Media Briefing: How sportsbooks are placing bigger bets on sports media outlets

October 21, 2021

By Tim Peterson

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber looks at how sports betting companies are pushing more money to publishers.

  • Sportsbooking revenue
  • A surge in digital media jobs
  • 3 questions with them’s Sarah Burke
  • Axel Springer’s controversies, G/O Media’s office return, news outlets’ diversity reports and more

Sportsbooking revenue

The key hits:

  • Sports betting companies have been pouring money into publishers since a landmark legal ruling in 2018.
  • BlueWire Podcasts provides an example of how one media company has taken sportsbooks’ media interest to the bank.
  • While sportsbooks are working with publishers, some are also looking to become publishers in their own right.

The online sports betting industry has become a significant win for sports publishers over the past three years — particularly for one media startup with a deal with a single sportsbook that represents its largest revenue source.

That’s the case for three-year-old BlueWire Podcasts, a media company that publishes 170 sports and sports-adjacent podcasts, which was founded just three months after the U.S. Supreme Court, in May 2018, struck down a 1992 federal law that made sports betting illegal in most states.

A little over two-and-a-half years later, BlueWire is now reaping the rewards from that ruling. The podcast publisher signed a three-year-long deal with WynnBET that has already led to a $3.5 million investment in the media company in exchange for partial ownership, at least $1 million in advertising revenue and a multimillion-dollar recording studio built at the Wynn Las Vegas that opened in early September, according to BlueWire’s founder and CEO Kevin Jones.

“The partnership with WynnBET has been rocket fuel for BlueWire,” said Jones, adding that the sportsbook approached his company in January this year and within a month had put the deal in ink.

BlueWire’s deal is an exclusive partnership with WynnBET, meaning the media company cannot work with other sports betting companies on partnerships. The deal also guarantees a certain amount of revenue for ads and BlueWire will produce a handful of podcasts for WynnBET as well.

Jones declined to share exactly how much money BlueWire earns from this category, but he said that sports betting has become the company’s largest revenue stream since it was founded three years ago.

Sportsbooks as publisher patrons

Sportsbooks have blossomed online in about a dozen states since the May 2018 ruling, quickly developing lucrative and rapidly growing customer bases. One estimation by investment management firm Ark Invest from July projected that online sports betting will become a $9.5 billion market this year and will reach $37 billion in 2025. There is money to be made — and spent — in sports betting.

Within a year after this overturn was handed down, media companies began reaping the rewards from partnerships with sportsbooks, oftentimes creating elaborate content partnerships that include a branded show or even physical space in seven- to 10-figure deals. In February 2019, Turner Sports closed a content partnership deal with Caesars Entertainment that included founding a Bleacher Report studio within the casino operator’s Las Vegas resort. And more recently …read more

Source:: Digiday

      

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