Betting used to be the preserve of mob bosses and back-alley card sharps. Now it is an increasingly regulated $500bn business where ever more bets are placed on mobile phones. Executives at firms like Flutter use workaday metrics—conversion rates, cost of customer acquisition, employee engagement—familiar to managers at Amazon or McDonald’s.
In America the legal betting that existed before 2018 was limited and local. Most of it involved casinos and resorts; sports betting was all but banned outside Nevada. This meant that as states liberalised offering wagers on sports—as nearly half of them have now done—most of these potential American rivals lacked the expertise to calculate and serve up online the shifting odds on which New York Yankee will hit the next home run.
Forecasts of American gambling revenues are now rising as fast as Schumpeter’s losses on poker night. By 2025 analysts predict that bookmakers serving American sports fans could pocket $10bn-15bn a year in gross gaming revenue, the money they earn after paying out successful wagers. Though covid-19 briefly interrupted most sports, it nudged more potential players to online leisure, which included bingo as well as Netflix.