Having headed up the Online Betting Guide (OLBG) alongside founder Antony Portno for two decades, Richard Moffat has been instrumental in its growth story, from a basic informational website to a community-focused hub with user-generated sports betting advice, discussions and tipster competitions. Today, OLGB, which was placed 12th on the 2025 edition of the EGR Power Affiliates rankings, attracts more than one million site visits a month and generates 200 million impressions annually on its social channels.
Still run very much as a lean organisation, OLBG has an army of users providing content, including between 2,000 and 3,000 members contributing to the site on a daily basis. For Moffat, there “still isn’t anything quite like it” out there. Unsurprisingly, there have been “a lot of approaches” over the years to acquire the business, yet Moffat has always held the view that the team and the community have invested too much time and effort to see it potentially wilt as part of a publicly listed affiliate group. Ensuring OLBG flourishes in the long term has always been the priority, the CEO insists.
EGR: So, 20 years at OLBG. How does that feel?
Richard Moffat (RM): It does sound a long time when you say 20 years, but it has gone very quickly. Antony Portno set the company up [in 2002 in Bristol] after he was made redundant as an accountant. He bought a book, HTML for Dummies, I think, and built a few sites – a shopping site, a mobile ringtone site and a betting site [www.online-betting-guide.co.uk].
I discovered the betting site while working as a financial adviser but fancied myself as a horseracing adviser on the side. I was one of the first people to put their tips on the site and that’s how I got to know Antony. When I first started [at OLBG as CEO in June 2005] I thought I’d give it a year and see how it goes. I could always go back to mortgages and financial advice.
EGR: Take us back to 2005, what was the setup like?
RM: When I started there was so much to do. My interest was around commercial content marketing, which I love, and Antony was more on the development side. I was settling the tips [competitions] on the site and starting to learn a bit more about online marketing. I took on as much as I could so that Antony could do more of the developing but, as we hired more people, I was able to focus more on marketing. It just went from there. We’ve tried to stay quite lean; we have a team of under 30 people right now.
EGR: The site had 1,000 members in September 2005, yet it had swelled to 50,000 three years later. How were you growing the community?
RM: The tipster competition had just about started when I discovered the site, but the forum was added later, and that’s how the community really started to grow. People were asking for a forum, so Antony built it. That’s what we’ve always done – try to deliver what people want. So, the tipster competitions and the forum created a place where people felt comfortable chatting about betting.
In the early days of the forum, it was just five or six of us chatting but then it started to grow every day […] it was word of mouth. People would say, ‘I wish I’d found you earlier, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for’. There still isn’t anything quite like it. I’m a big believer of having brand advocates – we see that in other industries like travel with TripAdvisor and personal finance with Money Saving Expert.
Also, most people at the time bet in betting shops so there was a need for an [online] guide to explain how it worked and which sites to trust. Back then not all operators offered betting on all sports, for example. Some wouldn’t offer horseracing or some that did football would only do the top leagues.
EGR: What was your approach to SEO?
RM: Back then, ranking [highly] on Google was just 10 blue links. There was no PPC [pay-per-click], just these 10 results. In some ways it was a lot easier to rank. Now if you rank highly, you might be down the bottom of the page because there is so much going on. There was no mobile and there wasn’t a lot of social media. So, if you did well on Google, you did extremely well. Our competitors were just other sites like us, whereas it’s now operators themselves. They didn’t rank back then.
EGR: The URL was shortened in 2011 to OLBG.com. Was it a logical move?
RM: We already had ‘OBG’ on the website, which is better than OLBG, but people started calling us OLBG. Because so many of the users were calling us that, it just made sense. And our URL at the time was very long. Whether we could have had a better name or not, I’m not sure because OLBG is not very easy on the tongue. It is what it is, but we built a brand around it. We do a lot of offline advertising, so the old URL would never have worked. We have always invested in community first and monetisation second.
EGR: How significant was OLBG’s sponsorship of the Mares’ Hurdle from the 2012 Cheltenham Festival onwards in terms of amplifying the site?
RM: It was a huge commitment and a big portion of our revenue at the time. We felt we wanted to stand out from our competitors because a lot of them were keyword domains. We wanted to be seen much more like a key partner. It was partly strategic, but we also wanted to do something we enjoyed because we enjoy National Hunt racing. There was a lot of fun around being able to take our members to racecourses and into the paddock and present trophies.
Sponsoring the Mares’ Hurdle series allowed us to do something good for the sport because back then the mares’ races weren’t very popular. The Mares’ Hurdle was on the second day [of the Cheltenham Festival] and not [one of the races aired] on terrestrial TV, which was Channel 4 then. Through the work we did, we managed to move it to the first day, increase it to a Grade 1 and create a whole series of races leading up to it. We didn’t know what we would get out of it, but it really did help raise our profile in the long term.
EGR: OLBG sponsored the Mares’ Hurdle in 2015, the year Annie Power fell at the last hurdle, which was thought to have saved bookmakers a £50m payout on multiples involving jockey Ruby Walsh.
RM: That was actually the biggest televised race that day, when Annie Power fell and Glens Melody won. It was watched by more people than the Champion Hurdle. That was a nice little victory for a race that no one previously watched. We sponsored the race for eight years, but it came to an end just before Covid.
EGR: Around a decade ago a wave of consolidation began to sweep through the sector as larger affiliates used M&A to turbocharge inorganic growth. Were there offers for OLBG?
RM: Understandably, we were a key target at that point because we were one of the largest independents. We had a lot of approaches. We had discussions but we are absolutely glad we didn’t sell because while those that did sell got an exit, and that’s fantastic, I don’t see many companies flourishing post-sale. We wanted OLBG to survive long term and to flourish. People have put so much into building it – not just us and our team but also the members.
EGR: How have you seen the industry grow and evolve over your 20 years at OLBG?
RM: It’s a constant wave of challenges. You get over one wave and something else comes in, whether that’s mobile, regulation, tax, or Google updates. Right now, the challenge is around AI and LLMs [large language models] now that people are using ChatGPT. There’s always a new challenge – that keeps it fun. It would be boring if it was the days of the 10 links and we were sitting at the top of Google. Challenges bring fun and opportunities. With each challenge some of our competitors slip away a little bit. Because we kept things lean and we’re forward thinking, we’ve been looking at AI for years. We’ve got a very good development team here.
EGR: Do you think you could have similar success with OLBG if you built it today or is it a far tougher and vastly different environment than the early 2000s?
RM: To build a community of brand advocates takes time and long-term investment. I don’t think any of the [affiliate] PLCs have invested much in that, much to my relief, and that’s why some brands aren’t still around. You can’t turn up in 2025 and grow that easily and quickly. Authority takes time. So, it would be extremely challenging to start today. What people trust about us is that 23-year history and reputation. We went quite early on brand and community, and we were not focused on commercial.
PLCs have very short-term needs to generate revenue and show growth all the time. I guess we have been in quite a unique position where for a long time we haven’t had to demonstrate growth to anyone else because we’ve always been a private company. We’re seeing the rewards of that now where we have incredible year-on-year growth. So, it would be extremely hard to build a brand quickly [these days]. You see that with operators trying build a brand and market share, it costs a huge amount of money. And if they don’t get it right, they don’t last long.
The post OLBG’s CEO: It would be “extremely challenging” to launch the same business today first appeared on EGR Intel.
Richard Moffat reflects on his 20 years at the Online Betting Guide and why fostering a loyal community was crucial to its success
The post OLBG’s CEO: It would be “extremely challenging” to launch the same business today first appeared on EGR Intel.