The Cashout: Is ESPN Account Linking Helping ESPN Bet Yet?
TCL will offer market analysis in the US gambling space in The Cashout every Friday to paid subscribers, along with a news roundup for free subscribers. The weekly post will focus on metrics in the US market as well as regulatory and legal developments as events warrant.
We have some sports betting numbers from November, and we’ll see if ESPN Bet’s heralded account linking with ESPN is showing up yet. Plus, I’ll catch up with incoming September and October numbers.
But first, here’s the Friday roundup:
US gambling roundup for Dec. 6
Two US senators requested a Federal Trade Commission probe into DraftKings and FanDuel.
Someone bet $3 million on the Philadelphia Eagles to win this Sunday.
I argued yesterday that the sports betting industry needs to keep hammering away with positive news if it wants to turn the narrative around.
I wrote on LinkedIn about a sweepstakes operator mangling the mechanics that theoretically keep it legal in its FAQ. The content has been down ever since.
Legal sports betting in Missouri will likely impact Kansas.
People keep trying to bet on legal apps in Texas, even though it’s not legal yet.
A deep dive from The Economist on US sports betting (paywalled).
Efforts to ban smoking in casinos continue to pick up steam.
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The (very) early November sports betting numbers
If you want to start drawing way-too-early conclusions about how November is going, I have you covered! We only have two states with online sports betting numbers reported: the great states of New York and Iowa.
The most interesting data point for November is that ESPN Bet launched account integration with the core ESPN app at the start of the month. If that’s a needle-mover, we’d expect to start seeing the data bear that out pretty immediately. Account linking should be adopted quickly and should create more wagering right away, if you are bullish on the idea, but that’s not what we’re seeing on the latter.
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