Opportunity for Racing as Sports Betting Eyes Content

Sports betting companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on customer acquisition in recent years, but a pair of experts said April 17 that a competitive shift is coming as these companies figure to soon turn to content to differentiate themselves in the currently crowded emerging market.

Those experts said as these sites look for the best content, horse racing needs to make sure it's part of the equation.

The American Horse Council conducted a free webinar Monday to examine the impact of sports betting and fantasy gaming on equestrian sports, including horse racing, which has not embraced fixed-odds wagering in the United States even as 38 states have legalized such wagering on sports.

Michele Fischer, vice president of the United States division of SIS Content Services, which is the largest distributor of horse racing content to global wagering operators, said fixed-odds wagering on U.S. horse racing would be an attractive addition to sports betting platforms. She said there's still time for the industry to make the move but the clock is ticking.

"We have to look at the industry five years from now, 10 years from now," Fischer said. "We are getting left behind—and I'd say this for other equestrian sports—we're becoming niche—very niche—very quickly," Fischer said. She predicted that the day is soon coming when sports without a direct presence on sports betting sites will lose traction with the mainstream audience. 

"There's always going to be people that want to come to the racetrack and they're going to want to bet on horse racing. That's a small group," Fischer said. "But (fixed-odds sports betting) is a huge opportunity for this entire industry to get out with all these other sports."

Fischer applauded the move of some sports betting sites to offer shared wallet platforms that allow players to fixed-odds wagers on sports and pari-mutuel wagering on racing but she said it's not going to be enough in this new era. She said new sports gambling fans better understand the fixed-odds standard offered in other sports than the fluctuating model offered in pari-mutuel wagering.

"We have to stop this worry and concern about, 'Oh, let's keep what we have,' because that's gone. That's leaving us," Fischer said. "We have to think about where we're going to sit five to 10 years from now."

While horse racing has had a long relationship with pari-mutuel wagering and is considering its best moves forward as fixed-odds wagering on sports becomes the norm, the webinar also noted that there has been an uptick in sports betting and fantasy gaming on equestrian disciplines such as polo, show jumping, and rodeo.

Brian Wyman, senior vice president of operations and data analytics with The Innovation Group, said sports betting platforms will soon differentiate each other based on content. As they examine the best sports to offer, contests that offer a clear winner, have their results determined in a short amount of time, and offer quality video coverage will have an advantage. Those are just three reasons horse racing would be attractive.

"Once the (customer promotion) marketing dollars kind of level off, the sports books are going to be kind of in the same boat as casinos to where the product that they're offering is more or less a commodity, right?" Wyman said. "Content is really going to draw. It'll be a driver over the next few years for some of these books."

Ed Martin, president of the Association of Racing Commissioners International and CEO of the newly formed Sports Betting Regulators Association, said that since 2018 when a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed states to determine if they wish to offer sports betting, horse racing most assuredly has faced legal competition like it has never seen before in terms of online wagering.

"Horse racing lost its monopoly as the only sport that people could legally wager on," Martin said, noting that Nevada was the one exception of a state that has a long history of allowing sports betting. "The reality of it is there is a huge new competitor to horse racing for the entertainment and the gambling dollar. And everybody's trying to adjust to that in the horse racing side to figure out where those opportunities might exist going forward."

It's a new challenge that also brings a significant opportunity. Fischer said while sports betting platforms are looking for new content, racing needs to act soon. She's confident that if it takes such action, it will bring in new eyeballs.

"We have to look at this as an opportunity and that opportunity is for horse racing or other equestrian sports to reach a new and bigger audience," Fischer said. "The opportunity here is expansion."