Knowledge base October 22nd, 2026

How Betting Companies Build Their Consumer Bases Out of Fans

Key Takeaways

• Sports fans are valuable potential customers since they know sports already, spend on related products, and can be encouraged to bet using bookmaker ecosystems.
• Large sportsbooks use large marketing budgets, sports partnerships, and innovation to reach millions of potential customers.
• Fantasy sports and prediction markets are common strategies companies have used to grow and become big.
• Keeping existing customers is cheaper and better than gaining new ones, which operators do using personalized promotions, loyalty programs, and cross-selling.
• Newer companies are using social media algorithms, shareable content, influencers, the prediction market format, and more enjoyable ways to bet.

Every week, millions of people watch sports and like to show off their stats, knowledge, and opinions. In fascinating ways, betting companies have become exceptionally good at converting them into customers and keeping them. The giants promote themselves using advertising dollars while new companies compete through social media and innovation. Fans now get emotionally invested in both their teams and the bets they place, proving their intuition right.

Betting Companies’ Biggest Asset: The Sports Fan

Sports betting in much of the world today is seen as an additional source of entertainment that people can add to watching the match. The $111.2B industry relies on fans’ knowledge of and passion for a certain sport in order to encourage them to choose this additional activity. They are already often nervous about the results of matches, so the adrenaline of betting is not as new as for non-sports fans. So it makes more sense for betting companies to target sports entertainment resources rather than convincing people who aren’t interested in sports to bet.

Unified Sports Ecosystems

Fans today do much more than watch live sports matches and root for their favorite teams. They buy mugs, pens, jackets, flags, helmets, balls, and all sorts of items to celebrate their identity as a fan of the team. So they are used to spending money in different ways. This is especially true for major fans that like to attend the games in person and celebrate with some tasty food. 

Betting operators go a few steps further to encourage fans to watch and add extra elements to the entertainment. They create whole ecosystems that help make betting as much a part of the fan experience as any other way they spend money on the hobby. Bookmakers are interested in sports betting becoming as natural a part of fan entertainment as possible. They connect all of these sources of entertainment in a way that creates attachment to their brands and makes betting appealing.

It works like this:

1. A fan buys a jersey, hat, helmet, or gear with a team or player name on it.
2. The sportsbook gives the fan loyalty points for bets.
3. The sportsbook provides a live stream of the match for them to watch.
4. The fan places a live micro-bet during the game.

Mobile Devices

Fans watching at home no longer simply watch the game on TV. They have long been used to watching a game on television or on their laptop and then checking stats on their smartphones or tablets to check fantasy scores, discuss things on social media, and read live commentary or reactions from athlete celebrities on X. Bookmakers have added themselves into this process too.

Sportsbook Streaming Interfaces

When bookmakers stream games themselves, they give fans access to watch the match, but they are also able to display betting chances at high-adrenaline moments. They ask fans, “Will Messi score the winning goal in the third period?” These prop bets are shown at the bottom of the screen during the live stream. This is made possible by sportsbooks buying broadcasting rights. Game feeds usually take up the top half of the interface, while the bottom half is full of a changing list of micro-props.

Fan Expert Bias

Fans spend hours reading team rosters, learning about new players and their skills, and studying head-to-head histories. They debate coaching and general management decisions. This intense interest leads to fans developing an expert bias—the false confidence that, among other things, they can make bets and win easily. That would also prove their sports intelligence to themselves and others. Bookmakers provide the immediate infrastructure to put that to the test.

Flutter’s FanDuel

Flutter originally was founded as Paddy Power in 1988, based in Dublin, Ireland. It focuses on popular brands like FanDuel for bettors in certain countries where betting is regulated or will soon become regulated. Then Flutter uses its technologies, expertise, and cross-selling in other countries to keep those consumers. This is the largest betting company in the world, making $16.83 billion in 2025. It takes its revenue from multiple big brands like:

• FanDuel: USA and Canada
• Paddy Power, Betfair, and Sky Betting & Gaming: Great Britain and Ireland
• Sportsbet: Australia
• Sisal: Italy
• Tombola: multiple European countries

FanDuel is Flutter’s biggest source of profits, making $7.4B in the US in 2025. It was an innovative company, making fantasy sports an incredibly entertaining experience in 2009, even during a time when it was hard to predict what regulations might be made on fantasy sports. Back then, Nevada was the main legal state where sports betting could be done. 

Fantasy Sports

FanDuel started creating fantasy leagues that would finish in just a day or a week instead of a whole season. Fans were quite happy with competitions where the winner was decided quickly. By 2013, FanDuel had already registered 1 million users. Players would put together money to compete in leagues, and winners would enjoy a big prize. 59.3 million people in the US and Canada played fantasy sports in 2022. 

Their $1.2 million funding rose to $416 million in eight years. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 created a legal exception for betting on games of skill, like fantasy sports. Then, in 2018, the platform benefitted from the Supreme Court of the US ruling to end the federal PASPA ban on sports betting in almost every US state. Soon, 38 states legalized betting.

Important Partnerships

FanDuel knew the importance of building a very strong reputation. It invests heavily in teams of data engineers, SEO experts, and behavioral analysts. Beyond that, it has signed partnerships with sports leagues. 

League Access

It has paid a lot to become an official NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, and NASCAR sports betting partner (as well as a partner with numerous other US and Canadian leagues), allowing it to get instant odds updates from stadiums’ data sensors as well as use their intellectual property—the symbols and names used in the sports leagues.

FanDuel gets digital integrations of NFL-owned media like NFL RedZone and its other live games. Props are discussed on NFL Network as commentators advertise FanDuel. It gets to set up tents at big games and has access to VIP areas, which it can use for luxury fan experiences.

It’s also strengthened its reputation by partnering with payment gateway providers:

• Nuvei
• Visa Direct
• PayPal
• Venmo
• PayNearMe
• Play+

Marketing Budget

Flutter spent $3.68 billion total on all its brands in 2025. A large portion of this was on:

• National television: the largest expense
• League deals
• Digital and social media growth
• User incentives

Community Building

The organization has made a big effort to create shared experiences, socialization, and a sense of belonging. It does this by using leaderboards, social media integration, and forums. It’s also put much importance on customer support. It has given deposit matches and hyper-personalized benefits for users. Its “happiest customer” referral benefits gave isolated referral prompts to the most active users for the best word of mouth, which FanDuel heavily relied on. 

It also used tools like Segment and Blaze for extremely customized in-app content cards for different users in its CRM.

DraftKings 

Currently the second-biggest bookmaker in the United States with $6.05 billion in 2025, DraftKings was created in 2012 and also grew in popularity thanks to fantasy sports. Its timing in entering the market six years before the PASPA repeal was perfect. However, the main reason it got popular was by using one of the most aggressive customer attraction strategies in modern business history.

The 2015 TV Ad Explosion

In 2015, FanDuel and DraftKings together spent over $500 million on television advertising. Every 90 seconds, DraftKings showed another commercial on sports networks like ESPN and Fox Sports. Their TV ads focused on regular sports fans winning huge, life-changing amounts ($1 million first-place prizes) in a single week. This created fear of missing out, and many people downloaded the app.

Major League Partnerships

DraftKings didn’t do any local advertising. Instead, it signed exclusive partnerships to become the “Official Daily Fantasy Partner” of the NFL, MLB, NHL, PGA Tour, and UFC. It had its live betting odds and fantasy scoring tickets shown in pre-game shows and live game broadcasts. This made the brand look very official, as if it couldn’t be separated from sports. And because it was fantasy sports betting, it was legal. It could advertise while actual sportsbooks could not.

DraftKings secured a $250 million exclusivity deal with ESPN starting in 2016, preventing other fantasy platforms from getting seen.

Aggressive Incentives to Customers

The operator bought its early popularity. One way was matching deposits with 100% bonuses. It also hosted massive tournaments that cost nothing to enter. 

Extreme Spending

In 2021, DraftKings put an amazing 75% of its income into its brand being shown everywhere. FanDuel only spent 50%, by comparison. During its heavy growth phase, DraftKings had an incredibly high LTV-to-CAC ratio of 6.7:1, while the standard healthy ratio is 3:1. It builds its marketing budgets with a 2–3-year payback window. So it intentionally overspent on performance marketing to get maximum local market entry.

DraftKings has used:

1. Awareness campaigns on TV and online, with celebrities like Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas
2. Localized state launches with incentives before registration to users, as users were given free bets for downloading and registering accounts early. 
3. Performance marketing focused on fans of local teams, like the Boston Celtics for Massachusetts users
4. Paying aggressively high costs for search ads
5. Algorithmic cross-selling: referring users to casinos
6. Automatic CRM engines to send push notifications based on betting patterns

bet365

Unlike many of the other competitor giants of the industry, bet365 is a completely private tech empire worth $5.4 billion and totally controlled by the founding family. In the late 1990s, Denise Coates was managing her father’s betting shops in the UK. She believed that those physical shops were limited geographically, so she bought an internet domain, borrowing $20 million by mortgaging the family’s physical betting shops.

bet365 launched in 2001, and by 2005, Coates sold the family’s physical betting shops to pay off the bank loan and go completely online. Her competitors were slow to move online, and this was a brave move. Also, because she kept the company private, she never had to deal with pressure from public shareholders to cut costs.

Pioneer of “In-Play” Betting

Before bet365.com existed, almost all betting was pre-match betting. bet365 funded the development that resulted in live in-play betting, so users could bet on short, quick moments within matches with bet winners decided immediately. 

Free Live Sports Streaming

This was the first major operator to buy global broadcasting rights for niche and major sports. It allowed users to watch live streams right in the interface for free, as long as they kept an account with deposits on it. So it became an entertainment center.

The Business Model

bet365 operates as a high-frequency, high-liquidity financial center for global sports. It relies on:

• Low fees on a massive scale, in part thanks to low operating costs
• 24-hour operations across dozens of localized languages and currencies
• Algorithmic risk management
• Aggressive customer profiling with serious betting limits for sharp bettors or those known as not good for business
• Recreational bettors get loyalty features, push notifications, and casino cross-selling offers

Geographical Expansion

bet365 has entered over 150 countries worldwide, becoming a global powerhouse of over 100 million users. It has done this by taking early positions in regulated markets and gray markets to accelerate cash flow before clearer regulations could come. It entered other European markets early, like:

• Spain
• Italy
• Germany
• Denmark
• Ireland
• More recently, the difficult markets of France and the Netherlands
• Mexico
• Colombia
• Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Ontario and Alberta in Canada
• 17 US states

In the process, bet365 buys the digital broadcasting rights for that region’s favorite sports for in-app live streaming.

Strategic Expenses

bet365 employs over 10,000 staff in centralized offices and doesn’t pay any licensing fees, since it makes all its live betting algorithms completely in-house. But it spends a lot on big sponsorships. It is the official global partner of the UEFA Champions League and the official betting sponsor for the UFC in the USA and Canada.

Sometimes it spends as much as 85% of its Gross Gaming Revenue on promo bets.

BetMGM

BetMGM is owned by two different industry giants—MGM Resorts International and Entain plc, the UK global gaming technology provider. This happened in 2018 when the gold rush on sports betting began, after PASPA ended. Unlike DraftKings and FanDuel, MGM Resorts didn’t have the complex digital code required to run a high-activity mobile sportsbook. On the other hand, Entain had the technology but no brand recognition or audience in America. They joined forces and now own 50% of BetMGM each, sharing the $2.8 billion in annual revenue.

Customer Acquisition

The other giants in the USA had to spend millions of dollars on expensive television ads to build a user base from scratch, but BetMGM already has the perfect resource to get its customers—its physical vacation centers. They connect to guests’ mobile phones. 

MGM Rewards is its main tool for doing that. When a vacationer visits properties like the Bellagio, ARIA, or MGM Grand in Las Vegas, they are automatically added to the rewards system. Then BetMGM directly contacts members of the database to convert them into active mobile app users. It doesn’t have to offer any “free bets.” It offers rewards as experiences instead. When users bet on a smartphone in Ohio or New Jersey, the loyalty points they get can be spent on:

• Free hotel rooms
• Free dinners
• VIP concerts
• Exclusive event access
• Personal customer service representatives

Celebrity Promotion

BetMGM invests a lot of money in celebrities to get their public support. It markets itself as the “King of Sportsbooks” by using stars in national marketing campaigns like:

• Jamie Foxx
• Tom Brady
• Wayne Gretzky
• Vanessa Hudgens

Business Model

BetMGM enjoys quite high profit margins because the business is built more for online casino game revenue, even though BetMGM advertises for sports betting. Betting does bring in a lot of money, but the profits in betting are low and unpredictable. Online slots and blackjack, however, give a very predictable house edge. So, iGaming actually creates 68% of BetMGM’s total net revenue. 

What BetMGM does is use sports to get millions of users onto the app, and then it uses smart algorithms to cross-sell casino games to those sports fans as soon as a game ends.

Betway

Founded in 2006, Betway is an international gambling brand responsible for a massive portion of the $2.43 billion annual revenue that its parent company Super Group reports. It is very different from BetMGM since it doesn’t focus all its efforts on one country. Instead, Betway operates free of borders, taking advantage of the global sports markets in a sponsorship-heavy model.

It had difficulties becoming popular in the UK and had to change operations to Malta. It was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under Super Group but found US sports markets very unprofitable. It’s mainly focused on Europe and Africa as a result.

Customer Acquisition Strategy

Betway does not pay to show ads during television breaks. It buys sports teams and leagues instead. It uses absolute brand saturation in everyday sports. It relies most on the English Premier League, most famous for having its logo shown on the jerseys of West Ham United Football Club, as well as of Arsenal, Brighton, and Manchester City players. 

Betway is on screen whenever a soccer match is shown to millions of viewers. It also sponsors entire sporting ecosystems. It’s the official sponsor of the Cricket South Africa leagues, major ATP tournaments, and big global horse racing festivals like Cheltenham. On top of that, it was one of the first major sportsbooks to treat esports as top-tier. It poured millions into sponsoring legendary esports teams like Ninjas in Pyjamas and major CS:Go and Dota 2 tournaments. As a result, it got a very loyal, younger, digital audience before mainstream bookmakers paid attention.

Business Model

Getting users to come and bet on sports is mostly a tool to get users through the door, like in BetMGM’s case. Football accounts for about 75% of its sports wagers, which is the main stimulus for users to download the app. Once they do, Betway encourages fans to play in its slots, roulette, and live dealer games. Outside of Africa, iGaming makes up 65% of Super Group’s net income, since slots are predictable and higher-margin.

However, Betway’s biggest base is in South Africa and other African markets. It uses mobile payment networks and low-data mobile apps, which has given the parent company one-third of its global revenue.

Geography

Betway prefers European countries with strict, formal gambling commissions. It is most popular in the UK and Ireland, as well as operating in:

• Germany
• Spain
• Italy
• Sweden
• Belgium
• Portugal
• France

Betway has a strong market position in Ontario and avoids gray markets. It operates in Mexico, Argentina, and is in the process of entering Brazil’s huge newly regulated environment.

The New Challengers: A Different Way to Build a Betting Audience

The established betting giants built their audiences with huge advertising budgets, sports sponsorship, bonuses, and access to major sports leagues. Now, a new generation of operators is taking a different approach, though. Many rely on fantasy sports as DraftKings and FanDuel did, but they also use prediction markets as an alternative regulatory model and create clever twists in how people can bet and show off their experiences. 

Instead of making betting look like a financial transaction, new innovators have tried to make it feel more like a game, a social activity, or even a form of entertainment between friends. They make the experience more shareable and require less knowledge. Social media has been a very helpful method for challengers to enter the market, like:

• TikTok
• X
• Discord
• YouTube
• Facebook

They rely a lot on the algorithms of these networks and on sharing their bet slips. All of that is easy to share. More importantly, they always add something new that makes the user experience much more enjoyable.

Underdog Platform

Founded in 2020 in Brooklyn, Underdog was a fast-growing challenger in betting. It was the first operator to successfully put prediction markets directly into the mainstream sports betting culture. It achieved tech unicorn status before getting a massive corporate deal. London-based IG Group agreed to buy it for $1.3 billion due to its innovations in market betting. It has generated $466 million in net revenue. 

Underdog first launched as a Daily Fantasy Sports platform, but there was no way it could compete with the giants spending heavily on advertising. It avoided operating in sports betting and offered fantasy sports across over 30 states, including where sports betting was completely illegal. Then, to avoid regulators and look a lot like ordinary bets, in seven states, it created federally protected prediction markets instead.

PrizePicks and Their Simplified Big Bets

Again following in the trend of fantasy sports, PrizePicks is the largest Daily Fantasy Sports operator in the United States now, with a user base of over 10 million people. The lottery and gaming giant Allwyn International later bought a 62.3% stake in it. It’s now valued at $4.15 billion. 

Before, mobile sports fans had to build full teams and play against thousands of other strangers in a huge season-long or daily combined-money prize contest. It was hard to win and took too long. In this case, players no longer had to create whole teams. The app presented a pick-one format instead, and users just had to decide whether, for instance, Brock Purdy would pass for over 250 yards. They just had to choose “more” or “less.” However, on these apps, users cannot make single bets. They must combine at least two to six players into a single roster, called parlays. These kinds of bets are good for the house since getting several bets right at the same time is mathematically unlikely.

Its marketing method relied on the viral group chat culture. It was based on peer-to-peer excitement. It started this by partnering with comedians like Druski along with Twitch, TikTok, and sports streamers. It’s easy to take screenshots in the app. The app makes clear, visually addictive cards.  They offered “more or less” bets on all kinds of events that bigger sportsbooks ignored. They also function as a prediction market format since it allows easier regulation.

Prediction Markets: The Big Threat to Traditional Sportsbooks 

Two major threats to sportsbooks are the well-established prediction market giants, which offer lower costs to bettors, more options, and allow people to bet on whatever they want, as long as someone else can be found that will be willing to take the opposite side of their bet. The two giants are Kalshi and Polymarket in the United States. The monthly trading volume in US prediction markets is $24 billion, compared to $14 billion for sportsbooks.

Special Legal Treatment from the US Federal Government

They are a very serious threat because they’ve grown extremely fast and might completely steal the market. They are treating sports results like financial assets, rather than casino wagers. DraftKings and FanDuel have to operate under very strict laws and use certain technology to prevent money laundering and player abuse. In many states like Texas and California, sports betting is still not even legal.  Instead, Kalshi, Polymarket, and other challengers structuring themselves as prediction markets are getting monitored by the much more permissive Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 

No More Vig (or House Edge)

Traditional sportsbooks take about 5% of every bet, so they have a reason to stay in business. Prediction markets instead just connect users directly, while taking 1–2% fees for offering the platform for the transaction. Users seem to prefer prediction markets now, since they get better odds thanks to not having to pay fees or often play against experts. Sportsbooks, however, argue that too many novices are getting taken advantage of by Wall Street sharps.

No Bettor Limits

Sportsbooks over-limit “sharps” betting on their platform. When certain bettors keep winning or show suspicious betting patterns, they reduce how much those people can bet, or they ban them completely. Prediction markets allow people to bet as much as they want, since those platforms themselves are not betting against those players. People can bet $1 million as long as they can find a partner to bet with.

Also, prediction markets allow bettors to bet on anything, not just sports. They can bet on the weather, celebrity behavior, music, politics, and war. One of the reasons governments treat them so well is many believe they provide reliable information on the true probability of certain events occurring. The CIA even briefly had a program of its own in 2003, the Policy Analysis Market, to use expert bets to show how likely certain event results would be, in case they decided to take certain political actions. So there is truly no limit to how much can be bet.

Kalshi

Kalshi was founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara and made $1.5 billion in 2025. One of the sources of pride for Kalshi is that it has always tried to operate within the United States’ laws. Kalshi wanted to build a “Wall Street for everyday events.” Operating legally created challenges. It took two years of negotiations with the CFTC to operate legally. And it was the first digital platform of its kind to become a federally approved financial exchange, just like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Kalshi even had to take the federal government to court in 2024 when the government tried to stop it from offering election contracts, which opened up massive opportunities. 

Polymarket

Shayne Coplan created the company in 2020 in Manhattan. Polymarket was built on the Polygon blockchain connected to Ethereum. It used only USDC, a US dollar-based stablecoin. So it benefited from extremely low transaction fees and fast transaction speed. It became very popular thanks to bets on the 2024 presidential election. Coplan boasted that his platform proved better for predicting the results than polls, since the measured probability of a win for Trump went up fast after Joe Biden quit the race. 

Polymarket was fined $1.4 million and banned from the US in 2022 because it operated without a license early. However, it restructured, raised $70 million, and launched as Polymarket US to handle the heavily restricted domestic volume. Its 2025 revenue was $1 billion. Kalshi and Polymarket are direct competitors.

Customer Acquisition Model Comparison

Company	Main focus	Main customer attraction tools
FanDuel / Flutter	Huge sports and fantasy ecosystem, model repeated in different countries	League partnerships, TV, digital, referrals, extremely personalized user benefits
DraftKings	Fantasy and mass-market sports	TV, celebrities, extreme bonuses, free fantasy leagues, exclusive partnerships
bet365	Global, family-owned sports-betting brand	Low fees, fully in-house technology, live betting pioneer, league sponsorships
BetMGM	Worldwide luxury casino network adapted for US digital sports	MGM properties, loyalty, celebrities, heavy promo bet spending, cross-selling to casino games
Betway	Mainly European and African betting company	Team/league sponsorships, esports, brand saturation, cross-selling to casino games
Underdog	Digital sports engagement, mainstreamed prediction market sports betting	Social media, product design, fantasy sports
PrizePicks	Simple player predictions	Social media, creators, streaming
Kalshi / Polymarket	Event prediction	Turning betting into financial contracts

What the Future of Betting Customer Acquisition Looks Like

The next stage of getting new betting customers will be a lot less about showing a sportsbook to as many people as possible. Traditional advertising will still be important, but operators are becoming more clever about what happens after someone downloads the app. So many different options for bettors will be developed, with users being treated in even more personalized ways. Some will get personalized betting market offers, others—casino games.

Bookmakers are getting used to the idea of building ecosystems of different genres of entertainment activities. This creates a big advantage: an operator doesn’t have to convince new customers to become interested in one betting product. It can attract them in very different ways. Shareable content is going to grow on social media to help certain brands get recognized. Prediction markets, meanwhile, are a great opportunity to operate legally, even though audiences for prediction markets and sports betting are usually very different.

Using just one promotional method is usually not enough. Advertising, sponsorships, partnerships, and major sporting events will likely be required as users keep getting exposed to new platforms and the same ones all over again.

Conclusion

The older sportsbook giants use large marketing expenses, traditional advertising, and existing consumer bases to create ecosystems. Meanwhile, newer platforms offer uniquely interesting formats to better entertain users, especially through legal loopholes. Social media and innovation have proven to be huge advantages. So who will become a successful operator? Someone who makes betting entertainment better for certain audiences and finds fresh, clever ways to promote themselves.

FAQ

How do betting companies attract new customers?

They use a combination of advertising, sponsorships, partnerships, social media, bonuses, referrals, and innovations. Big operators have the budget to use more traditional formats, while newer platforms rely more on social media and unique entertainment offerings.

How do new betting companies compete with major sportsbooks?

Newer companies can compete through newer types of products instead of trying to outspend the large operators’ huge advertising budgets. Many of the common methods are fantasy sports, more convenient betting, social media, prediction markets, and products that can be shared easily.

Why is social media important for betting companies?

It allows betting companies and their customers to spread sports content more quickly. Predictions, bet slips, fantasy picks, reactions, and influencer content can generate attention and encourage users to share betting products with their own audiences. Most new companies also don’t have the budget to outcompete bookmaker giants in traditional advertising.

What are prediction markets?

They allow users to buy and sell contracts based on the outcome of future events. Depending on the platform and the restrictions that apply, they can cover many areas like sports, the weather, entertainment, and other real-world events. They eliminate the middleman and only require two people to take each side of a bet.

How do betting companies keep customers after they get them?

They use personalized promotions, loyalty programs, live betting, bonuses, community building, and other forms of engagement. The goal is to give existing users more reasons to keep using the company’s products after their registration or first deposit instead of leaving for another operator.