Launch of Sports Betting in Kentucky: 2M Geolocation Checks Done!
Transcript
00:00 I guess we got to go to Kentucky first because boy, oh boy, it looks like they're welcoming
00:08 a sports betting in the state of Kentucky.
00:10 Yeah.
00:11 You know, and thanks Joe for having me.
00:13 I always love to come on and talk about these new States when they launch, because we get
00:17 a lot of data and for the, the business thirds on the backside of sports betting here, that's
00:22 the kind of stuff that we love to see.
00:25 And yeah, Kentucky was excited for sports betting to launch.
00:29 Now let's remember that they had retail betting launch at the beginning of the month.
00:33 This was them waiting for mobile betting to launch on the 28th.
00:37 But in the first 24 hours, we saw more than 2 million geolocation checks, according to
00:43 GeoComply from about 200,000 accounts.
00:48 That's pretty good for the first 24 hours.
00:50 Now, geolocation check doesn't necessarily mean placing a bet.
00:53 It can mean placing a bet, but it can also mean when you're logging in, or maybe you're
00:58 in a car and you're moving and they're just making sure that you're still within that
01:02 permitted area.
01:03 So we're not saying 2 million bets, of course, but we're saying a lot of bets.
01:08 We're saying a lot of activity.
01:11 Now just to give some kind of scale to that 2 million, the first week of the NFL regular
01:17 season, we had 242 million geolocation transactions across the 24 mobile States with legal sports
01:25 betting in the US.
01:27 So obviously that's a little drop in the bucket, but it's an important drop in the bucket,
01:32 because this has been waiting for a while to get legal betting.
01:37 And the interesting thing about this, Joe, is if you go over to Legal Sports Report and
01:41 check out this story on our website, we have embedded in the story a video from GeoComply
01:48 that shows all these little pins dropping from where the bets are coming from.
01:53 They're mostly green.
01:54 Some of them are red if they're dropping outside of state, and that shows you where bets not
01:57 being accepted.
01:59 But really interesting to see just how many of these are coming from the Cincinnati and
02:03 Louisville areas.
02:05 And you're thinking, well, of course, those are just heavily populated areas.
02:09 There's going to be plenty of people around that in general.
02:12 But when you think about the fact that Kentucky is offering sports betting to 18-year-olds
02:18 instead of just 21-year-olds, as you get in Ohio and Indiana, you have to wonder what
02:24 that was like for some 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds if they were making that trip over to be a
02:28 part of the opening wave, which you would assume they would, right?
02:33 If they're waiting to bet on sports and they haven't been able to in their state, obviously,
02:37 you're going to get in when the thing kicks off, because you had all of these different
02:41 promotions going on.
02:43 We're not seeing the same level of promo from a year or two ago, where people are getting
02:48 thousands of dollars for their first deposits or a back and a bonus bet or something like
02:53 that.
02:54 But you're still seeing really decent offers, which, hey, if you're getting nothing anyway,
02:58 why wouldn't you go get those offers?
03:01 One of the interesting things that we learned was that of those 200,000 or so accounts that
03:07 we had, only 60,000 of those are pre-registered.
03:12 Operators were allowed to start signing people up before the market actually went live.
03:17 And that's always interesting to me, because you will see special pre-registration offers.
03:22 So it's interesting to see why less than a third of the market really did that pre-registration.
03:28 Maybe enough people were happy with the retail betting.
03:33 Who knows what that could be?
03:34 But early on, really interesting numbers from Kentucky.
03:38 Kentucky is going to be a fun state to watch.
03:39 Again, you have some really good brands in there.
03:42 You have your Caesars, DraftKings, Fanatic, Spandool.
03:47 We will see ESPN get in there because Penn is in there.
03:52 And the more information we get from Geocomply, I'm really going to be watching to see if
03:58 we can tell just from where some of this out-of-state betting interest is coming from.
04:02 Because like I said, Bet365 and DraftKings, they're operating for 18-year-olds.
04:07 And I think that could be a difference maker for those two operators.
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