For new sports bettors, navigating the waters of who to fade and who to follow keeps getting more and more difficult. Social media is a great place for these new users to get advice and learn how to bet, but oftentimes the algorithm fails them rather than further their education.
“The problem is that social media in general, but Twitter specifically, doesn’t target necessarily those who know, it targets those who speak,” said Alex Dubin, CEO of BettorOff. “And then the people who are effective but not necessarily effective self-promoters are drowned out. You have a signal-to-noise problem.”
BettorOff is one of many upstarts trying to address the problems inherent in the community of people giving picks. These issues range from a lack of transparency in how winning a bettor’s picks actually are to content creators opting for what will appeal to the algorithms of Tik Tok and Twitter rather than what will win at the end of the day.
BettorOff app wants transparency and results to speak for themselves
The idea behind BettorOff began with addressing one issue in particular.
“Bringing transparency to an incredibly opaque market was where it started,” Dubin recalled. As the app, which allows you to track your own picks as well as follow along with other bettors, developed, the scope of what BettorOff could do began to grow and change the vision. Now, Dubin summed up the mission like this:
“Enabling [sports bettors] to make that money but also shifting the balance of power from the content producer to the community and saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to give you a tool here that is going to allow you to actually objectively rank these people against one another. Decide who you listen to, who you spend your time on, and eventually who you spend your money on.’ So that it’s not just a matter of Twitter’s algo going after the people who hit 16-leg parlays and turn 50 cents into 12 Ferraris but ignores the fact that they’re $8 million in debt from the other 12,000 picks.”
Creating opportunities for micro-level betting expertise
With this customization, BettorOff aims to relieve some of the pressure for sports bettors who give picks to offer picks on everything, bringing down their overall success rate. In fact, the nature of the app is creating opportunities for expertise at a very small scale.
“I’ve tracked friends of mine who have little mini expertise areas. We have found plenty of people who have that, who are experts in Akron University football, which is a completely unmonetizable skill. But the ability to pick, they’re sort of micro experts. We’ve found plenty of them. But look, the broader you get, the more risk you take, and if you go broad enough, eventually the house is gonna win.”
The complete transparency of a user’s results is the selling point of BettorOff, but Dubin acknowledged there are plenty of people giving out picks that want nothing to do with the company. This resistance to tracking picks is not something that came about with the expansion of sports betting. Touts have a long history of obfuscating results so that the inevitable cold streaks don’t completely crater their bottom line.
“We’re definitely going to piss some people off. And there are going to be popular touts out there who don’t want a thing to do with us. We are not going to be for everyone because we’re about transparency,” Dubin said.
Dubin spoke at length about highlighting winners and successful bettors who make lack the panache of more commercial social media personalities, but BettorOff, like any social media concept, needs a plurality of people in order to succeed. The hope is the app can provide a range of utilities, including simply tracking your own picks or doing the equivalent of lurking and creating an account purely to curate what others are doing.
Entertainment still at the heart of BettorOff app
While BettorOff aims to filter out the noise and focus on the signal, the intent of the app is not to distill picks down to nothing but numbers with no personality. Dubin understands this is not a sustainable alternative to other social networks.
“There’s definitely a place for entertainment,” he said. “I think that any platform that brands itself as social media that steps away from entertainment, is going to have issues growing and scaling. We definitely aim to provide the entertainment side of it, right, all of the features that you have on Twitter, like share, comment, follow. That’s all there.”
Now that it is in place, the next step is seeing whether or not the BettorOff app can lure sports bettors making picks off the popular, broad social channels with plenty of eyeballs. For those like the micro-expert from Akron though, the users on BettorOff may be exactly what they need–a niche audience who appreciates what they have to offer and a platform for that audience to find them in the first place.
