Ohio Sports Betting Sets Record First Month | Sports Betting News Today | LSR Podcast 184
Join us today on the Legal Sports Report podcast for the latest sports betting news and updates. The newest legal sports betting state posts a startling first-month handle, raising expectations for those to follow. Also, how struggles for Bally’s and PointsBet could shape their futures, and pushback against proposed sports betting ad restrictions.
Full transcript
Matt Brown (00:09):
Hello and welcome to episode number 184 of the LSR Podcast. My name is Matt Brown, joined each and every week by the brightest minds in all of the gaming industry. With me, I have two of them. You know them; you love them. It’s Dustin Gouker; it’s Adam Candee. You can find them on the Twitter machine. It’s absolutely free to follow them @DustinGouker, @AdamCandee, two E’s, no Y. And if you hate yourself, you can follow me @MattBrownM2. Everything we do, absolutely free. So hit that subscribe button. We do appreciate it. Hit pause, go down, five stars. You’ll be back in three seconds. Do appreciate that as well. It’ll help people find this here very podcast. We’ll talk about some stuff going on over at Bally’s, not necessarily the greatest news coming out of Bally’s. What is PointsBet going to do moving forward here into 2023? And we’ll talk a little bit about Maine, but Adam, let’s kick things off in the great state of Ohio.
Ohio raising expectations for those to follow
Adam Candee (00:58):
And great is the right word for the returns in Ohio from January. I think these numbers shocked just about everyone in the industry when we saw 1.1 billion, with a B, dollars wagered in Ohio in January. And when I say everyone, I mean even the folks in Ohio who initially projected $1.1 billion wagered over the first six months, not just January. Six whole months. Now there were some incentives to get to that $1.1 billion as all of sports betting Twitter would like you to know that FanDuel alone spent $170 million in promos. And they got the return off that because when you take FanDuel and DraftKings together, they accounted for nearly 77% of the total wagers made in the market.
(01:54):
Now those who like to get into the numbers in such ways will say to you, yeah, well it was negative revenue for the month. Yeah. That’s how it works. Have you watched every other market? That’s how this works. That’s how it’s gone in every market in which promotional dollars are out there. They go out huge to get the customers in the first place. And frankly, this is what … Guys, I’m going to stop and pause for a minute. OK? I’m going to make a poker analogy and it’s probably going to be ham-handed. Oh, because you guys are the poker guys. OK. But-
Matt Brown (02:31):
I like it though. Listen — outside of the box, outside of your comfort zone. Listen everybody, I was going to say, this is a safe space. Adam’s about to go out on a limb here. I like this.
Adam Candee (02:42):
It’s just the three of us, right? OK.
Matt Brown (02:43):
Yeah.
Dustin Gouker (02:44):
It’s a safe space.
Adam Candee (02:45):
This is what you can do when you’re the chip leader. You can bully people with your stack.
Matt Brown (02:49):
There you go. All right, that works too.
Adam Candee (02:49):
Thank you.
Matt Brown (02:49):
That works. That works.
Adam Candee (02:53):
Thank you. I’ve been working on that for weeks. You could go out there when you’re FanDuel. You could spend this kind of money because you are the market leader, because you are in the strongest financial position of any of the operators right now. So it’s an enormous start in Ohio. Now, you can look at the factors and say, OK, the Bengals were in the playoffs and so on and so on, but it’s still a billion dollars in a state that does not have nearly the same population as some others. And if you’re on the YouTube, you just got a little special treat there with my AirPod falling out.
Matt Brown (03:25):
And the numbers here, Dustin, we talked about this at the time, but this is even just more eye-popping considering they missed Ohio State’s run with this as well. I mean, they didn’t even get Ohio State’s run with these numbers that came out. And so that is even more crazy whenever we talk about the fact that you had the state school that everybody follows make as deep of a run as they did throughout the college football season. And those are not even accounted for in these numbers right here. So yes, the numbers might not be on the positive side here, but it’s all about customer acquisition as we know at the very beginning. And when you see these types of things coming out with FanDuel and DraftKings, you just look and you say, OK, this stage is going to be every bit as big as we thought it could be.
Dustin Gouker (04:11):
Lots of finishing stuff. Yeah, like you said, Ohio State famously lost in the national semifinals seconds before Ohio sports betting actually went live or online sports betting went live. So yeah, if you add that national championship game in there … It’s also fascinating to think about what the Super Bowl’s going to be like or what the Super Bowl would’ve been like if the Bengals had been in it with all this activity going on. Back to put a bow on the FanDuel stuff, I mean, people are wringing their hands about how much FanDuel is spending. If they’re spending that much money and were like third in the market, then you have a problem. But yeah, they have almost half the market in terms of handle. Yes, it’s a lot of money, but you’re getting a result on that.
(04:49):
You’re getting customers to start betting with you, which is the whole point of this. It’s not to … There’s been so much hand wringing about these Ohio numbers. It’s really funny to me. There’s also other interesting things in there too, at least from the operator standpoint, that I pointed out as well. As much as I crap on Barstool, they’re right there. They’re number four. I mean not super exciting. They’re still 4% of the market, which is kind of what the average, but that’s better than everybody not named FanDuel, DraftKings, MGM. There’s something to be said for that because everybody else is almost a rounding error in all of this right now. The other one, I know we’re a broken record around this, but 365 starts out at number five, which is to me, this is the way the sleeping giant … That they started this, again, with some spend and some of this going on, but they organically just kind of leapfrog Caesars and all these other operators and are suddenly a player here.
(05:48):
And I’m here to tell you, if you’re taking less than 1% of the market on day one, maybe you shouldn’t be in the market. I see that Betway barely did anything. I don’t know what Betway is up to. We don’t talk about them a whole lot, but they’re less than a 10th of a percent of the market. You have PointsBet less than 1%. Betr, which famously, which did not launch on New Year’s Day, but which launched later in the week, had a million dollars in handle. This is their first launch. This is the Jake Paul operation. I’m not sure what they’re doing.
(06:21):
Yes, I guess they were profitable if you take away their promotional spend, but how do you get only 0.1% of the market? Again, I understand not day one, but that’s a really bad start for what’s supposed to be a challenger brand that’s supposed to make some noise, and it’s not doing anything. So lots of interesting stuff here. Again, Caesars, saying it’s going to pull back on promotional marketing spend behind all these, number six in the market in terms of handle. So lots of interesting stuff here, and it’ll be fascinating to see how it all shakes out in Ohio, which already is now one of our biggest sports betting states across the country.
Matt Brown (06:56):
Adam, we mentioned, so Ohio State by the way … I mean we fast-forward a year from now. Ohio State’s not going anywhere. They’re one of the favorites to win the championship again next year. The recruiting classes are, they’re not going anywhere. The Cavs are actually in fourth place in the Eastern Conference. So you have a good NBA team as well to go along with all this and of course when the NFL season rolls back around. We know the Bengals are going to be one of the better teams and we assume that the Browns are going to be much improved as well. So I think that the numbers … We fast-forward a year from now with a year of maturity and what they have going on inside of the state with the teams that they have as well. I think that these numbers could be even more crazy, that we might even be sitting here talking about, wow, they exceeded even our lofty expectations after these initial numbers came out.
Adam Candee (07:44):
Sure, entirely possible that that’s where we find ourselves in terms of Ohio. And I think what it’s going to do in a way is it’s going to set an interesting bar for Massachusetts, which we know is scheduled to launch here in a couple of weeks. Massachusetts is another market where we know there has been a lot of pent-up demand. We know that the major operators are all going to be taking part in that state. And so we are going to look and say, OK, Massachusetts, we probably would’ve compared you to some states that are a little closer to your weight class when you first start, and now we might be looking at you a little bit differently given what Ohio was able to do.
Struggles for Bally’s
Matt Brown (08:24):
Yeah, it’s going to be super, super interesting. And I think we all expected them to be big, maybe not as big as they were here right out of the gate. Dustin, we alluded to at the top here that there was going to be some news coming out about Bally’s, and listen, there was not a week that this pod went by about a year and a half ago where we didn’t have some sort of Bally’s news, and then it would be some sort of other acquisition, some sort of other news, whatever it might be, they have plans to do this, plans to do that, et cetera, et cetera. Then it kind of went quiet for a while, and then now the Bally’s news that we have gotten of late has not been of the best variety. And I guess we could say that that kind of continues here.
Dustin Gouker (09:03):
Kind of a crazy revelation here, that Monkey Knife Fight, which is what we talked about this last week, these parlay/daily fantasy sports sites that are out there. Monkey Knife Fight was I think the first one of them; I’m not sure, I’d have to go back in the time capsule and look at that, but they’re acquired by Bally’s for $90 million in stock back in 2021, and they just shut them down entirely, which is wild to me that this failed so badly that we’re just going to close it up, this is not working. It leads to a lot of questions. It obviously was working at one point in time. Was it because of Bally’s management of the product that it wasn’t working? Was the database of users that Monkey Knife Fight had built up? Was that just not that valuable?
(09:51):
And the backstory of this is Bally’s is less than a rounding error in all this. They’re not moving the needle really anywhere in terms of online sports betting and online casino. So very interesting that apparently Bally’s have been trying to sell it, but if you’re going to just shut it all down, I don’t know how much value there is in that anymore because you’re now lost the users as well because you’re just paying them out and saying, well, that’s it. So I don’t know.
(10:21):
The CEO stepped down, have a newly appointed CEO, and he says, we all make the same mistakes. I don’t know what mistakes there are to make. You’ve made some pretty bad mistakes because he spent a lot of money between that and what they thought was going to be their tech answer and that works and they’re writing that down too. I mean from an outside perspective, it’s hard to not call this as just a giant mess. And I don’t know where they go from here. I don’t know how Bally’s becomes a real legitimate player in this space with everything going on because, again, they’re not in a lot of markets. Again, this was supposed to be their customer acquisition panel through MKF, and that didn’t work out. So I don’t know where it’s all going, but it’s certainly not good.
Matt Brown (11:01):
Yeah, Adam, behind the scenes, we don’t know what’s going on obviously, but it was definitely interesting the foot dragging that we got from Bally’s, right, because you knew that the team was already in place. They acquired a software company to where they had their own software. You had the different market access states that never really got off the ground. So it was just interesting the whole way along that we were looking at this company that was coming out, spending a ton of money, talking about all the things that they were going to do with that, with all the acquisitions that they made and how they were going to position themselves in the market. And then the fact that they did, we have these people who are champing at the bit to get into these states and whatever, and then you’ve got Bally’s that does have access to all these different states and just never actually moved on it.
Adam Candee (11:50):
It’s really difficult right now to understand what the play is for Bally’s in the long term. And I realize that a lot of times we get to be prisoners of the moment when we look at FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars and say, I don’t know how anybody could come in and be a bigger part of the market. Are the top four established and done with, and probably not, in the long run, but Bally’s in particular, it has been misstep after misstep after misstep. And I don’t understand long term where they’re headed because we talk about Monkey Knife Fight. Fine, you buy a DFS platform thinking you’re getting a database, and obviously it hasn’t worked to the level that they wanted with that. I think the Bet.Works acquisition is really the one that makes you scratch your head because the first iteration of their product that went out was so bad that even they had to say, look, this just doesn’t work.
(12:44):
We’re going to have to do a 2.0 version. Well, what is it? Where is it, and how is it going to compete? And really what is the hook that is going to separate you? Because now we see that the regional sports networks that they went and rebranded for Bally Sports in the hopes that that was going to be a huge play in terms of their exposure and their ability to reach new customers. I mean, you’re talking about bankruptcy for these regional sports networks. I don’t understand in any way what the play is for Bally’s to be able to turn this into a profitable enterprise. And I realize that they have an advantage that some others don’t, that they have casino cash flow from physical properties to be able to balance this out a little bit. But really it’s getting late early here for that company in terms of the US sports betting market.
Matt Brown (13:32):
Yeah, Dustin, we look, and it’s currently Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, New York and Virginia, but they do have access in 11 other markets in which they’ve just not moved on. And listen, I guess the argument could be we don’t find those markets as valuable. The population there doesn’t add up, but we’ve seen all these other books come in, and no matter any state that they can possibly get live in, they have decided to go ahead and get live. So it seems like maybe that is the play here. So it is just interesting to kind of see as we look into 2023 if you’re Bally’s, OK, are you assuming you’re just going to now compete in Arizona and Colorado? They have these massive markets that there are tons and tons and tons of books that are allowed there. I mean what is the strategy, right? Are doubling down on these states where you have this massive amount of competition? I just don’t know exactly what the path is.
Dustin Gouker (14:30):
Yeah, I mean again, it feels like we’re just dumping on Bally’s, but I guess it’s validated at this point. There is no, honestly, there is no path. You’re supposed to get a database; database didn’t happen. You’re supposed to have this great platform; platform apparently is not good. So what are you coming in to differentiate? There’s nothing special about the Bally’s product. They’re obviously not going to be spending a lot on marketing. Their brand has almost zero value outside of the places where there might be a casino. And even then, it’s questionable.
(15:00):
I just don’t know what they’re doing with the interactive division. There’s nothing to be done there. Unless somebody’s going to come in and say, yeah, we’re going to spend a lot of money on this, we’ve seen there’s no path. It’s a head scratcher and yeah, I mean I guess hindsight’s 20/20 obviously you could have said … But I bet you go back in this podcast history, and we are probably questioning these things too. Were these great ideas at the time, and was Bally’s really going to be a player in this? I don’t remember every last thing I said, and I say lots of wrong things, but I think we had a healthy amount of skepticism that this is going to work in the first place, and now that’s being born out.
How PointsBet could shape their future
Matt Brown (15:37):
Adam, talking about another company where we do just wonder at least a little bit what the long-term strategy is. PointsBet is learning that it’s very expensive to do all of this, and certainly there’s going to have to be a shift for them as we head into 2023, and some of the stuff was starting to take shape in the latter half of 2022, as well. So-
Adam Candee (16:00):
PointsBet pulled out of Massachusetts. PointsBet pulled out of the Sunday Night Football deal, and now PointsBet is saying they’re going to focus solely on existing markets in 2023. And given what Dustin already mentioned about what happened in Ohio, you can understand why they would say that in their most recent earnings call. Their investors did not react well. The stock price in Australia dipped after their earnings call. And I think most importantly, when you look at that Ohio performance, I mean you see brand new entrants like Hard Rock and Tipico ahead of PointsBet. And when you consider the amount of money that has already gone into exposure for that book in the last five years, that has to be a major red flag for anybody looking at PointsBet. How is it that you don’t have as much share as a sportsbook that — sorry, Tipico, no one’s ever heard of you. And Hard Rock is pretty much brand new because of what’s happened with them in Florida.
(17:02):
So I don’t understand really, again, sounding like a broken record when I was talking about Bally’s. I don’t understand what the path is here for PointsBet in the long term that would make their investors happy. I guess I just don’t see, if you’re continuing to take this small of market share and you’re setting your sights so low in the long run, what’s the play that ultimately gets you to a point where you as a standalone operator are able to generate the kind of returns that are going to make people happy? So I think if you dig a little bit into what we saw from that earnings call and see that, I believe the number was 56% of their handle came from in-play.
(17:42):
They have invested heavily in making their in-play product the best possible. They’re trying to get to less rejection, less delay, et cetera. It just seems to me that at some point when we look at PointsBet, that has to be a play where some company comes in, a larger operator comes in and says, you do this one thing better than just about anybody. And maybe that’s something we can bring into our operation and improve ours to make us a more serious player in the long run.
Matt Brown (18:11):
Yeah, I mean, Dustin, I know that we continue to say, and it seems like this is something that has been a recurring theme here of who’s going to end up buying PointsBet, eventually. But the thing about this is having used all of these apps, I mean seriously, I’ve used every single one of them now at this point in multiple different states. And look, I would sit here and tell you if I thought the PointsBet product was crap, right? I think it’s pretty good actually. I think the app is pretty good. Certainly, as Adam just mentioned, the in-play product is good. I think their prices on a lot of different things are pretty good as well. I mean, certainly their futures market stuff is priced pretty fairly, comparatively to some of the other stuff out there. So I do think if there was a brand that really and truly felt like, hey, our brand recognition alone will drive users and the PointsBet engine essentially would be kind of behind the hood.
(19:09):
I mean under the hood, I think that maybe that’s not crazy for me because again, if we do believe that there are at least a faction of people out there that do appreciate product and do appreciate the functionality of an app, and certainly as people become more savvy in all this, they’re going to certainly value that much more in which books they choose to bet at and things like that. I think that PointsBet is actually really great. I know you said this a million times on the pod, but I actually, they’re a pretty good acquisition target. I mean their stuff works good.
Dustin Gouker (19:44):
Yeah, I mean since we always hear a lot of people like to say product wins, I mean, where does PointsBet in the spectrum of where product is? It’s certainly good. Yeah, certainly. And it’s certainly not bad. It’s not so bad that it’s driving people away and probably is pretty good at retaining customers. We got to think. So, yeah, it’s like, OK, your product isn’t a problem. They are arguably leaders on product, but they’re still sitting here taking less than 1% of margin, and they’re pulling back on marketing spend everywhere you look. So again, it is another one. It feels like we’re just going to be having this conversation about a lot of operators, I guess. That conversation’s coming for Caesars, too. Caesars is profitable, but the 2% to 3% of the Ohio market, I guess that’s exciting.
(20:33):
I don’t know. But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what PointsBet … Again, this is going to be the answer. I think Adam and his staff are going to be answering for all these years, what is the path for these companies or should they just be shutting it down, or should they be doing M&A? I know it’s still early, but I just look at all this, and I’m like, I don’t know how … Yeah, great, Fanatics has a story for now, too, and Fanatics apparently is going to be live relatively shortly in at least one state, but I don’t know if some of these other companies, if they’re just going to dork around and have an infinitesimal portion of the market, that’s not exciting, and they’d have no path to grow it if you’re not 365.
Matt Brown (21:16):
Adam, this is taking a … I’m going to go off on a tangent here and put you on the spot for something that is not in the rundown and you haven’t prepared for, so get ready my friend. But when we look at Caesars and we look at MGM and all of that, the one advantage that they do have comparatively to the rest of the market out there, I mean sans Bally’s, but again, we’re not talking about Bally’s. It’s that they do have all these physical presences all over the country. They do have this stuff. Are you surprised they haven’t leaned more into that? Because I kind of am.
(21:50):
The differentiator if it’s not going to be product, because I mean, listen, we have our friends over at Eilers or whatever, DraftKings win product, every single whatever … They have the best apps, they have the best websites, they have whatever. They win every single time. So it’s not going to be differentiating yourself via product, at least not for now. The one way you could differentiate yourself is like, hey, look, sign up and bet whatever and then get a free night at whatever, or this, that and the other. I don’t know why there isn’t more lean into, hey, you can bet on our app and then get an experiential process out of it. You can go and physically take in some of these different little things. I just don’t know why there’s not more lean in from that aspect.
Adam Candee (22:36):
I think we get into a multi-pronged response here that we probably could spend a lot of podcast time on either today or another time, but alright, let’s talk about what the brick-and-mortar operators are doing versus what the tech operators are doing. I think what we’ve seen from both MGM and from Caesars is, when it comes to marrying the physical and the online, they’ve tried to lean hard into the rewards programs. They’ve tried to bill that as what makes them different and say, OK, well, when you bet on the BetMGM app, when you bet on the Caesars app, you are getting rewards that you can use at our physical properties. You can use them for stays, use them for meals, use them for shows, spa, whatever it is. And I think that’s their pitch in terms of trying to leverage what they have with the physical properties over others.
(23:23):
I think if you try to engineer that in reverse and say, well, what are you doing with your existing customers from the casino and trying to bring them into sports betting? I don’t know. I would just look at that and say, given the age demographic of how casino customers tend to skew these days, I wouldn’t think you have a lot of very natural crossover with your slot customers trying to bring them into sports betting. Maybe you have with iGaming, right? For those states that they have the ability to sell into iGaming and however that can support the sports betting product, sure, and if you’re going to continue to look at sports betting as a gateway drug to be able to sell people into iGaming, then sure, then I think that all works together, and then you can all fit that whole ecosystem together and get people onto your property and get them sort of captured entirely into your world.
(24:19):
But beyond that, when we’re talking about this online sports betting product in a vacuum and we’re just talking about, hey, how do you separate yourself to the average person who’s out there downloading two or three apps and trying to figure out which one is the one for them? It’s not going to happen on products from what we’ve seen so far, right? DraftKings and FanDuel just had two big a head start with their DFS products to be caught from behind by another operator. I think that what Dustin starts talking about 365, that really is the one place where 365 can make the difference that others can’t. They’ve had more time to be able to refine that product and to be able to offer something that other people in the market haven’t seen.
Matt Brown (25:00):
Yeah, it’s going to be interesting. I think that there is a little bit of untapped stuff right there. I mean, Dustin, you’ll just remember and then we’ll move on, but in the DFS days, right? I mean the one thing FanDuel/DraftKings did very, very well was they would use those little partnerships, and granted, it wasn’t like the biggest thing in the whole world, but it was just a spiff, it was a bonus. It was a little thing for customers and stuff like that. Hey, here’s this experience at ballpark X, Y, Z or this gathering or this whatever, and all this stuff like that. And we just don’t hear about that with Caesars and MGM where it would be very easy to say the BetMGM Con or something where it’s like the huge gathering at Bellagio where they bring in everyone and all different things like that. There are things that I think that are out there that just aren’t really being utilized.
Dustin Gouker (25:55):
Yeah, and I guess it also makes me think the sports betting national championship, is that even a thing anymore? I don’t know. That was exciting for a little bit, but I think maybe it went away or I don’t know. I don’t even know what’s happening.
Matt Brown (26:06):
I think COVID happened and disrupted it.
Dustin Gouker (26:11):
But yeah, I mean there’s certainly more. Getting into different ways to market the products is certainly the next iteration of this that is not blasting the airwaves, not just paying leagues and teams. Tons of money to slap your name on billboards and stadiums and things like that. So it’ll be interesting. One other thing from PointsBet that I thought was fascinating out of all this, they reported their H1 in Canada, which is I think just three months. I think they launched in April along with everything else that they were doing, and they only had a hundred million in handle for that period, $5 million in revenue. They just opened up a headquarters in Canada to support their business. I’m not even sure that pays the rent, that money. Again, that’s tough metrics. I know Ontario’s been very different than everybody kind of spec’d out, but I don’t know. It’s, again, we have all this evidence that PointsBet, this is what they are. They had more market share, and now they’ve drawn down marketing spend. This is where they’re at. It’s a tough road.
Matt Brown (27:12):
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’ll be interesting, and we’ll certainly monitor all of this stuff as we head throughout the course of 2023 where it’s like now we’re moving into not necessarily phase two. I’m not going to call it phase two of all of these companies, but certainly maybe phase kind of 1.5 of strategy and how they continue to either maintain where they’re at or try and climb that ladder just a little bit here. Dustin, let’s close things out here with the American Gaming Association coming out and talking back to one of the states out there.
Pushback against proposed sports betting ad restrictions
Dustin Gouker (27:43):
Yeah, this is another one. This is one we’ve been talking about a lot this coming wave, this wave of restrictions on advertising. And again, this one I know for sure if you go back in the podcast and listen to the three of us, we have been saying for months and perhaps years, regulate yourself before this stuff comes down on you. And here we have indeed, Maine, yes, small state, but they’re looking to prevent some sort of advertising, marketing and promotional bets using celebrity spokespersons. Just other things to kind of throttle how this can be marketed. AGA comes out, says, this is not great. This is how you let the offshore sportsbooks win because you’re throttling how you can promote this. Now, yes, there’s certainly some of what we’ve seen in Ohio around responsible gambling and bonusing and things like that. That’s probably all good.
(28:31):
But Maine has taken it a step further, arguably where they, they’re really kind of handicapping what you can do in terms of Maine even when they launch sports betting props this year. So it’s good to see the AGA, which only a small part of its membership really, really cares about sports betting, but they’re taking a stance on actively fighting against restrictions like this. We’re also … We’ll see where that goes, but the natural endpoint of this is that there’s not been a great self-regulatory aspect to this, and the prevailing winds have taken us to this point where regulators say either they’re bored or they think they need to step in and they’re doing something about it. And sometimes that stepping in and doing something about it is not going to be ideal for the industry.
Matt Brown (29:22):
Adam, we’re looking at New York, as well. We’ve talked a little bit about New York here over the last couple of pods, as well, but they might be looking into something like this, too.
Adam Candee (29:32):
I think the one area where everyone is going to be able to agree is that marketing to underage/marketing to college is something that needs to have a serious change in the way that it’s done. We saw Barstool get fined in Ohio for this. We know that they’re not alone in terms of these questions because of the college partnerships that have been out there. And look, we’ve been talking about these for years, starting with PointsBet in Colorado where we said, really, is this the wisest way to go about this? To have partnerships with universities and sportsbooks? It just seems potentially fraught with problems. And so we’ve seen some potential regulations popping up in New York. I think Dustin summed up well, the situation that we have in Maine, and ultimately this is going to be one of the stories for 2023. It might be the story for 2023, is what sort of regulatory pushback there is on advertising for sportsbooks.
(30:32):
And I think some of it’s going to take its roots back to The New York Times series that ran a few months ago. But I don’t know that that’s necessarily the only reason. I think that we’re probably coming to just an important reckoning point here where we ask ourselves, what is it that we want the shape of this market to look like? And not to be more alarmist than I usually am, but I think you have the opportunity right here and now to look at the UK, to look at Europe and see what’s going on and to learn some lessons right now, right? To not have to get to the point where this gets really harsh before you start to take some incremental steps that will make people happy and that are probably, frankly, the right steps for the industry in the first place in terms of making sure the product is targeted only at people who it is intended to be targeted at.
Matt Brown (31:25):
Yeah. Guys, everything we do here, absolutely free. So again, please subscribe, rate, review. That’s the only thing we ask of you. Hit the little pause button, go down, hit the subscribe. If you could give us a rating, even a review, even better, because that’ll help us climb the charts. And of course, you’re watching this over on the YouTube, subscribe button down below. Of course, we will be doing a lot more stuff here on the YouTube. Adam and company, everything we talk about over on legalsportsreport.com. So sure is nice of you to head over there and read the words of all the guys that are putting in the time to get these stories out. We also appreciate that. If you want to follow Dustin on the Twitter @DustinGouker, @AdamCandee is two E’s, no Y, and I am @MattBrownM2. For Adam, for Dustin. I’m Matt. Talk to you guys next week.