Be honest. How much time have you spent scrolling through TikTok/Instagram Reels today? An hour? Two? Five? More?
Our brains are receptive to the dopamine we get from short-form video clips on these platforms and it’s no surprise that there are companies looking to build this experience within sportsbooks.
Meet Wager Games: a B2B software supplier which is trying to do just that. Wager Games provides a feed of short-form video clips from sports betting content creators into a sportsbook app natively players can turn into bets in one click.
The idea was borne out of the company’s founders love for sports betting, entrepreneurial spirit and tech backgrounds, as well as an observation around the changing of consumer consumption.
It’s not only TikTok that is tapping into short form content, but Spotify, Uber Eats and Amazon too.
“We looked at this change in the world, and we looked at our favorite hobby, sports betting, and we felt like this change in the world was inevitably coming to all online experiences, and sports betting was the perfect use case for it,” says Ben Levitt, Wager Games’ chief operating officer.
“There is an unbelievable amount of content being created off sports betting platforms, and the platforms themselves are text heavy, spreadsheet heavy, can be intimidating to newer users, and people, every time they log on, are wondering, what should I bet on today?”
A long-held complaint about the sports betting industry has been the UI; while product innovation has soared, operators have seldom introduced new features on the frontend, leaving users with the same spreadsheet style look.
Levitt and co are trying to change that: “We saw this opportunity to build the largest network in the world of media, affiliate and content creator content, and be the distribution hub to bring it inside the platform where the transactions are taking place.
“Ultimately we want to help sportsbooks have a more engaging, more insightful, more fun product and give users the experience they’ve come to expect from the rest of the internet.”
Founded in 2020 by Levitt, alongside CEO Kelson Quan and CTO Anuj Tomar, Wager Games developed from a B2C platform into a B2B provider with four North American clients and global expansion on the horizon.
Quan brought Levitt into the fold via an introduction from his entrepreneurial network while Tomar was previously his manager at the venture arm of a large bank on the west coast of the U.S. before taking the leap into Wager Games.
It has been a long journey to get to where the company is today and there has been a lot of technical work in the background.
“We were first integrating with MaximBet, our first client, and it was like drinking from a fire hose, honestly, because we had so many different kinds of data challenges with the kind of data that we had access to,” says Tomar.
“It’s a pretty smooth process of ingesting data that our clients provide and transforming it into data insights that take the form of a feed that a user ingests. Personalized bets, recommendations, head to head matchups, things like that are presented through data that a client might use just to understand particular users.
“So we take it and aggregate it and transform it into something that’s usable for a general population.”
Short form content for acquisition and retention
The Wager Games team have identified two core use cases for its solution: an aggregation of content outside of the sportsbook, bringing content creators into a marketplace for people to find these picks in a dedicated sports betting world, and providing for those who like dedicated second screen experiences outside of the sportsbook to find great content, to find ideas on what to bet on.
Levitt explains: I think where we sit in the middle is bringing this content onto the sports betting platform and giving sportsbooks the power to own a community and allow users, when they want to go find what they bet on, to not go somewhere else, but to go to the sportsbook and find engaging, positive, insightful content there.”
The company also wants to tap into personalised experiences, serving up content based on bets that players had placed previously. A classic player retention tool; give players more of what they want, and they will stay.
But the use of influencers and content creators can also be a powerful acquisition tool.
“We initially thought it was a retention tool as well,” says Levitt. “But it turned out that sportsbooks were really able to market that they have creators. We have a whole educational corner. You don’t even feel like you’re learning, you’re watching an engaging video.”
In action for the NBA Playoffs
As the NBA season reaches its climax and the finals kicking off on Thursday, Wager Games is ready to provide content for bettors looking to get in on the action.
And the team explains that a win-win situation is created during big sports actions: the sportsbook earns the traffic from the creator and, in turn, the creator earns more followers from existing bettors.
“We’ve seen some really viral moments around the NBA Playoffs that range from sharp analytical advice to fun picks that have been really exciting,” Levitt says. “On the acquisition side, it’s really cool, our creators are letting their followers know they can actually find content and other amazing content like it inside of select sportsbooks, and they’re so proud to be featured in Wager Games.”
What’s next for Wager Games?
The company is fresh off winning the First Pitch competition at SBC Summit Americas last month and is ready to continue making a splash in the market. In addition to their four live clients Kambi has announced them as the preferred social-infrastructure provider for their leading turnkey sportsbook platform.
Its product is already having a big impact. The company claims that if a user follows at least two creators, there is a 50% retention lift month over month.
There is still plenty of development for the company to do, however.
Asked about technical improvements upcoming, Tomar notes that “we will be improving our core product feed, making it more engaging, making it more personalized.” He also reveals that international expansion is on the horizon.
“There’s a whole suite of things that we’re currently building to enable that we’ll need internal tools for our teams that are going to be standing up some of these new countries, and that’s going to be an entire project in itself,” Tomar adds.
Levitt closes off by pronouncing his gratitude to the industry for the company’s welcome and reception.
He says: “We came into this industry not knowing a soul, and knowing that we were really good at building fast and building things that we thought that users wanted, but truly as complete outsiders, and the way that the industry has embraced us from the operator level has blown us away.”
