SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
BetITBest CEO Nico Jansen, who is speaking at this week’s World GES in Barcelona, reflects on the advantages of a strong Germany squad at Euro 2016 for his business.
How has business been during the Euros? Is Germany’s progression good for BetITBest?
In terms of our traffic, which mostly comes from Germany, the progression of the German team is quite good as we could easily increase the numbers of our users by 12%, if not more.
In addition, we have seen an increase of articles covering the German team and their opponents. Given that they are world champions, Germany deserve to be classified as the actual favourites to win the European Championship and that also creates interest.
Besides Germany people are interested in the stories about ‘David vs. Goliath’ – so the progression of Iceland, who unfortunately had leave the tournament after their loss against France, and the great performance of Wales have been covered by a lot of articles at our end.
What sports will you be focusing on once the Euros has finished given there’s a month before the start of the domestic football season?
Although domestic football leagues are only just starting in August, football is always one of the top topics, as during the off season transfers are being made and the Champions League and Europa League Qualifications are already ongoing.
Besides ‘king football’ we are seeing a huge interest in Wimbledon and we are thrilled to see the impact of this year’s Olympic games as well. Alongside these traditional sports, we are seeing a high demand of esports, which will also increase their impact on our industry. The numbers don’t lie on esports. It is already hugely popular.
How is the deep integration with bookmakers progressing? Are bookmakers receptive to what you are trying to do at BetITBest?
We already and fully integrated with four bookmakers and our queue is already fully filled with integrating even some more. In addition, we have already signed up some ‘big dogs’, which fully believe in our approach and in the impact the idea of ‘one wallet’ will have on the industry.
As of now we have a total number of 17 bookies interested in being integrated to our system, so the boys and girls from our IT department are doing a tremendous job by integrating those bookies step by step. Of course we are very happy having the support of the right people at our partnered bookies, as some other projects have been put aside to being capable of integrating their end to our end.
Based on our credo, keeping the demand for resources at the bookies end at a possible minimum, we only need a few days to fully integrate a bookie to our system. But as we all know, the clock is always ticking and if your idea is not supported and backed by the right people, you are tilting at windmills. So we are doing pretty well and we are looking forward to finally open our full portfolio to the B2C-world as soon as we receive our licence from the MGA.
What is your content strategy – is the main focus on statistics or do you plan for more stories and video content?
By the start of EURO 2016 we published a EURO 2016 native iOS app to cover the latest news and twitter posts of the EURO 2016 teams. Just for this event we additionally integrated around 300 news agencies and 100 twitter channels. So besides offering the latest scores and live match trackers, we are still able to cover the latest news and rumours as well.
As we already cover around 1,500 news agencies, 1,000 twitter channels and 500 Youtube channels, we are looking forward to even integrate Instagram accounts. Luckily a lot of sportsmen are quite addicted to social media and post a lot of interesting stuff about their day-to-day life.
As we updated our crawler as well, it just takes minutes for all those different sources to be fetched, linked to the teams and therefore available for our users. We will update our native apps as well to make it as comfortable and easy as possible for our users to get the latest news, tweets, pictures and videos of their desired clubs and stars. It all helps our plan of being the user’s ‘one account to cover them all!’
What makes World GES such a compelling proposition for Bet IT Best?
This is the second time I have been invited to World GES as a speaker to run and host a discussion table. It is a great event to get in touch with other decision makers from our beautiful industry, as you usually do not meet and greet this amount of C-Level people during other events.
In addition the World GES is built as and enforcing networking in a special way. The location is chosen wisely and it is taken care of people actually interact with one and each other. Besides talking business with attendances you can easily switch topics and deepen a business relationship by getting on the personal level without any difficulties. So in the end our industry is a widely distributed family (from Tel Aviv all over Europe, Isle of Man and Curacao) which gets together at those special occasions.
