Shares of Genius Sports climbed 17.3% Tuesday after the company reported significant growth in its NFL streaming product that launched last season.
GENI closed at $9.48, a new 52-week high for the sports betting data provider, on more than four times its average daily trading volume.
“Our commercial execution this year now sets a solid foundation for profitable growth in 2025 and beyond,” Genius CEO Mark Locke said on the earnings call. “We have extended our largest rights deals through the end of the decade, giving us certainty of our fixed costs for the foreseeable future.
“This, combined with our sportsbook renewals, now reinforces our medium-term expectations for sustained annual revenue growth of 20% and continued progress toward our adjusted EBITDA margin target of at least 30%.”
BetVision drives live betting
The earnings presentation offered a deep dive into the live-betting bump caused by BetVision. The product overlays betting information and options on the live stream of a game, which attracts more and more customers each week and is “redefining the NFL betting experience,” Locke said.
The number of BetVision unique streamers is now 12 times what it was when the product launched in Week 1 of 2023. Those streamers are already double what they were at the beginning of this season, with viewership hitting record highs in recent weeks, Locke said.
More than half of the handle from those stream viewers, 59%, is from live betting. Compare that to the 30% share that live betting makes up of all NFL handle. Total NFL in-play handle is up 50% from last year.
There are more updates coming for BetVision customers, which now include bet365 and DraftKings. One will allow bettors to click on an athlete on the screen and see all the markets related to that player.
Genius improves terms with sportsbooks
Locke said the data provider achieved a “universal pricing uplift” across all of its major US sports betting partners as well as “many others” internationally. FANHub, an advertising and activation platform recently released by Genius, was a core component of some deals, he added.
Locke described the deal renewals as “overwhelmingly positive.” Moving forward, the US operators will renew at different times and will be treated as business as usual, he said.
“I made a commitment to the market a while ago that we would try and revalue data in the market,” Locke said. “We said for a while, we think it’s undervalued.
“And so a big part of these renewals has been sort of trying to rebalance some of that and really get data to a level that’s more commensurate with the value that it offers to the sportsbooks. And I think, overall, we’ve been very successful doing that, and we’re extremely pleased with where we’ve come out on that.”
Genius Sports Q4 guidance steady
Genius now expects to see adjusted EBITDA hit $86 million this year on $511 million in revenue, which would be annual growth of 61% and 24%, respectively. That is from beating the third-quarter expectations for revenue and adjusted EBITDA by $1 million each, so fourth-quarter expectations remain the same.
The company previously gave fourth-quarter guidance of $176 million in revenue and $32 million in adjusted EBITDA.
It also expects its adjusted EBITDA margin to be 16.8%, nearly 4 percentage points higher than 2023.
