The Bleacher Report website, owned by AT&T/ Warner Media is making some great strides in the legal sports betting world according to a report put out by the business website CNBC.
Their business plan includes attracting a young generation of gamblers -aged 21 through 34- who have a positive view of sports betting.
Their consumers have grown up in the internet age, the time of fantasy football and other sports exploding on the scene, where betting on sports has been sown into the fabric of society.
The only difference is that up till recently, it’s either been done in Nevada, illegally or on the margins.
But we’re about one-year into the new landscape with the US Supreme Court overturning those laws that made it illegal in most states to bet on sports. In 2019, eight states have already legalized it, with seven more jurisdictions set to join the fray.
Bleacher Report, with its platforms, interacts with up to 250 million people and they are leveraging that into sports betting. This summer they are expected to launch their first sports betting shows built off their partnership with Caesars in Las Vegas.
Chief Executive of Bleacher Report Howard Mittman is expecting the new shows to make a big impact with his audience, saying “because we have an app that has almost 20 million downloads, 9.5 million consumers receiving alerts from us anywhere from 5 to 20 times per day, we sit on a lot of first-party data. We understand what consumers are doing. We like to think of the app as the heartbeat of the American sports fan.”
He went on to explain just how he plans on using that data to attract and appeal to sports betting fans saying, ““We are commingling the data we have about usage, experience and what consumers want with Caesars data, which is some of the most powerful and cumulative data in the world for sports betting.”
And he certainly makes a strong point. In business the challenge is always to create a great product and working with Caesars and their decades long experience with sports should go a long way towards achieving that goal. Next is having the audience and the traffic to share that great content and there are few properties in the media world better set up to reach the lucrative and young sports betting market.
In fact, according to CNBC, sports gamblers are five times more likely to interact with Bleacher Report’s platform and current betting content than non-betting consumers. One can just imagine how much more that can grow once these new shows launch.