Is crowd betting the best way to make sports betting more social?

Operators have struggled for years to make sports betting more social. The benefits of a customer sharing a bet with their mates are obvious; natural customer acquisition, better engagement and free word-of-mouth marketing.

And while no operator can claim to have cracked the code yet, a couple of recent crowd betting initiatives look to be a step in the right direction.

Colossus Bets last week launched its Syndicates product, which lets groups of players club together for a ticket into Colossus’ jackpots.

The product is designed to let punters get a greater number of tickets into jackpot tournaments, boosting engagement as more entries stay alive throughout a sporting event. Colossus also included a variety of social elements in the product, allowing syndicates to vote on when to cash out, for example.

Elsewhere, Sky Bet recently launched a crowd-boosted accumulator feature – where the odds on a selected acca get better and better as more people get on it.

The likely idea is that a punter will try and convince his friends or social media followers to get on the same bet, improving everybody’s odds, and presumably generating some free marketing for Sky Bet.

But there are inherent problems in crowd betting – not many companies can deliberately expose themselves to a major liability on one acca like Sky Bet can, for instance.

There is also the naturally private nature of betting. No punter likes broadcasting his losers and it remains to be seen how long a Colossus Syndicate can keep losing bets – the expected outcome on the massive tournament pools – before members get fed up.

With that in mind, we want to know your thoughts. Are crowd betting innovations like the two above the first step towards a more social form of betting? Or is crowd betting doomed to fail like other social betting efforts to-date?

Have your say here…