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Retention is the word on everyone’s lips in this industry. Everybody agrees that acquisition is expensive, that customers are harder to keep than to buy, and that the moment sport goes live is often the moment we lose them. And then you come back twelve months later and hear exactly the same thing.
That has always puzzled me, because this is not a problem anybody is hiding. Ask any operator where their engagement drops and they will tell you – the customer places a bet, the whistle goes, and then they are gone. Watching on one screen, scrolling and messaging on another, and neither of those screens belongs to the sportsbook.
So why has nobody fixed it?
There are plenty of reasons. The industry can be risk averse. Businesses like an idea, want to work together, and then it meets an army of stakeholders across different departments who all need to agree. Is it marketing? Is it product? Who owns it? Who pays for it? Where does it sit on the roadmap? Momentum dies. I have watched it happen more than once.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think the real reason is actually much simpler: most of the industry doesn’t know how to do it. It’s easy to identify a problem. It’s much harder to find the solution. And this is where I think iGaming needs to look outside its own industry and bring in expertise from somewhere else. In this case, broadcasting.
Filling the live window properly needs a very particular combination of skills. You need broadcast skills – the ability to hold an audience for two hours with your personality, your voice and whatever is happening in front of you. You need to understand modern digital content and how people consume it. You need on-air confidence, because live is live and there is no second take. And you need to genuinely understand betting, because the moment you say something a bettor knows is wrong, you’ve lost them.
There are plenty of people in betting who understand marketing, plenty who understand social media and plenty who understand trading and betting. But finding people who can bring all of that together live, on air, while keeping an audience entertained is much harder. And you can’t fake it for long. The audience will find you out.
My own route into this was radio, and I think that’s one of the reasons the gap is so obvious to me. Radio isn’t about grabbing attention. Anybody can grab attention. Radio is about keeping it, hour after hour, for an audience that can leave at any second. You learn to give people a reason to stay. You learn to build hooks, tease what’s coming next, know when to talk, when not to talk and how to keep something moving. When I started presenting betting content for William Hill more than a decade ago, all of that transferred directly.
And we already know the format works. Look at Soccer Saturday, which has spent years entertaining people by talking about football matches they can’t even see. Reaction, personality, information and entertainment, delivered live. Betting has had all the ingredients available to it for years. It just hasn’t had the recipe.
You can see the same change happening outside betting. Buying something online used to be purely transactional. You searched, you clicked, you paid. Now look at ecommerce platforms such as eBay and Whatnot who are investing in the live experience, where people spend hours watching someone sell something live, joining in, chatting, bidding against each other and treating the whole thing as entertainment. The transaction still happens. But the experience became the product.
Betting is still too focused on treating the transaction as the product.
There is another part of this conversation that I think is important: AI. I understand the attraction. I use AI myself and there are plenty of things it can do incredibly well. But I don’t think AI solves this problem. You can’t manufacture the genuine reaction to a goal that’s just gone in. You can’t recreate the feeling in a room when a 40-1 shot comes flying down the outside. Live content works because a real person is experiencing that moment at exactly the same time as the audience. And people know the difference.
There is also something quite funny about flying to a conference centre on the other side of the world, specifically to sit in a room with other human beings, and then discussing how AI is going to solve engagement.
For me, the more AI-generated content we see, the more valuable real people and real personalities will become.
None of this is a secret and none of it is protected. Anybody reading this could build it. In fact, I expect competitors to copy what we’re doing, and that’s fine. I’d rather see a category with several credible businesses proving this works than an industry continuing to talk about the same problem year after year without solving it.
The opportunity has been sitting there in plain sight for years. The technology exists. The audience exists. The content opportunity exists. The real question is whether you have the people who can actually do it, people who know how to engage, entertain and retain an audience.
