Fantasy pick’em company Bounty Sports is aiming to grow its already large North American presence with a new strategic content partnership with Inside the Pocket (ITP). ITP is an aggregation platform around free-to-play content and the hope is the deal can help expand Bounty Sports’ footprint, particularly in Canada.
The paid pick’em site is already available in 23 states as well as across Canada. ITP is focused on F2P content as well as DFS and P2P, but the partnership with Bounty Sports will bring a new content vertical to the organization.
Through the deal, Bounty Sports and its suite of products will be exposed to a new set of affiliates and media sites via the Inside the Pocket platform.
“Despite some notable successes and consistent growth, this rapidly-changing sector always asks you to evaluate your next best steps. Which is why this third-party collaboration with an aggregator as unique as ITP made such strategic sense for Bounty Sports. Their technical know-how sets them apart in the overlapping F2P / DFS domains of game development, player management, and multi-level data,” said Bounty Sports CEO Jess Hodgson.
As Hodgson sees it, DFS appeals to some of the same sharps the major sportsbooks are offering. Bounty Sports aims to shelter recreational players from the pros with algorithm-based models:
“Our longstanding contention at Bounty Sports is that traditional fantasy sports models are geared towards the sharps who dedicate significant resources to creating algorithms which can unravel the complexity of DFS scoring systems and last-minute team-roster changes across the leagues. In response, Bounty has created an entirely new ecosystem in which fans can participate in fantasy sports alongside other more recreational users, without being picked off by cutting-edge algos. We’re combining the power of traditional pick’em style pools with the social element of fantasy and F2P.”
For Inside the Pocket, the appeal of the deal is the broadening of their content platform. CEO and Founder of Inside the Pocket Hussain Naqi explained the appeal:
“We’re supremely well-positioned to leverage this opportunity because we can diversify content, leverage consumer data, and segment it for our clients as the North American market’s shifting sands crystallize. Our complementary partners at Harte Hanks and Xpoint are also affording ITP unique consumer insights and precise regulatory-location control that will allow us to hyper-segment audience communication in good time for the upcoming NFL season the World Cup 2022 football, always tent-pole events for operator performance, and correlated marketing targets.”
Bounty Sports and ITP believe in the synergy across not just DFS and sports betting, but F2P games as well, so the hope is this deal will provide a synergy that enhances both parties as they expand across North America.
