iGaming Daily

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We are fresh off the SBC Awards North America edition and there were some big winners including FanDuel. They followed the win up with a solid Q1 report this week that saw year over year growth but still fell short of Wall Street expectations. We're going to talk about what FanDuel has cooking and how its increased focus on iGaming could boost those revenues. And after that, we're going to take a look at the affiliate landscape where a change from Google could jeopardize some of the industry's top partnerships.

So let's get ready and dive in for today's episode of iGaming Daily. iGaming Daily is presented by OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. 56 % of the EGR Power 50 personalized player experiences with OptiMove. I would hope that if you were in New Jersey last week, you stopped by the stand, you talked about how much you loved iGaming Daily to OptiMove, but you can also just give them a call now, get your first free month when you buy OptiMove, just mention iGaming Daily or use the link in the description below.

I'm Jessica Wellman, editor of SPC Americas, reunited with media manager Charlie Horner. Charlie, we missed you in New Jersey, but I'm told I get to see you in Canada. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it looks like a lot of fun last week. And yeah, I hope you all enjoyed it. The podcast was still great. Well, thank you. It was very fun. It was a very productive week. We ended with the awards, which at the end of the night, you know, FanDuel just, they got up.

to be for sports betting operator of the year, they got off the stage and then we immediately called them back up again because they were online casino operator of the year. So big wins for them in the industry. I think they still have a lot of respect. We still think of them as even though it's FanDuel and DraftKings, I don't know about you, I feel like Fandool is slightly bigger is usually my mindset of it. And then, yeah, go ahead, sorry.

Yeah, I think I feel like we do default towards FanDuel being number one, even though DraftKings would argue differently. I don't know whether that's because we're affiliated with Flutter, who's obviously this huge multinational operator. Well, and I will say I just have them top of mind too, because I had the good fortune of working with Martin Elliott on Christian Gnetsky's Hall of Fame profile that was the cover of SBC Leaders this year. So getting to talk with Christian about Fanjou.

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You guys can check that out. We've uploaded an online version to SPC Americas. It's funny too, he was basically, I was like, did y 'all know this was gonna happen in 2018 that it would just be you two just out the gate? And he was like, my God, we had no clue. We were hoping, and he was like, cause we were at death's door 10 times, and this was like the last chance. So that was a really interesting read. And then Q1.

Decent growth year over year fell short of kind of what Wall Street thought they were going to do. Anything stand out to you in the results? Well, like you said, Jess, you know, solid revenue growth, solid EBITDA growth in the US particularly. I think we've got to consider really that the comparatives were difficult because of the...

2023 launches in Ohio, Massachusetts in Q1 compared to this year where you sort of had three weeks of North Carolina and Vermont. No offense to those guys, but not quite Ohio. And then, of course, they did go into some detail about the whole Fox bet debacle and how that's sort of impacted the bottom line.

Yeah, and this also, to be clear, this is all a flutter, not just a fan duel. I think too, what we've heard across many earnings calls is the Super Bowl was pretty painful. Nobody made money there, if anything, they lost money and ditto, you know, March Madness. You had Yukon that was just unbeatable.

When you have a heavy favorite like that, that a lot of people bet futures on and there weren't a lot of like major major upsets besides the NC State, it becomes a much less profitable.

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you know, endeavor for you. Although I'm sure I'm dying to see like Kentucky has been giving like they reduced how much information they give. And I'm dying to see the March Madness numbers for Kentucky because Kentucky lost in the first round. I was like, I know if you operated in Kentucky, you printed money that first weekend because we all blew money on that. But anyways, you know, when we're thinking about FanDuel,

When you think about kind of their brand approach, what do you like or what do you find interesting about the way that they approach the US market? So, I mean, of course, we've historically always a big leader in sports. They've kind of that transition from a DFS operator into a sports book that felt like a pretty seamless transition, and they've managed to nail that side of the business. And it's

a really strong brand in that aspect. But what we've seen over the last couple of years in particular is that that sort of drift into the casino space where they've really vamped up the product, increased their marketing on that and tried to catch up with the other players in the market like Bet and GM and DraftKings. And I mean, who am I to disagree with what Flutter are saying that Fanjule is number one in

I gaming in the US. I mean, this is to where Adam Greenblatt in his discussion at the event last week, which you can read on SBC Americas as well. You know, he's like, I know the perception is that we're seeding ground in I gaming to DraftKings and FanDuel. But you know, and then he's like, but internally to us, we're just, you know, revving up. And I'm like, that's very good, like leadership spin, but.

If even you are kind of acknowledging, most of us feel like they're making things up in terms of the iCasino gap, I think it's probably reasonable to say it is happening to some extent. And that's what I think is really interesting. Draft King's approach to making up that online casino gap was to acquire Golden Nugget. Because that was...

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you were probably still in school when this was happening, you know, they really became a powerhouse in New Jersey. They were like the number one online casino. And so through an acquisition, they were able to really make up a lot of ground in that product. On the Fandual side, there wasn't such a huge acquisition, but I will say I really like what they're doing with their products right now. And that gets us to an announcement they made this week that

For the first time ever, and this is in the PR, but I actually believe them because I don't think I've seen this short of influencers that are very specific to gaming. They're gonna have Rob Gronkowski, the retired NFL player, sit down at LiveDealer Blackjack, or Roulette rather, and you can play Roulette with Gronk at the table and interact with him and stuff like that, which when you think about...

how to engage online casino players? This is a pretty cool way to engage them. Yeah, absolutely. I think this makes sense in a lot of ways. I just briefly, I think it is quite remarkable how Fanjul and DraftKings have managed to not only dominate so much in sports, but they've managed to replicate that success in casino, particularly when their biggest competitors really...

and Bet MGM and Caesars come from the traditional land -based casino sector. So to assert that dominance in the online casino vertical as well is quite impressive. And this partnership with Gronk really does make sense because you are this leader in sports, you've done the big kick, I two years in a row at the Super Bowl. And people have really sort of

associated Gronk with Fanjul and as Fanjul are looking to ramp up their output when it comes to the casino side of things a lot more, why not synergize those two, those two brands in one, in one foul move? I think it's a really smart move. Yeah, I'm curious on the Gronk thing. I wonder how much this is him versus this is them. I would love to chat more because they branded a slot with him.

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that he has on Fandle Casino. He's playing roulette. And then several months ago, we wrote about Fandle Face Off, the skill games app that Fandle has. And they were like, Gronf, do you want to do a football game? And he's like, nah, that's boring. I want to do, we call it cornhole. I don't know if it even exists in your neck of the woods.

You play it in the back yard, there are like these slanted wooden platforms with a hole in the middle and you have beanbags and you try to get them in the blank stare. If only we had video for Charlie looking at me like I, I mean, we did the rat casino for children a couple of weeks ago and he was more open to it than what I'm explaining right now. Nada, does it ring a bell? No, I think I'd have to see a video of this. Yeah, he chose cornhole as his game and it's like, I think it's smart.

on both sides to take this guy who like was very good at football, sure, but it's also just like this very lovable kind of dopey guy that everybody is fond of and he's the life of the party and use that to build up your casino side where on the sports betting side, like that's not all that, there's so many more interesting things you can do on the casino side than just have him be like the grunk tight end pick of the day or whatever.

Yeah, it's really interesting that the shift that they've managed to do. But I remember covering Flutter earnings calls 2023 and 2022 where they were saying, yeah, we acknowledge that our casino product isn't anywhere near there yet, but we're going to spend the next year building the product up. And then after that, we're really going to invest in the marketing and pushing it out there side of things. And

Yeah, it's an interesting, it's a different approach, but it's something that they clearly believe in. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious to see more. That's for sure. All right. With that, you can check out the earnings recap, those various stories we had on SBC Americas. You should be able to find them in Google search. Some things, though, we might not be able to see here in the near future. And we're going to talk about that after the break. Welcome back to iGaming Daily, where we are going to talk about something that...

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I think everybody in the affiliate world is speaking about, even though you can't really find that it's written about out there. And that's this latest Google update, which for those who don't know, you know, affiliates, it's all about search and where you rank in search. And Google updates are natural. It's part of the business. You understand you're going to have dings, you're going to move back, you're going to learn, adapt, and move up in the ranks again. But this new one is freaking people out.

Since I have been in the affiliate space for some time, I figured, Charlie, we'll just kind of flip the script on this and you can be the one asking questions and I can kind of answer them if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I think for our listeners, it would be ideal just to explain a little bit about what the update is, how it's going to change things and yeah, how is it going to impact people? This update, what Google does with these updates, the goal is to make search better for...

their users, that the most useful information makes it to the top that isn't the ads that people buy with Google. So with this latest update, a lot of what they're doing is targeting people who are overly reliant on AI and people who are kind of using tricks is a strong word, I guess, but in their mind, kind of cheating the system or gaming the system. So what they're doing is they're kind of

They're not kind of, they're punishing sites that are tacking on kind of new content to sites that are old legacy sites. Like take something, I don't know, Friendster, a thing that at one point had a huge URL and everybody visited all the time. So historically, Google knows it's this big site. And then people will be glomming on, you know, like vacuum cleaner reviews or mattress reviews or, you know, sports betting affiliate content.

And so the big piece of this that has already had its impact is this, you know, glomming on your content to legacy content that isn't really related to what you're doing so that you just jump up in the ranks right away versus building a new site. That piece of it, we'll get into more detail, that's happening. What's going to happen later...

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is when they actually update the algorithm, the goal is to ding these pages that are thousands and thousands of words that are just designed to capture keyword terms because a lot of them are being written by AI and because like they really don't, they're not useful to humans, you know? And so that'll have its own impact, but those are kind of the two big prongs that are affecting the gaming space. Sure. And, and,

Really, I mean, the Google algorithm is sort of changing all the time. They don't tell us about it because they don't, they're not obliged to tell us about it, but I'd imagine there are thousands of updates all the time. And what is it significantly? they these core updates. Like every few months, they'll say, we're going to do a big core. They're always tweaking, but yeah, this is like a core update where they did give them a little bit of notice what they were going for. Sorry to cut you off. No, no, absolutely fine. And so.

I guess this specific update is something that's going to have a huge impact on the industry, particularly on the affiliate side of things. But will it have an impact on operators as well? And what will the impact be on affiliates? Well, I mean, I think operators are always grateful to have affiliates because it's a source of new customers. Certainly you have to pay for the acquisition, but...

I think operators want affiliates to succeed as much as affiliates want affiliates to succeed because at the end of the day, if they're their partner, they're going to get referred to them. What this might do though is on the upside for operators, their own site will maybe index higher. And, you know, the goal is ideally when you Google like FanDuel sports book, number one result should be FanDuel sports book. But yeah, it means that.

for the operators that an affiliate system is less efficient than it was before, which is not a great thing. For affiliates, it's huge because of these partnerships that they have. Do you know what partnerships I'm talking about or no? If we're about to move on to my next question. That's my segue, wink, wink, nod, nod. Yes. Of course I...

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knew that. So much prep we put into this, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and this is something that we wrote about a lot last year is these affiliate companies partnering up with local and regional news outlets, particularly when New State launches are on the horizon, where they provide sports betting affiliate content to the news outlet. Now,

From what I can gather, there's going to be a big impact of this Google update on those relationships. Jess, could you just explain how this is going to be affected? Yes. It's already happened, actually. So Google will apply what are called manual penalties, where they see that somebody is doing something they don't like and they will manually turn it off as opposed to an algorithm update.

So I think probably the biggest impact this has is on gambling .com. Sportico wrote a very good feature on them just two weeks ago about how their partnerships with Gannett and McClatchkey, which are two of the biggest publishing newspaper companies in the United States, has really benefited what they're doing. So like you said, when North Carolina rolls out, the North Carolina newspaper is at the ready with a bunch of content supplied by an affiliate.

that lives on their pages. And these deals, especially for affiliates now that things are kind of drying up, this is where the money is coming from. So it's a big problem. It's not just gambling .com though. Katina has deals like this. Better Collective has lots of deals like this. The big three have inked a lot of deals with Advanced Local and these local papers. What Google has done,

is overnight they have what is called de -indexed these search results, where these things that were on these sites, if you search for North Carolina sports betting, they no longer come up. And because of that, some of these operators talking to people in the space, I've heard some of these papers have already turned the...

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pages off and it's what's called, you know, 404 where you go and there's nothing there. So they've already just like pulled them because this update has happened. These pages are not going to rank and Google has basically said like, not cool, yo. And so it really jeopardizes. I'm very curious to see what kind of happens with these partnerships because now if this remains the case, they have no value, like literally no value.

There's been a lot of money invested into these partnerships and the affiliate space is already tough enough without these kind of updates all the time. And I guess as online publishers, we're always at the behest of these kind of algorithms and Google updates and everything that we're talking about here. What's Google's intentions with these updates? Is it all about the end user making more user friendly content?

We've spoken before about these pages on affiliate sites where there's just 10 ,000 words reviewing generic terms and operators and stuff. Are we going to see the end of those and moving towards more user -friendly content? If I've learned anything from being in the affiliate space, it's that SEO specialists are very bright and very creative and they will come up with new ways to continue to rank.

I've heard some affiliates in the space say, like, you know, we're actually okay with at least the page content thing that I was talking about, making sure that there are higher quality pages ranking over a bunch of AI stuff because they believe their content is of a quality that will be rewarded in the system. Yeah, Google will tell you the end goal is to make the user experience different.

as good as possible. I think we all know Google sells ads. Like when you search, I think, I mean, these days I feel like the first five results I'm being given are something that Google is pushing. So obviously they have something to benefit in this. But yeah, I don't know about you, maybe this is because I'm an affiliate. When I Google stuff, I can tell right away, even if I'm searching for a new car or, you know, right now I'm moving and I need...

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boxes and supplies, I can tell right away what is a real site versus what is an affiliate site. And I personally, this is no offense to affiliates, but knowing how the system works, if I'm looking for like the best new suitcase, I'm not gonna go to an affiliate because I know better. I'm not gonna, because I wanna know from travelers what actually is the best suitcase that I think.

You know, users are starting to realize this stuff isn't good. And so I don't, I think that this is all for the better and that it will reward the affiliates who are putting out useful content. And there are plenty of people in the space doing that, that feel very comfortable about where this update is going.

Yeah, it seems like it's going to be transformational for the space and it's going to have a lot of brains really thinking and stressing over the next few months. So it's going to be really interesting to see where everyone's thinking about this in the future. very curious on these SEO pages, as a lot of affiliates call them. That piece hasn't rolled out yet. I think it's in a couple of days. So...

checking to see where the ranks land after that for the major sites themselves, the gambling .coms, the PlayUSAs, the action networks of the world to see where they land after that shuffling. That'll give you a better understanding of how they're rewarding things. But that piece of it, we're still waiting and seeing. But it's a very interesting.

area to pay attention to and it's one you're not going to see a lot written about because most gambling content is written by affiliates. And even this story, like I tried to write it and it was just very difficult to because it had all disappeared already, you know, like you can't really tell where it ranked before versus now, but I can just, you know, anecdotally say I remember certain papers landing in my results and they're not showing up anymore.

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All right, you got my take on this whole SEO thing as a former affiliate, but as you all know, iGamingDaily has great affiliate -focused content from Ivana Flynn. She's gonna be on tomorrow with Alayta Solis to talk more about this so you can get the real granular take. So be sure to check that out. Charlie, what else is going on? We got an event next week, right?

Yeah, yeah, we're just off the back of SBC Summit North America. So we've got lots of content about that going out across the network. And then we'll be in Malta next week. So the guys from Casino Beats will bring you all the latest from the two -day conference session there. And the podcast will be live from Malta next week as well. So yeah, be sure to tune in to iGaming Daily next week. And we'll see you then.