SBC News SBC Interviews Thomas Høgenhaven Chief Strategy Officer at bettingexpert.com

SBC Interviews Thomas Høgenhaven Chief Strategy Officer at bettingexpert.com

bettingexpertThe SBC team catches up with Thomas Høgenhaven Chief Strategy Officer at bettingexpert.com, a leading traffic portal (Affiliate website) for sports betting. Founded in 2003 bettingexpert.com gives detailed reviews of igaming operators on all verticals. With head offices in Copenhagen, bettingexpert targets sports betting traffic from multiple European markets, making it a leading portal for sports betting advice.

Having recently released their new responsive website with better user personalisation. bettingexpert.com has a high emphasis on betting advice, expert tipping content and community interaction regarding betting selections.

SBC caught up with Thomas to discuss  igaming marketing, creating new portals for interactive consumers and operating an international community for sports betting enthusiasts.

ThomasSBC Hi Thomas great to meet you.  you have launched a new website with responsive design/capabilities over popular HTML 5 or App development why did you decide to choose this path and what interactions are you hoping to gain from this new release?

Thomas: We spent lot of time on this release. The old code on bettingexpert was a decade old and it was time to rewrite it from scratch, in order to prepare for the future. So we needed to write this release in order to build more features in the future. While we were at it, we made the site responsive in order to serve our large number of mobile/tablet users better. We also restructured our competitions in order to pay cash prizes rather than bookmaker vouchers. Finally, we launched our product in three new languages: Russian, French and Spanish. Our community has responded overwhelmingly positively to these changes and we have seen the visitor/sign-up ratio improve significantly.

At this point, we feel it is more scalable to offer our services via a responsive site that works on all devices. It enables us to deploy updates faster and more consistently across devices, which is our primary concern at this point.

This being said, there are features such as notifications that will work better in a native app, and we are looking into building apps around such features in the fall/winter.

SBC: You are one of the few acquisition portals that operates in multiple international markets? How do you as a team select which region you are going to operate in and what challenges have you faced when entering these markets?

Thomas: We are monitoring regulations in new potential markets closely. If our services are illegal in a market, we will not enter it. This is a clear stop light for us. Whenever we see green lights, we are evaluating the potential number of users and ROI. We also look at the geographical data on our existing users as an indicator on whether there is a demand for our services in the given market.

SBC: You have one of the biggest tipster communities in igaming. Is it possible for your tipsters to make a positive yield over time? Especially when many markets are becoming harder to beat?

Thomas: Surprisingly, our tipsters seem to become increasingly better at beating the bookies. Across the 61,366 tips posted on the English bettingexpert in 2013, there is a positive yield on 1.18 %, The same period last year showed a -2.02% yield across 41,079 tips. These are just average across thousands of tipsters – so some of our tipsters are demonstrating impressive yields.

 

SBC: How come unlike other tipster or betting information sites you do not charge your customers for access to this information?

Thomas: The industry is unfortunately full of self-proclaimed experts selling uninformed betting tips at high prices. Other so-called experts offer tips without documenting their history. As there are no guarantees tips will win, we think it’s best to give everything away for free while documenting full tipster history. Luckily, we are able to monetize bettingexpert through affiliate and ads earnings.

SBC: You operated bettingexpert.com prior to social verticals such as Twitter and Facebook influencing your members or visitors.  What operational and technical adjustments have you had to make in order to your portal relevant and engaging?

Thomas: As a social network for punters, we have to learn from leading social network platforms. Their services are constantly raising people’s expectations on other platforms such as bettingexpert. This being said, we are primarily building our network around user generated tips. This means we have to do things very differently from other services. Despite these similarities, our users tend to see us as something very distinct from Facebook and Twitter, and expect different things from us. We are engaging a lot more in the user-generated content in order to assure consistency and quality. This doesn’t scale very well, but it creates a vastly better product.

 

Team bettingexpert.com Copenhagen
Team bettingexpert.com Copenhagen

SBC: With social engagement becoming the norm, do you feel you have less influence or control over your traffic. Has social media made it harder to motivate digital traffic as they have more sources of information and opinion?

Thomas: In one way, bettingexpert is not as impacted by external social engagement as other betting sites. Mostly because bettingexpert is a very social platform to begin with. But social media can be challenging. For example, we cannot use affiliate links on Twitter. This means we have a hard time monetizing our content there. We can Tweet that “Our Tipster Zami is backing ManU against Swansea at Odds 1.80 at @bet365”.  But it violates Twitter’s ToS if we add an affiliate link. So in this way, it makes it harder to control our traffic. We always have to send the users to bettingexpert.com first in order to monetize it, which does not necessarily guarantee the best user experience (it is often good though, as the user can read a full analysis of the game and see the tipster performance).

 

SBC: Where do you see the future of affiliate/performance marketing for igaming. Do you see this model changing long term to accommodate changes within the industry?

Thomas: It’s very possible the payment structure will change in the igaming industry. But we are sure there will be a demand for our services as long as we have lots of users who are interested in betting. So as long as we focus on building a good product the betting community wants, we will be all right.

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Thomas Høgenhaven Chief Strategy Officer – bettingexpert.com

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