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Recode has spoken to a number of experts who offer a glimpse into the future of sports betting in the United States and how media giants hope to get a piece of the pie. Drudge featured the link to this article prominently atop their page Friday afternoon.
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The easiest way for media companies to play in this is to simply take ad money from sports bookmakers, and/or develop programming aimed at sports gamblers, Recode notes.
The Bleacher Report, for example, just announced it will be hosting a gambling show out of the Caesar's Casino property in Las Vegas.
Earlier Friday, Gambling911.com reported that Sinclair Media will be producing a gambling show broadcast throughout the state of Nevada.
Recode asks this question:
One complicating wrinkle: The overwhelming majority of sports gambling happens via illegal/offshore operations. Do media companies want to take money from those guys, the legal/US guys, or both?
It wouldn't be a surprise to see a handful of these companies start accepting ads from offshore betting companies. After all, they used to. The offshore gambling firms pay top dollar too.
The less likely is what Recode offers here:
Trickier: Making more money via affiliate advertising, where the media companies make money by sending viewers and readers directly to casinos and sports books, and getting paid for each referral. Affiliate revenue is increasingly important to all kinds of publishers (including Vox Media, which owns this site), so this isn’t a difficult idea to grasp. But it does link the media companies more directly with betting, which may give some of them pause. Maybe because they’re worried about liability issues that could arise when problem gamblers end up looking for someone to sue once they’ve lost all their money, or perhaps because they simply don’t feel great about embracing gambling, period.
Over a decade ago, prior to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006, nearly all television, print and radio ads were paid in the form of media buys as opposed to afffiliate deals.
Whether companies look to delve directly into the gambling arena remains to be seen.
Sky, the UK satellite TV business that recently acquired by Comcast, owned its own betting business for 15 years.
Recode suggests that media companies the likes of CBS, ESPN, ABC and others have already dabbled in sports betting to some degree by mentioning spreads on games.
(But) now we are talking — in theory — about big media companies actually running their own sports books. Who might that be? We can rule out AT&T’s WarnerMedia, per AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson: Onstage at the NBA’s Tech Summit event in Charlotte, North Carolina, I asked him whether he’d be in the sports betting business directly and he responded with an emphatic, “No.” (But, per above, his company’s Bleacher Report is indeed going to be taking other gambling operations’ sports money.)
My uneducated hunch is that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox will be up for it, given that they’ve already been exposed to it via Murdoch’s operations in the UK and other territories where sports gambling has been legal for years.
Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
