Darren Rovell on Sports Gambling and Investing in Sports

Video Transcript:

Nicole Lapin: So you have recognized super early on that the gaming side of sports business, be it fantasy, legalized gaming, yada yada, was going to be a driving force for growth. And it was, but investors who participated in the space lost so much money in 2022. So what happened here as publicly traded sports gaming companies did so poorly despite the fact that fantasy sports and gaming are still growing faster than the economy?

Darren Rovell: Well, just obviously competition was a big thing. In New Jersey, you have 23 different sports books on your phone that you can bet with. And are they that different? The average person downloads 1.3 sports books. So the idea would be, okay, if we do better promotions or we do better odds, the gambler's going to come to me. It's not necessarily true, and that didn't bear out. That's one of the reasons why things didn't work out, and it came at a cost.

The consumer acquisition cost of people, of gamblers, is a ton, and so what happened was you're offering free deposits, you're offering free bets. You're offering all these things to get to the consumer. At the end of the day, that CAC number, that consumer acquisition cost is just enormous, and then often, because a lot of things are the same, sometimes you can't keep people as you can in other industries. Loyalty in sports betting really hasn't borne out, and that's one of the issues of what happened in 2022.