Will there be a sports betting awakening in 2018?

This will be a year of awakening and coming of age for the digital sports betting industry in many ways. The industry has long lagged behind other eCommerce sectors and not matured as rapidly. It has for years been characterised by major players essentially on similar third-party supplied technology platforms and it has been very inward looking and copycat.

The result was that operators were not in control of their technology destinies, they were not innovative and they were all essentially selling the same old pizza and differentiating only on price and promotion. This is not what happens in the wider eCommerce world.

Other sectors displayed a clear understanding that to win you need to compete on product and service, and that you need to be different, faster, smarter, cheaper and cooler. You need to innovate not just features but business models, and to do that you must have control of your technology, your product road map and your timelines.

You need to be flexible and able to fail fast and iterate. Is Google a white label? Is Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, eBay, Uber, Hotels.com? Typically in most other sectors technology becomes owned quickly and competition is primarily on product and service.

Non technology owners fall away and the remaining ones are just small players on the side lines. Typically four or five players are left standing with reasonably distinct offerings for which they are known.

I believe that the awakening is happening, but for many operators it might be too late. I myself came from eCommerce outside this sector with a clear mission to build my own platform, overlay the best innovation from elsewhere (personalisation, recommendation, filtered search and discovery, A.I., speed of platform and so on) and then to innovate even further on top of that again. This is the way to deliver what customers want and to take your share of market in the top four or five when it has all played out.

Looking ahead

So what does 2018 hold in store? This year Paddy Power Betfair have launched their new platform. They now control their destiny and their delivery timelines and pay no royalty to a platform provider. They can point their IT at innovation.

BetBright and few others are in the same boat as PPB with technology control. The bar will move up and pizza sellers are ultimately doomed. All the other big players I believe now realise this is the only path but for many it is too late, they are already passing into history.

Furthermore, regulation has yet to move its mighty hand. FOBT regulation will decimate the retail footprints and all that free high street branding and advertising with cross-sell to digital will shrink greatly.

We may see bonusing restricted or banned in 2018 or 2019 and when that happens all that will be left to compete on is product. The age of promo and price war will come to an end and the market will ultimately reduce – as I said to four or five players over the next three to five years and BetBright intends to be one of them.

I look forward to this year. It is the year which marks the beginning of the coming of age, the arrival of the time when the technology disruptors and the innovators will be the kings and that is our space so bring it on.

Marcus Brennan is an ecommerce entrepreneur and founder of multiple business in the telecommunications, gaming, social and entertainment sectors. In June 2012, he founded BetBright and took on the role of CEO, a position he maintains today.