Sports and Media Just Got Betr⚡️

Recorded: March 17, 2023 Duration: 1:02:10

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(upbeat music)
Hey, welcome everybody.
It's been an action pack week of AMAs and we're going to cap it off today. Andrew Forte is going to be leaving the charge on this one. I'm going to be supporting. We got
Scott on the mic. Scott, quick mic check to make sure we can hear you, sir. Yo, what's going on, Noah? What's up, Andrew? What's up, well, Tom? Good to be in the aquarium today.
Absolutely man great to have you Andrew forte. Want to give a quick intro before we jump jump into things? Sure I'll definitely top and I'll definitely tap into it. So the team is out here right now. They're running a few minutes late, but we will be patient. So better.
It's changed the way we look at Legacy Media as well as Legacy Sports and Legacy betting. So hopefully talk to that great team. Today the co-founder Joy will be attending as well as ahead of media. So we're in for a good conversation and obviously guys everyone be sure to follow all the speakers up.
up top and definitely be sure to kind of rock with the tweet down below and run for a good space. If you don't even have any questions, just either DM myself, know one of the speakers or possibly even kind of post under the chat of the text box up here.
Yeah, right on and actually it never heard of better until you put it on on my radar and your forte. How'd you hear about them? So initially know they have a pretty large following on Instagram more than you on Twitter. Essentially all of the all of the following on Instagram is productive.
Well, I'm looking forward to hearing more and hopefully our guests jump in here relatively soon. No, Joey is here. Just please bring him up. Nice. Yeah, Joey. I'm going to shoot you a quick invite.
And guys, make sure you're on your speakers or in here. Make sure you're on your phones. Otherwise, we're not able to pull you up to speakers. Unfortunately, player spaces is still trying to
sort out some tweaks or rather sort out some bugs and tweak some of the infrastructure to make it more user friendly.
So if you're having issues connecting, there should be a request button at the bottom right, bottom left, if you're screened, you should be on your phone, laptops, not computable. So it's sure hit that button and it should let you out pretty quickly because no one has sent the invite already.
Yeah, I think Scott made the same mistake. He initially joined with his computer and then realized he had to be on mobile so he switched over.
Alright Joey not you guys here if you can hear us sir. I could hear you can you can you hear me? Yes, yes, slot and clear. Alright, sorry about that. This is my my first Twitter spaces and I had to like enable
the microphone for the Twitter app. I've never had to use it before. So, I'm going to appreciate you guys having me on. -Duey, welcome to our stage and we appreciate you showing up and giving us a time to do this today. -Sure thing. -All right guys, welcome Joey. He's one of the co-founder, CEO of Better.
Joy, please give yourself and obviously, what you guys doing it better or quick introduction about yourselves. Sure. So yeah, founder and CEO of better. You could view better as to some extent almost like a holding company that runs a gaming business and media business on the gaming
side were really differentiated in two primary ways. One is we have a focus on simple intuitive UI UX. I actually got involved in this category and started my prior business simple bet because I felt like the existing sportsbook product
experience is back when I started simple about about seven years ago as a project and you know this this probably holds true still today you know I looked at a sports book and I saw things like -175 money line +5 and a half points bread and I quite literally didn't know what those product experiences meant so so it better we're
really focused on just making sure that the product experience on the sportsbooks I it is simple and intuitive and that people who haven't been on sports before are able to pick up the product and intuitively interact with it almost not not too dissimilar from what Robinhood did today trading we view the current set of sportsbook products almost like
the e-trade fidelity trial swab of the day trading category at the time. And then the second thing we're really focused on is instant gratification vetting, what we're calling micro vetting. So in play vetting has been a thing that's been around for a long time, but
the extent of in play betting has generally been the pre-match game line, what's typically a money line fluctuating over the course of the game, and that line fluctuating and not resulting until the end of the game. What micro betting is done is it is introduced
Instant gratification of the sports betting user experience by enabling the discrete moments within sporting events like pitches and at bats of baseball games plays and drives the football games to become their own To become their own discrete betting opportunities and and you know my company simple bad action
We pioneered the technology to enable microbedding. We started as a direct consumer company focused on simplifying the sports betting user experience and after the Supreme Court repealed the federal ban on sports betting, we decided to focus exclusively
on US ports and when we were looking for the back end technical infrastructure to enable moments within sporting events become their own discrete betting opportunities, we discovered that nobody had built it before. So we had to build a lot of machine learning and automation infrastructure to to enable that to exist and that's ultimately, you know, along the way it's simple that we realized that we could
And so, you know, make a lot of money just licensing that technology to other operators, but, um, but along the way realize that we had no control over the user experience and, and from my standpoint, that was the biggest limiting factor to the mainstream adoption of not just micro betting, but sports betting as a category in general.
ultimately why we're pursuing better and going after the UI/UX. So that's a little bit more about the gaming business. There's a little bit more to it that I could get into later. And then on the media side, really focused on original and short form content to almost go after this grassroots
effort to not just build brand awareness and we can get that anytime we want given I started this business with Jake Paul who has you know has as most of you probably know one of the more famous athlete influencers in the world right now but we're really focused on brand affinity
in the meantime, original short form content, developing a relationship with our audience such that we can convert our audience over to our suite of real money gaming products in a manner that has effectively low to no customer acquisition costs. So that's a super quick overview on the business.
That's awesome. So I do a couple of quick questions. Obviously I've been I'm sort of fluent within the betting industry obviously not as well as you are. The term micro betting is that a term you guys created and kind of I guess quote unquote coin or something that has been used before now you guys just kind of reinventing the wheel and kind of creating a new fork for it. Yeah, so.
Microbedding's existed to to some extent prior to the US market opening up. I would say if you just zoom out for a moment and think of what drove what drove the global regulated marketplace before the US market opened up, the sport was predominantly
predominantly soccer. And if you think of the cadence of a soccer match, there's not really many moments to bet on. There's not a lot of scoring. It's a very fluid game. So you did have some next occurrence markets around things like, will the next thing that happened in this soccer match be
a throw-in yellow card, red card, gold, corner kick, etc. But I think you could probably all agree that those are kind of contrived user experiences. Right. Like it's not... You're not watching a soccer match wondering to yourself, will there be a throw-in before a red
So micro betting did exist to some extent, but it never really lent itself very well to soccer and just generally the global marketplace. But if you think of the Keynes and composition of US sports, they're very stopped in starting nature. They're driven by moments like
which is net bats of baseball games, plays and drives football games. And they're also driven by a lot of scoring and speculation over superstar players and what they'll do next. So, you know, it kind of did exist, but it, you know, until the U.S. market opened up and there was this emphasis on U.S. sports, it never really made sense for
company to come around and invest the tens of millions of dollars in years required to build the requisite machine learning and automation infrastructure to ultimately enable it to to exist in the manner that that simple that has enabled it to exist and and better is enabling to exist from user experience standpoint.
I appreciate that great insight. So the second thing you mentioned in the media, obviously, your Instagram account is doing very, very well. I do follow both accounts one here on Twitter, the one on Instagram. Obviously, everyone listening should be doing the exact same thing if you haven't already give joy of follow as well as all the speakers appear as well as a better account of obviously on Twitter and Instagram. So it's obviously, it's really
parent that all brands are trying to build on social media. Essentially you guys create great content on Instagram. Do you see an overlap within the short-form content you are creating so those are kind of digesting consuming your platform and from a betting perspective? Or is there an overlap there or two separate entities? What's what you notice thus far being operational?
Yeah, I mean, so if I'm understanding your question correctly regarding overlap, you mean our media audience converting the product? Yes. So yeah, I mean, like I said, the number one priority for better media is to ultimately serve as a low-to-no-cack.
vehicle for the gaming business. And so far, the initial results from that have been very positive. We actually estimate, and it's hard to get the exact numbers for this because, as you may know, Instagram and TikTok don't tell you exactly how many people you have and how many people follow you in Ohio for
example, which is where we're currently live with our real money vetting product, but we estimate that at least 20% of our social media audience in Ohio has already converted to real money gaming fuser. We've only been live in the state for a little bit over two months. So, so far,
the audience to product conversion has been very strong and that's really encouraging because we're nowhere near where we ultimately want or need to be from a content creation and just general media perspective. We're just scratching the surface of what we ultimately think we may be able to
I think it's probably around 10 full-time employees on the VDS side right now. Obviously we have Jake and we have some other talent like Millie and dollar Marko and Han Shake Bats and Derek have really done a nice job of establishing themselves as talent.
that is engaging with the community. But everybody's getting a lot better every day and we're just getting started on the BDSI. But so far the initial results have been very encouraging. That's awesome. Yeah, you guys, you guys, content on Instagram and TikTok offers, but absolutely phenomenal.
It was there kind of a point in time, Joey, when you guys kind of had this aha moment, like, you know, disrupt, you know, legacy media or legacy betting or it was just kind of, you know, this kind of this, this thought process that was taken over the past, you know, 12, 16, 24 months, whatever it may be, the kind of solely graduated into that process or is it something you guys will just kind of hit#
I said we can exploit them here because they have blind spots, XYZ blind spots. What was kind of like that process when you guys initially started out? How did the thought become a deliverable essentially? Yeah, I don't know how much time we have. I got into some of the founding story, but not all of it.
for me this has almost been like a decade-long journey. I got started in the US sports gaming market almost a decade ago. I started a daily fantasy sports business that was focused on simplifying DFS at the time. I don't know if you all are familiar with the initial iterations of Fando on Drapking.
But there were like these salary cap contests or you need to fill a line up according to a salary cap and enter it into a contest called a GPP and you know you'd win prizes according to how well that line up performed against others and you know I felt like at the time that was about 2013 2014 that that experience was too complicated.
for the casual sports fan and I started the company trying to be the casual sports fan platform, casual sports fan oriented platform for the daily fantasy category and it was through that experience that I was introduced to traditional sports book a couple years later.
And realize that to whatever extent the DFS experience was not really built for a mass market casual sports band, the traditional sportsbook experience was even worse as I alluded to with the minus 175 money lines, the plus 5.5 coin spreads, the fact that the product experience
It's self felt like a transactional UI layer almost feeling like interacting with a spreadsheet versus a mobile experience that was built to engage and entertain the consumer and ultimately started simple bet as a project to go after that about six, seven years ago and then along the way recognize
recognize the micro-betting opportunity as it pertains to the US market specifically and built the leading PDP technology company that is enabling this new form of betting to exist. And now better in many ways is for me
just finishing what I started in terms of figuring out this user experience that the casual sports band is able to resonate with. And the initial data supports the fact that there's something major missing in the US sports gaming market today.
For example, Fandall, who's the market leader, they've talked out at about 3.5 million MAUs, I think on their strongest quarter. But they're currently in front of 85 million or so gambling age sports fans and they'll be in front of closer to 175 million.
add maturity and I don't think they have a brand awareness problem. They quite literally advertise like car insurance companies, except perhaps they're not as funny. I think there's more of a product problem where the majority of sports bands in America don't like they quite
and literally can interpret the sports betting product experiences that are put forward to them. So, you know, been almost on a decade-long journey to try to solve this. We had to build a lot of the background tech along the way to get to this point. We've done that. We've set up better to solve this problem and then along
the way obviously realized that customer acquisition was going to be a, you know, if not the primary expense to properly scaling and operating this business. And, you know, I'm not going to win by outspending fandal and draftings on customer
position. We realized along the way we would have to play a different game than that. But what we could win potentially is the game of building the first media organization and brand that actually has brand affinity with the consumer, I would say,
perhaps far as well as sports is maybe the only other company in our category that that is approached that's approached customer acquisition in this manner. So it I guess more directly answered your question. This has been a very long journey for us. And you know, in many ways, better is
is finishing what I started almost a decade ago and it feels like we're off to a good start. Things are going according to plan or even beating plan a little bit. But obviously we're not even close to scratching the surface of what we ultimately want to accomplish and we're just getting started here.
It is for sure awesome to hear all the experience that you had. The junior team have joy and I'm glad you're getting back to what you started in the beginning. Obviously there's a difference between retention and consumption. I feel like you know, consumption is way more important than retention. You can retain 100,000 followers, 100 followers, whatever it may be. How many of those people can actually consume on a daily basis, weekly basis, whatever it may be.#
you guys content strategy moving forward within better on on Instagram Twitter took that all these kind of platforms is really kind of platform and culture to where every every you know every content strategy every QAQC is different per platform what's kind of that that strategy going forward and you know clearly up to date for you guys I'm like yeah sure yeah great question so I don't know if
You know, none of us know if TikTok is going to be the end during platform that ultimately, you know, is the category leading social media company, but we do feel like most social media platforms will ultimately increasingly look more like TikTok rather than last, right?
thinking about content, I'd say we're probably building it for TikTok and then YouTube and then Instagram sort of in that order and then ultimately expecting those other platforms to look increasingly more like TikTok. So original content, short form content,
And of course we also have a nice slate of premium content that's a lot longer form. But you can take short form content out of that. And for example, BS which I call a lot of views for episode basis is already the number one sports show on digital.
YouTube. We actually launched season two yesterday, so I encourage you all to watch it and let us know what you think. But the original short form content built for TikTok, but acknowledging that those other platforms will likely look more like TikTok than last over time.
That's awesome. Yeah, essentially, you know, we live in a tension economy, an attention to the worst state, that's currently where we're currently at, obviously. And I think there's lots to get done with TikTok, because there's tons of benefits on TikTok for the reason that it's very, very fast pace. You can kind of have, you know, everything on your role that once go through four or five, you know, videos of better within#
I think it's fantastic. Joey, while we're coming on topic of business strategy and content strategy, obviously this being your very first Twitter space is maybe a little bit premature question, but do you feel like sometimes the future you could implement Twitter spaces as part of your business strategy and a rollout? I mean, you might be more of an expert on this than I am.
I'm just gathered my bearings here, but no, this is cool, right? Like I could see maybe there's like a virtual watch party where like some of our talent are you know watching the event on TV and then talking about it with others here on Twitter spaces. So yeah, I mean that's just like one initial
idea that comes to mind. I think my head of media and just content team and Jake would have a lot of a more informed perspective than I would as you know the person who's really more focused on the gaming business at this company but not as this feels like a cool platform and certainly over
been to exploring it, particularly given how authenticity and sort of just being off the cuff a little bit here is sort of at the heart of the ethos of our voice. This is a nice forum for sort of facilitating that, I would think.
Twitter space is a zephy interesting joy and tell it in Scott also hold their own Twitter space is ever every weekly but every week every every day within that week and obviously it's a little bit different because you know usually marketers there's kind of the anticipation of how many people they're actually can kind of interact with with Twitter
before most people are really unaware of this. I personally feel like there's a lot of underpriced attention on Twitter spaces, but we have yet to see that. Tout and Scott can definitely jump in there on their thought of Twitter space and how it can be implemented into any brand, especially yours, moving forward if possible.
Yeah, man, I think that would be a great idea. And I think it would be cool to do it once a month. Like you were saying, Joey, I kind of have a live thing. Not only do people that are involved, I think it's great for people that are just interested. People that are inquisitive. And when you come to Twitter,
There's no signing up for anything. You just come vibe. You like it. You know, come play the game. But I think just the experience that Joey and Better could do. No one's doing that right now. And I think that bringing in the talent
That you already have Joe. I think that it could be a real cool thing to start doing like maybe once a month So not so heavy lift at first. There's something real real easy once a month Cool. Yeah, no definitely open to exploring this maybe Maybe I'll follow up with you to
directly after this call. You can speak with some guys on some of the people on our media team and give us some advice on how to go about this. But we're certainly open to it. I think it's a good idea to at least explore. >> Awesome. Joey, I have to ask, we've kind of, you know, I've, you know,
run through that wall what's been that one thing that has really kind of been more on the difficult end for you guys right now. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it just comes down to the nature of the business we're in which is that you know you have I mean just to use Massachusetts as a specific example so better than Massachusetts will be
our second state that we go live in, better was one of 10 companies to get a sports weight-during license in the Commonwealth. The other nine companies are either worth at least a billion dollars or very close to it. So you're competing against
not just one or two, but I think probably just about a dozen if not more incumbents that are billion dollar or multi-billion dollar organizations that just are far better capitalized than you are. They have more money to
to pursue a customer acquisition program and build out a brand and then take that brand that they're attempting to build out nationwide and ultimately convert it over to real money sports betting products in more states because they can afford to get market access and
licenses in a far faster, all-encompassing way with respect to nationwide expansion than that we can right now to provide some even more context to this dilemma. Some people suggested that we went out
And we raised $50 million in the Series A pre-revenue. And a lot of people were like, wow, that's a lot of money for a Series A and for pre-revenue. That's a lot of money, right? But just in January, just in Ohio, and just with promo bonuses, this doesn't even include the paid UA and
marketing efforts, Fandall and DraftKings combined for more than three times our entire equity financing, just in Ohio, January, promo bonuses, excluding their paid marketing initiatives. So my point is, this is going to be a series of David vs. Goliath matchups.
We have 50 million in equity financing and we're probably going to put a little bit more money into the company. We're still going to have to be incredibly deliberate and methodical with respect to the decisions we make.
on the product and go to market side of this business. For example, deciding to go live in Ohio first and then Massachusetts second and Virginia third and looking at these markets, getting market access in a way where there's equity components to the market access deals to mitigate
the upfront fees and minimum guarantees and then pursuing potentially other real money gaming verticals where maybe there's some skill-based gaming we could do where you could turn on a fantasy sports experience in 25 or 30 states and you're immediately so that you could better monetize and
by a media audience to support a gradual and methodical state-by-state rollout program for market access and licensing, thinking about things like, you know, better media as I alluded to at the beginning of this call is predominantly set up to serve as a low-to-no-cac engine for the gaming business.
We could potentially monetize the media company directly. There's plenty of brands out there that are complimentary or non-conflicting to ours that would probably love to, you know, send some, some, some mark, spend some marketing dollars with better media.
he has to have exposure to a growing audience. So my point is these are just some of the challenges that we have to face and ultimately the punchline is, I wouldn't say there's any specific challenge that comes to mind other than
The way we execute, how we sequence execution is incredibly critical to ultimately informing if we're going to be successful as a business in the space or not.
That was awesome. I obviously have no knowledge of your guys kind of marketing tactics or GTM strategies or whatever it may be. But just kind of also looking perspective here, you guys have one thing that most of these brands don't have. And I think a lot of that is social power from a social in an aspect from a brand aspect. I feel like you know brands obviously
I'll build on SoulShill as a lot of Brand-Eck, what are you behind your guys name having who you guys have on the team obviously, which we've touched upon earlier. Do you think that that's kind of one thing that really hasn't taken its full effect yet of the big names attached to your guys brand obviously working with you and not just kind of uses a leverage point?
Yeah, I mean, like I said, we haven't even scratched the surface of what we ultimately think. We can accomplish on the media aside and kind of what I was just alluding to too in terms of like how we're rolling out the business from a market access and licensing standpoint.
where we're currently only live in one state right now for real money betting. Next month will be live in Massachusetts and that will be two. You know, then after that will be live in Virginia and there's a few states after that. So my point is there's not
know, it's going to take quite a bit of time for better gaming or at least better, better, better betting, real money sports betting to be live on a nationwide scale, which is fine because it gives us time to find our boys, develop our audience.
and really perfect the product experience because also our product is nowhere near where we wanted or needed to be. I noticed you just shared a tweet in the spaces, for example, where a couple days ago we announced our introduction of our versions of core markets.
like money lines, points, spreads, and over-handers, we don't display it like the minus 175 and plus 5 and a half, that is uninterpretable and kind of the reason why I got started with all of this to begin with, but that's just one of many examples that point to
just how early stages we are from a product standpoint. So, you know, it's going to take months for us to really get more product parity with the incumbent operators. I think at least we do micro betting in order of magnitude or two better than anybody else.
I think we have the most intuitive UI/UX of any company in the category. I think the punchline here is we are deliberately growing slowly to build a healthy business which is actually not common in this category.
That's how we're growing it right now. And that's why I think to your point on talent and activating the media company, we're also pursuing that in a methodical way and still refining our voice and our content creation engine.
You know, that's why you know, and ultimately just not even scratching the surface of what I think will ultimately be able to accomplish. And the fact that version V0, if you want to call it that, is already resonating so strongly with consumers, both on the product and media side, is really encouraging to me.
Which is awesome and I do feel like you know, I feel like you know betting and obviously media are very well scalable I would say that media right now is way more scalable than I think it has been before This is the fact that I feel like TV time and kind of TV ads aside from the Super Bowl aside are kind of you know quote unquote dying off. It's not completely dead, but it is dying off
Most people carry a phone which makes it easy accessible. Most people kill their data per month. So can we imagine what they're watching on, you know, 60 hours a day on their phone. You ask 10 people in the audience right now to kind of see their screen time. I guarantee you their screen time is probably about 12 plus hours, which is not a healthy thing, but that's what it is. So obviously you guys are going from
You know Ohio to not Massachusetts. Obviously I assume there's somewhere in the role low in kind of in the strategy within the business. You guys want to kind of attack all states. Is there any plans after those states are kind of you know captivated and you guys are legally allowed to you know become a betting partner within that state? Is there obviously you know plans to go to Canada or overseas?
stuff like that? Worldwide possibly? Yeah, 100%. Worldwide domination is ultimately the goal. But like I said a few minutes ago, how we methodically sequence execution here is going to be critical with respect to ultimately getting to that. But yes.
I mean, I think our media brand is just given Jake as a global presence. And he's the leader and the godfather of the talent network that we're developing. So I think that combined with the fact that
you know, legacy sports book, not just in the US, but internationally as well as not really been invaded against in sort of the manner that we're pursuing. So, so yes, ultimately, we want to expand globally, but I think there's a
opportunity to build the first bespoke product experience for the US sports band right now with micro betting is being a pillar of that so we're going to be focused on the US market exclusively for the foreseeable future. I can only
I can imagine how difficult that process is on a per and a per state basis. I live in Toronto, but I can't imagine the process there of getting through the door and getting allowed to be partnered with that state and obviously it being a lot of that. The process is probably super, super tough.
initiative here to, you know, let's say, let's say possibly even integrate blockchain within the products of better possibly one day, let's say maybe integrate Bitcoin, anything kind of to that extent, US, US, DC, which is the native stablecoin to our crypto, anything kind of like that in the future plans for better.
Yeah, I mean, I'm open to it, right? I mean, I think as a startup and just the way Jake and I are wired were we're inclined to pilot emerging technologies and see if there's a way that it could benefit our business.
it could contribute to ultimately hope we want to accomplish from a business standpoint. So yes, certainly open to it. I think we have so much that we want to build right now from just a core product experience standpoint that we
you know, we haven't really been able to invest a lot of time or energy into figuring out exactly how we may be able to leverage blockchain technologies and crypto in general, but no, we're certainly open to it. I mean, one thing that immediately comes to mind
if I'm to speculate a little bit is maybe there's some component to how we are retaining users through loyalty programs that could enable this to make sense. But I don't want to sit here and
and speculate against a future product roadmap and pretend to be an expert in this category because I'm not, but I certainly open to it in the future. That's awesome. And, Joy, I would assume that you're catalyst for your growth right now. Do you think that your product experience and the product you guys have rolled out, or do you still look at some more so on the media?
was been the biggest callus to the growth of better thus far. Yeah, I mean I look we deliberately launched I don't know if I walked through the whole timeline yet but we launched the brand and the company is a media company in early August and then only a month later we launched the gaming business with the with the better
app which is a pre-to-play app available in 48 or more states and then we got a license so we launched that in September and then we got our Ohio license in November and then launched for real money vetting for the first time in Ohio. The universal start date and time of January 1st at 12 o'clock a.m.
But no, deliberately started as a media company to start with a brand, start with an audience, refine our messaging and engine there, and then very soon after launch the gaming business via the free-to-play experience and now Ohio for real money and soon to be Massachusetts and then Virginia
It's a highly differentiated product experience on the gaming side, but there's a lot of work to do. Getting core markets was a major step for us. Tune will be Parlay's and Player Props and other types of betting experience.
that consumers can find elsewhere. But I don't really want to pick one or the other because I think both are incredibly complimentary to one another and they've both been just, I think one of the reasons why we've gotten so much attention so quickly is because
Both gaming and media are highly differentiated in their own categories. And I truly believe that better has an opportunity to be the category defining company in two massive industries in gaming and in media, which represents a 10-new
$100 billion more opportunity over a very long period of time. I like how we started. I am content with the progress on both verticals. We have a pretty small team of like 30 or so full-time employees.
that have accomplished a lot so far and we're really leaning into being a small lean nimble team to continue to rapidly improve both our product experience and our media platform and ultimately looked to be number one of both categories.
Awesome, because you mentioned gaming joy, I do have to ask. I don't know if this has been done or I'm excuse my ignorance has eGaming right now been implemented in terms of like this someone being able to personally bet on that right now, whether it be Fortnite.
eSports possibly playing Madden or playing 2K. Is there that right now that's been integrated or something that could possibly happen on your guys then if this was to be part of your product role. Let's see the next 15-20 years.
Yeah, I think I'll put this in the, excuse me, I'll put this in a bucket similar to sort of blockchain crypto where it's something that we're very open to doing and are inclined to embrace, but now is not the right time and I'll say for eSports specifically there's two primary concerns.
Considerations here one is just a commercial viability consideration and you know I know that you know over the last 5 to 10 years or so There's been a lot of sort of industry talk about how eSports is really becoming Incredibly popular and and and the growth of eSports is is really accelerating
more recently. But at the same time, if you look at it, at least from a betting perspective, relative to sort of the big five sports, which you'll see on better now, you have Major League Baseball, then NFL and College Football, then NBA and College Basketball, those five sports that I just alluded to.
account for well over 90% of all betting volume right now. So from a business standpoint, again, going back to us needing to vary deliberately and methodically sequence execution, it makes more commercial sense for us to have the best possible
experience for those five sports versus integrating other categories in sports like these sports at this time right it's just so there's just the commercial consideration and then the same consideration which we're monitoring closely is the
regulatory one. There are some state regulators that have made it very clear that they just don't feel comfortable with betting on esports. Now I think so far that's been generally a minority opinion with respect to U.S. regulators, but nevertheless it's
something that needs to be closely monitored. So I think ultimately when it makes more sense for us from a commercial standpoint, we'll have more regulatory clarity at that time as well. So the timing will line up nicely for this to be sort of a two, three, four year away thing.
I definitely agree. I feel like increasing those four or five verticals at first, aside from, you know, increasing more with this definitely the way to go. I was gonna ask this question again just for kind of the silliness of the conversation. Drone racing potentially on the map, but who knows with all that in the same bucket. I feel like Drone Racing is kind of one of those things that's new. Many people haven't really heard about this,#
Watch gamers play on Kig or play on Twitch. It's one of those things that people could watch you race drones for the time lab, whatever. Maybe it's one of those things I've read today. But I'm always interested in reading stuff like that. Not that it obviously could happen, but there could be a future. I don't want to say no to anything obviously. No, 100%. I think one of my
One of my few feces on the space is that There's a lot of emerging IP. You know, there's drone racing league. There's pickle ball. There's corn hole. There's bowling. I mean, there's all of these sports that You know, maybe aren't the most mainstream sports, but if somebody is
the best possible consumer experience around, not just betting on pre-natch money lines, but actually enabling every single discrete moment of that sport to become its own betting opportunity and enabling consumers to do that in real time. I think betting may emerge as
the predominant way why a mass market mainstream consumer base ultimately engages with that emerging IP. So, and I actually was reading an hour before joining this, a simple, bad, announced partnership
earlier today with the indoor football league I think it is and they're helping them develop regulated micro betting products to help drive engagement for that IP.
dozens to hundreds of different live sports that I think can really be reinvigorated through really good betting experiences. And we were 100% going to focus on that at better and some spinners.
specific ideas we have around this is because some of these sports are still emerging and they're not as mainstream. There's even a world where better starts acquiring media rights for some of these sports. So imagine an experience where imagine you have the better app open and
In the bottom two thirds of the screen you have our core micro betting experience re-eval to battle the moments of the game and then on the top third of the screen instead of just a static Mac state display or a visual you know we have like a visualizer for college basketball for example in
Instead of that, you actually have a zero latency stream of the live sporting event. So within your app, you're watching this for it and then being able to bet on it on the same screen and then you could tilt your phone in landscape mode and just watch the stream that way like you would on YouTube TV and that
and then even tap on specific players and take the spoke micro markets on them in real time. There's a whole lot you could do with some of this emerging IP and we're very excited to embrace that when we're able to it better.
You're having yours to use essentially though. You know this better than I do as a great opera that you are You want to go with the attention as it's kind of all that really matters because the attention here is that there let's not kind of pick sides Let's just go with to where the attention is Do any of my panelists speakers have any more questions for Joey and about better end of team?
But by the way, just in the last comment, this is all on execution. So that's why I have no problem sharing some of these some of these ideas. If somebody wants to go out there and try to accomplish what I just alluded to, I would encourage you to try it. I mean, I think it's a good idea. I think, you know, I
I don't have a zero-sum mentality towards this either. I think there's a lot of room for winners here and there's just a lot of incremental time to create. Like I alluded to, there's, you know, Fandals topped out at about three and a half million MAUs.
And they're in front of 85 million gambling aid sports fans and will be in front of 175 at maturity. So there's so much incremental time to create here. And I think ultimately it's value-occurative to everybody in the ecosystem. If there's
of a lot of the
execution is definitely what it's really worship ideas are fantastic, but they're usually a dime a dozen, especially the great ones. So just kind of for the sake of conversation, what percentage of the US if you have this data actually does bet like bet like not just let's say once a month, but bets on a weekly basis, do you know that number percentage wise for the US?
I don't have that exact number on hand. There's a variety of different estimates out there. I can look back at sort of the American Gaming Association publishes a lot of data and they've done a lot
of research and towards sort of speculating against how many gambling customers there are in the United States, you know, it's very possible if not likely that's still the majority of people who are betting on sports in the United States.
States are doing so via unlicensed illegal offshore operators. That's just simply the consequence of California does not sports betting legal. Texas does it. Florida does it. Even in markets where it has been legalized and
operational, it's very nascent. I mean, we're still in the, I don't know if we're on the top of the first, but maybe we're on the top of the second here. Supreme Court repealed the federal ban on sports, but less than five years ago. And so I think there's a lot of room for growth here, but to go back to the statistic that I keep on alluding
to, you know, fandall in terms of MAUs has peaked better around 4% of the total gambling age populations that they're in front of. So, they're, you know, we're focused on that other 95% better.
That's awesome here. Noah, tell what you guys have any questions for Joey Joey. We appreciate your time. Obviously it's winding down to the hour. Rift 51 after seven. We appreciate you coming though. As I said before, Noah, tell what you guys have any questions for Joey.
So I don't, I'm not a better, I don't really participate and I don't know much about that world. So it was a pleasure listening to Joey drop knowledge on us and your forte fantastic questions and I'm looking forward to seeing better prosper and hopefully you guys
I think this was pretty all-encompassing. I appreciate the time and interest in what we're doing. I think over the next few weeks and months, you could expect to see better batting and
in more states and even more breadth against the, you know, with respect to the betting market coverage that we're going to have within the better betting app. And, you know, we may also pursue, as I alluded to, a few minutes ago, other
articles within gaming that will have more of a nationwide presence that may become available in the better app over the coming weeks and other rides just continuing to grow our audience and refine our content creation engine.
So yeah, I mean I appreciate the time and interest in what we're doing Awesome. So I appreciate your time once again, and I hope there comes a day where you can kind of sit back look of all you've done and then it's kind of come to clueless that you guys did it better That sounds good man. All right, appreciate you guys take care
Thank you guys. Guys, be sure to give joy a follow. We appreciate you guys to it and today for another episode of Wheelcoins.
Appreciate you, Joey. We welcome our community. That was the final AMA action pack week. Remember that everything here on this broadcast is my educational purpose. It's only nothing is financial advice. So be safe out there. I'll see you all next week. Take care.