Testing against corruption
The owner of Bulgarian football club Lokomotiv Plovdiv is to make its players and officials take a lie detector test to screen for match fixing after an unexpected 1-0 loss to lowly Botev Vratsa, bottom of the Bulgarian first division. Chair-
man Veselin Mareshki said: “Nobody is insured against defeats but this loss is very strange. The fair-play principle is the most important thing for me and all players and coaches will take lie detector tests.” (David Bethune)
Social Buddy looking to muscle in
A new social betting site has declared ‘war’ on the ‘outdated bookmaker model’. BuddyBet CEO Jarrod Epps answers questions on the latest revolution to hit online betting.
SOCIAL W
hat’s your new offer to the market?
BuddyBet is a social gaming platform that gives sports fans opportunities to put passion back into betting using direct head-to-head or group challenges against your friends or foes. It’s an innovative, easy-to-use, pro- fessional betting platform that encourages players to face up to friends and the world to bet on sports, events, facts and direct head- to-head competitions. BuddyBet will launch for all users with stakes includ- ing virtual money, known as BuddyBucks, and forfeits/actions. Prizes are available for the most suc- cessful members, and cash will be distributed to the most active users in advance of the open, public cash- betting system (scheduled for introduction in Decem- ber). In line with the release of that full-cash betting system, BuddyBet users will
also be able to take advan- tage of pool betting and fully customisable betting options inside and outside of sports.
Social betting is quite an emerging market - who are your main competitors? Honestly, we think we fit into a niche that really isn’t being properly exploited. Most social betting sites are either not targeted correctly in terms of their approach to the market and/or they are not offering the opportunity to bet for real cash. Even Bwin, with its recently announced mega-invest- ment into social betting/social gambling, seem to be avoiding cash wagering games. Addition- ally, the traditional betting sites don’t offer the range of fun, social and viral elements we do. I suppose the biggest competitors we might have would be someone like Betdash, Bodugi or The Sports Casino (on Face-
book). But their models are very different from ours and, honestly, our intensive research shows that our focus addresses a need that our target users have much better than those other models do.
Where do you intend to find your core user base? We strongly believe that there is an extremely large, potential user community who currently have a bias against online betting in general, not because they are against gambling, but because traditional online betting has predominantly been a non-social activity. It carries with it a certain stigma and the requirement of a level of knowledge that ends up creating a wall many don’t want to breach. With the very successful Betfair model, what you see is a number of bookies and industry whales laying off a large amount of their risk into that platform, thereby
creating liquidity for smaller players to take their share of opportunistic bets. It works very well, but that model cer- tainly isn’t for everyone. For many, it’s just too intimidat- ing and technical…and for those users it loses the con- nection to fun and passion that many want in their bets. With the advent of gamifi- cation and the model Zynga pioneered in getting people to pay a small amount to play a social game where users can’t really win anything of value, they established a few substantial cracks in this wall of negative emotion toward traditional betting - and they did it mostly with people who would never have considered betting online.
How do you intend to breach the gap between purely social gamers and real cash betting?
Zynga and others have created a change in mindset across a huge swath of society and, from that, it
really isn’t a massive step to get people to consider our social model in betting, which we call gamblifica- tion, where they can take a small punt with friends and spread the banter a bit further than they could offline.
When you conduct deep user testing, it is quite common for the subjects to do quite a bit of stream-of- consciousness rambling, and what they say is incredi- bly valuable. We went through several phases of user testing, mostly focused on people who don’t bet online but who have a strong affiliation with a particular team. One of the most inter- esting responses we often heard was users who were actively convincing them- selves that this platform we’ve created isn’t really gambling - that it’s just a bit
of fun and really an exten- sion of the friendly wagering they are doing with their friends anyway.
If the massive numbers of users who currently do not wager online are moving toward this way of thinking for social betting involving cash, when you take into con- sideration the absolutely stunning number and various types of people this shift can reach, I strongly doubt one market player and one type of game will reign supreme for everyone. You will always have people who prefer betting on sports, or playing fantasy league sports, prediction games, pool bets or even taking non- sports bets. Our platform is being developed in a way that we can cater to many of those people at the same time - with pool betting and customised bets on the near horizon.
ww@bgt.ag BettingBusinessInteractive • OCTOBER 2012 15
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