With the largest World Cup in football history – held this summer in the US, Canada and Mexico – edging ever closer, operators across the world will be fighting to curry favour with casual punters and seasoned bettors alike. For Midnite, making a splash and winning over customers is nothing new.
Since launching as an esports betting brand in 2018, and subsequently transitioning to a traditional sportsbook and casino offering, the operator has gone from strength to strength in the UK market. Whether it’s through football club sponsorship deals with the likes of Southampton and Sheffield United, or tournament sponsorships with the World Snooker Tour, Midnite has significantly raised its profile.
It’s not just UK customers who have taken notice, as the operator secured $35m worth of capital in a Series C funding round in January, taking its total investment beyond the $75m mark. None of this would be possible without a competitive and proprietary product built from the ground up, which head of sportsbook Ben Cullen attests is only going to get better in the near future.
Cullen believes the company’s challenger brand status works to its advantage, as the operator with aspirations of reaching tier-one status can make decisions and changes much quicker than its larger counterparts bogged down by layers of internal red tape.
EGR: How are preparations going for the World Cup going so far? Are there any new features the company is looking to deploy in time for the tournament?
Ben Cullen (BC): We won’t officially kick things off until a bit closer to the tournament, but we’re constantly refining the most popular products. For example, we’ve invested a lot recently in our props offering. We’re constantly fine-tuning that as a product so that our bet builder is best in class – we think that will be a really popular aspect of World Cup betting.
Our coverage of the tournament and our market depth should be industry-leading, so we’re looking forward to offering it to customers. Over the last six to 12 months, we’ve really expanded our manual offering, and that’s something we plan to take on through the World Cup as well. A really strong core, manual and prop offering is our three-pronged attack for the World Cup.
EGR: How much of an issue so you think the different time zones will be throughout the tournament?
BC: It’s definitely going to be an issue for certain games, as some are at two and five o’clock in the morning in the UK. A lot of England games are scheduled around about the 10pm mark, so people are still going to be up betting at that time. We expect to still take money during the overnight sessions, but those late-night games will be affected, so it’s a bit of a shame.
The way the scheduling has been done, a lot of the key games will be at favourable times for the UK market, so I don’t think it will impact us too much. Even though some of those games are overnight, you’ve obviously got a significant amount of time to bet pre-match on those markets, so a lot of people who may be thinking about betting on them in-play will just get their bets on pre-match. I don’t think we’ll see a huge lull, although it would be nice to have it on a European time zone to capture both the pre-match and in-play markets.
EGR: Did the Club World Cup last summer in the US provide any learnings you can take into the World Cup?
BC: That tournament actually performed really well for us from a revenue standpoint. We ran a lot of promotions that did very well, and even some of the later games still drove quite good numbers on in-play markets. I’m sure the Midnite team will be looking back at past successes and seeing how we can emulate them for the World Cup.
EGR: Is there any worry of bet fatigue from a customer standpoint, given the tournament will have more teams – 48 instead of 32 – and more games – 104 instead of 64 – than ever before?
BC: I don’t think there’s any worry of that as there’s so much content on every day of the week now. You’ve got high-level football on pretty much seven days a week, and there’s no real bet fatigue that we’ve seen. Even looking outside football, you’ve got big, big events from across all sports every day of the week.
It’s not like it was 20 years ago when sports were a lot more spread out. Now, people waiting for big events open their phone or an app and there’s something there of a decent standard to bet on. As long as those good events keep popping up, there will be people to bet on them.
EGR: How are you looking to entice customers away from more established operators?
BC: By doing things differently across the board. We’ve done some interesting things from a brand perspective and have had to think outside the box, which we’ve done through our partnerships with Sheffield United and Southampton, for example. We’ve been getting noticed. We’ve been collecting data on how those brand partnerships have been working for us in terms of customer acquisition, and it’s been very positive.
Everything we do is data led; we do something, we see how it works, and we double down on things that are providing value for us. The way we’ve established our brand over the last six to 12 months has been quite different to what other traditional operators have done. From an aesthetic point of view, we probably look and feel a bit different to other bookmakers, too.
EGR: How can being a smaller brand work to your advantage when it comes to major sporting events like the World Cup?
BC: We’re a smaller organisation with fewer roadblocks, with all our own tech and a dedicated engineering team to build products quickly – that’s where our edge comes from. With larger organisations there tends to be a lot of middle management which decisions have to go through, whereas we operate with a flatter structure. Our plan to win is to be agile, build quickly and to our own specifications, rather than relying on any third-party suppliers for new products.
EGR: How have you had to adapt your bet builder product to keep up with market demands?
BC: We’ve made improvements to both the UI and UX. We’ve greatly improved our market depth offering with all the really popular props across more leagues. We offer a wide array of leagues and the popular prop markets like shots on target, shots, fouls, etc, have really boosted our bet builder product.
In addition to that, we’ve also changed the way people integrate with a product. A lot of the UX or UI changes have made the product feel a lot nicer and cleaner to use. It takes less clicks to get to a bet, we’re upselling bets in the betslip, and in general making a lot of changes so bet builders flow nicely for the customer.
EGR: How much of the funding raised by Midnite has flowed down towards the sportsbook product?
BC: The way we work internally is that as a management team we identify key drivers of growth within the business – whether that be sportsbook, compliance or marketing – and we attack the biggest value options first. We look at which elements are going to make the biggest improvements to the business in the quickest amount of time.
The sportsbook gets a lot of investment constantly, as do all areas of the business. We’re always making changes, be it weekly, monthly or yearly. There are various things on our roadmap we’re looking to achieve, so it’s an exciting time. Over the next year, the business and the sportsbook will likely look a lot different and a lot better for our customers.
EGR: How much growth have you seen in markets outside of football?
BC: We’ve seen quite a lot of growth in horseracing, which is a big product for us and to which we’ve made a lot of improvements. We’ve also done some sponsorships with the All Weather Championships, which have driven a bit of growth in horseracing. We also have official rights for some of the larger tennis tournaments, which means we can provide better options for customers in terms of bet delays and market offering, and that’s really driven some growth in the sport. Tennis has been especially good; we gained more ground in tennis than we have in any other sport over the last 12 months.
Snooker has obviously been good; the partnership with the World Snooker Tour has been measured and detailed, and we’ve seen that it’s really had a positive effect from customers. A lot of customers we’re seeing are coming to Midnite from directly seeing us, whether it be on Twitter or TV, so that’s really been a positive thing for us.
With darts, the sport has just exploded in the industry in general and we’ve really improved our offering. We’ve always got lots of manual offerings up for darts – we offer it both pre-match and in-play, and we offer a lot of tournaments outside the big stuff as well. We’ve seen decent growth there and a decent appetite from customers for darts.
EGR: How has Midnite been able to attract a younger audience compared to its competitors? And how do their betting habits differ to those of older customers?
BC: In terms of betting habits, it’s quite mixed, and really it boils down to a customer-by-customer basis. Our branding helps; at the moment, we’re advertising that we’re ‘not your Grandad’s bookie’, so you can take from that we’re targeting a younger audience. A lot of our branding is quite out there with its fluorescent colours and motion graphics, so it’s tailored towards a younger audience. That being said, we have a very diverse and wide-ranging customer base.
Have Your Say
Take our short customer survey on EGR’s content and data offering for the chance to win a £100 Amazon voucher. It will take less than three minutes, with the findings used to inform our plans to improve the platform.
The post Midnite’s head of sportsbook: Being agile and building quickly plays to our advantage first appeared on EGR Intel.
Ben Cullen speaks to EGR about preparations for the summer’s World Cup and why “doing things differently across the board” helps the challenger operator stand out in the UK market
The post Midnite’s head of sportsbook: Being agile and building quickly plays to our advantage first appeared on EGR Intel.