the firehose of partnership revenue may not be what it once was in 2018.
“I think it depends on the sports book,” Fawkes said. “If you’re Draft Kings or FanDuel or a couple of others, people probably know who you are at this point and so there’s diminishing returns on paying for [user acquisition] because you’re already pretty well established. If you’re a smaller sports book that just opened in a state that just approved sports betting … I think there still is that targeted advertising and acquisition at the local level. So maybe they’re partnering with a regional newspaper or a restaurant chain in that specific state. …
“I think the money faucet, it hasn’t turned off, but it’s certainly drained a bit from the past few years.”
The latter approach — focusing on serving the sports bettor — is going to focus more on informing and advising the user through more carefully crafted content and products. The user-centric coverage skews more towards a subscription model, providing insights that readers use to inform their wagers. This is the more sustainable approach (so long as the content is good) because the model relies on the value of the coverage itself. Simply put, users will spend money to make money. This is also more complicated and requires a writer/content creator or team that actually understands the nuances of sports betting, starting with the knowledge that there is more to smart betting content than just getting picks correct.
Getting it right includes getting it wrong
Most successful sports bettors endure a lot of missed wagers. If they’re hitting 60% of of the time, they’re thriving. So cold streaks from pundits, where their picks aren’t hitting, are to be expected. It’s thus advisable to level set with both the audience and internal stakeholders. Users who just want surface-level coverage — or media execs who don’t understand betting coverage is about more than providing correct picks — might be turned off if losses pile up and they believe there’s no additional value to the content.
“At ESPN we hired Rufus Peabody [a founder of Unabated] who's arguably a top-five bettor in the world right now. One of the best golf betters,” Fawkes said. “Of course, SportsCenter wants to do NFL picks on Sunday morning when the lines are toughest, and he probably hit like 46% … and an executive at the end of the year is gonna go, ‘So why are we paying this guy to make picks and he's getting less than 50%?”
As Fawkes or Peabody will tell you though, there is a lot that goes into sports betting beyond the actual pick. That’s why it’s important for sites covering betting to be illustrative with their thinking in making a pick because that’s where the content is valuable to savvy bettors.
“I think the way that sports betting content has gone, especially in the last 12 to 18 months is just here's a pick, here's a pick, here's a pick,” Fawkes said. “If the pick wins, brilliant! Pick loses, you're an idiot! And there's so much more to it, especially the process. I don't think people really understand that there can be losing picks that were really good [logically], that were smart. And there are winning bets that just were incredibly lucky and the process was bad.”
Fawkes believes the opportunity is in communicating to the audience where the real value in betting coverage resides. It’s in the process, not the picks.
“There are no strategy articles,” he said. “There's no ‘what we learned this last month.’ There's no trend [analysis] or an article for beginning sports bettors and one that's a little more in the weeds for advanced better. Things like that. So I think you have to have a mix of that content and try and establish to people that ‘Hey, this is also really important.’ ”
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Hi, I’m Mike. I’m a former editor for The Washington Post and ESPN. In 2024 I founded and now operate Launcher, LLC, a digital media consultancy operating out of Arlington, Va. Want to work together? Reach out on LinkedIn.