Analysis: How Oddschecker plans to spread its wings internationally

Just under three years ago, EGR visited Oddschecker at its then new offices in West London to hear all about how the odds comparison firm was planning to finally make its mark internationally. The Hammersmith-based firm had long been one of the UK’s largest affiliates – granted this is a term it has recently sought to distance itself from – but the business had until then struggled to find success further afield.

The idea at the time was to revamp its Italian, Spanish and German products in time for the Euro 2016 tournament, taking the bold step to ditch Oddschecker’s traditional pricing grid after research had shown customers in international markets often found the feature too complicated. These non-UK customers were instead solely presented with the best odds for all markets, using a rotational system when two or more bookmakers are best-price.

“I think it’s fair to say that we have had a couple of false starts with regards to taking the Oddschecker product overseas, but we now not only have a bigger focus on the international side of our business, but also significant resource dedicated to it,” Oddschecker’s head of international, Andy Lulham, told EGR at the time. “Rather than just throw up local versions of the UK site as we have done previously, we have undertaken a huge amount of market and customer insight work, with the outcome being truly localised, fully responsive websites that have a completely diff erent look and feel to our UK product as it currently stands.”

Whether this new international model was successful is difficult to gauge, but the fact that since then the firm has revamped the products once again suggests Oddschecker didn’t see the benefits it anticipated. However, events in recent weeks revealed that the firm is set for a major overhaul which will have significant ramifications for the future trajectory of the business, particularly its international reach.

In January, EGR broke the news that Oddschecker was set to tie up with The Stars Group-owned affiliate firm iBus Media and rebrand as Oddschecker Global Media. The acquisition of Sky Betting & Gaming by the Toronto-listed operator last year had thrown up plenty of questions as to how the two online operators would integrate, but there had unsurprisingly been few discussions at the time as to what impact the deal would have on their respective affiliate businesses. Yet the recent announcement of Oddschecker’s tie-up with iBus Media suggests this could be a major turning point for a business that has for so long been reliant on both a single market and vertical.

Going global

The rationale behind Oddschecker Global Media is similar in some ways to that between The Stars Group and Sky Betting & Gaming. Stars, the clear leader in the poker vertical and an emerging casino giant, had long sought, with little success, to replicate this achievement in sports betting and the UK market. And its $4.7bn acquisition of the Leeds-based operator gave Stars a formidable foothold in both a market and vertical it had struggled to get much traction in.

In contrast, Oddschecker had long ago become a market leader in the UK sports betting affiliate sector, with little exposure to online gaming verticals. iBus Media, meanwhile, is one of the biggest online poker affiliates worldwide, as well as having made significant strides into online casino, and has a much stronger international reach than Oddschecker. The company’s flagship brand PokerNews, for example, has nearly 30 different language sites and accrues more than eight million page views every month.

“The idea is to leverage the reputation Oddschecker has within the industry and build a media group that is far more global than Oddschecker has ever been before and has a deeper expertise into various verticals including poker and casino and has a bigger geographic footprint than we have today,” Toby Bentall, Oddschecker Media Group CEO, tells EGR Marketing. “During the CVC years we did build a business in Italy, Australia, Germany and Spain, but now we also have plans to roll out the Oddschecker product into a number of different countries fairly quickly.”

iBus currently has offices in Lithuania and Barcelona, as well as dozens of employees scattered around other locations across the globe, and has a strong presence in a number of markets. One country it has a particularly strong foothold in is the US, which Oddschecker has highlighted as being a key market for the business in the future following the repeal of PASPA and the expansion of sports betting across numerous states. Indeed, Bentall himself highlights the importance of the US market for the firm which was recently in the process of hiring a new person to head up its international operations.

And one source familiar with the company, and speaking on the condition of anonymity, believes this rationale will bear fruit. “The level of employees hired and technology investment outside of the UK has always been less than the UK but the UK generates all the revenue. iBus Media lets them focus on casino and poker as well as sports, and gives them access to big brands and traffic, while the skill sets of Oddschecker employees will help them drive forward.

“It’s a huge chance for Oddschecker and a huge move in the industry,” the source adds. “This is the start of Oddschecker becoming a group rather than just one brand or site.”

Odds-on for success

The new Oddschecker Global Media set-up will see the group split into three divisions, with Oddschecker UK remaining as its flagship UK odds comparison business and led by current COO Andy Towers. The other two departments will become a hybrid of Oddschecker’s international arm and iBus Media’s networks and brands, while the third will be iBus Media’s Barcelona-based digital marketing agency.

The combined group, headed up by current Oddschecker MD Bentall, will see the business no longer report into Sky Betting & Gaming but will remain a separate function within The Stars Group. Like the merging of any businesses, the combination will unfortunately lead to the reduction of various synergies, which in this instance will see between 15% and 20% of the group’s employees leaving.

Yet these cost savings are really just the tip of the iceberg for the PokerStars owner, which is keen to ensure Oddschecker retains the independence it enjoyed under Sky Bet’s private equity owner CVC Capital Partners. “I report to one of Stars’ executives but they are not an operational person and there is a clear direction from Rafi [Ashkenazi, The Stars Group CEO] that he understands we need to be an independent business,” Bentall says. “We were autonomous before but what he wants to layer on is a bunch of affiliate businesses that already exist within the Stars Group.

“We’ve been through the period of being owned by private equity after CVC bought the business in 2015. It was a really successful period for Sky Bet and Oddschecker was growing well in that time with a lot of investment going into the two businesses. Stars bought the group and it’s fair to say they are really pleased to be getting Oddschecker as well as Sky Bet, albeit that was not the rationale for the transaction.”

The combined forces of Oddschecker and iBus Media will see the emergence of one of the online gaming’s industry’s biggest super affiliates. In last year’s annual EGR Power Affiliates rankings, the odds comparison firm obtained a top-five position after winning praise from the judging panel for the scale of the operation, the breadth of its operator partners and its push to become a content powerhouse. iBus Media, meanwhile, also secured a top-25 position in 2018, and the combined power of the two affiliate heavyweights, as Oddschecker finally goes global, could well see some big changes at the top of this year’s rankings.