Massachusetts Sports Betting Sees Massive Success
Transcript
00:00 Okay, Northeast, not so much an issue here.
00:02 We've got very passionate sports bettors, no question about that.
00:06 And I would say, Jim, when you look at it, Massachusetts has to be one of the big
00:09 success stories, I would say, over the last year or so.
00:13 Financially speaking, I mean,
00:14 these are some staggering numbers coming in from sports bettors in Massachusetts.
00:19 >> Yeah, they've certainly been quite eager to bet on their sports.
00:27 We saw online sports betting in Massachusetts kick off just before
00:33 March Madness, and it's been a pretty positive market so far.
00:40 In July, they surpassed the $2 billion mark in overall handle,
00:48 which is a positive sign.
00:50 The local bookmaker, if you will,
00:52 DraftKings, has been the front runner there since the beginning.
00:57 This past month in July, they had 50% of all sports betting handle there,
01:05 which is pretty in line with what they've been able to accomplish
01:14 since online wagering kicked off there, like I said, in March.
01:19 One other interesting note that I was able to pull out of their recent
01:24 monthly report was Fanatics wrapped up their second
01:29 complete month of sports betting in July.
01:34 They saw a 24% increase in their sports betting handle.
01:39 It was 1.9 million in June, and then in July, they accepted $2.3 million in bets.
01:46 So a bit of an increase for Fanatics there, and that was too when they were
01:52 still only available to their prior retail customers, obviously, with their
01:59 sports memorabilia and clothing and all of that.
02:02 So now, just after that report was released, they announced that they're
02:09 now open for everybody in Massachusetts and a handful of other states where they
02:15 operate, including Ohio and Tennessee.
02:17 So now that they're able to accept more customers onto their app, I'll be
02:24 interested to see what August brings for Fanatics as they're now open to more
02:30 business going wide with their app.
02:35 One other interesting note from the Massachusetts report too is now that they
02:40 are starting to include daily Fantasy revenue and betting totals with their
02:49 monthly report with the traditional sports betting.
02:52 So I know some of my colleagues have been on here, especially Sam McQuillan,
02:57 talking about the daily Fantasy, sort of the legal aspect of that.
03:04 And I know that the Massachusetts regulators have been aware of some other
03:09 states, kind of cracking down or at least taking a little bit of a closer look to
03:14 how some of these outfits operate there.
03:17 So interesting to me that they're starting to include those monthly financial
03:26 figures with their traditional sports betting report every month.
03:31 So just real briefly on the daily Fantasy side in Massachusetts, DraftKings,
03:37 the leader there, and PrizePix was the second most popular operator of daily
03:45 Fantasy sports in Massachusetts.
03:47 So a couple of additional things that I'll be keeping my eye on as they move
03:52 forward with including that data in their reports each month.