The Penn National operation of simultaneous US sports betting brands ended in less than a year with today’s shuttering of theScore Bet.
TheScore Bet sportsbook is no longer taking bets in the US as of July 1. The move to close the brand and push users toward Barstool Sportsbook was announced a month ago.
It is far from the end of the road for theScore Bet, though. It will continue to operate sports betting in Canada where Score Media started and has a larger following than in the US.
theScore Bet reports solid Ontario launch
Penn National had plenty of positives to report about theScore Bet’s Ontario sports betting launch during its first quarter conference call. Penn closed the $2 billion acquisition in October 2021.
The app saw “high hundreds of first-time depositors and thousands of downloads every single day, all incremental to the first day,” CEO Jay Snowden said.
About 80% of the app’s bettors also used the Score Media app. That app allows bettors to build their bet slips before switching to the sportsbook to confirm and place the bet.
Larger base of users key to success
TheScore Bet launched in New Jersey in September 2019, about a year after most top NJ sportsbooks launched. The brand saw about three out of every four bettors originate from the Score Media app, CEO John Levy told LSR at the time.
That did not lead to much business, though. The brand took just $10 million in bets from December 2019 through February 2020, which was 0.6% of total handle for the market over that period.
It is a different story in Canada, though, where the Score Media app is the largest in the country. Penn boasted the strength of the ecosystem when it announced the acquisition:
Early results show the power of theScore’s integrated media and betting ecosystem to better engage and retain users; theScore Bet users with theScore media app compared to theScore Bet users who do not have theScore media app produce 88% higher handle/user, place 3x the number of bets/user, and generate a 91% increase in day 30 retention.
