The death of desktop?

Industry observers were predicting the death of desktop as far back as 2015, but this could be the year they are finally proved correct. The unstoppable rise of mobile is nowhere more apparent than the UK sportsbook sector. And new market leader Sky Bet is perhaps the purest example of all.

An upgrade of Sky Bet’s front-end at the close of 2017 saw a move to a single “mobile site” across all devices. Users logging onto Sky Bet sites on a desktop or laptop were met with the same site view as users on a mobile device. A simple, stripped down affair that prioritised speed and utility over aesthetics, and more importantly replicated the user experience and code base on both platforms.

For Sky Bet the benefits are obvious. The operator now has to maintain just one code base, can roll out new features on all platforms simultaneously and can focus all its resources on the one product. For all intents and purposes Sky Bet is now a mobile operator with a mobile site and users on a mobile platform, whatever they are accessing the site on. The desktop is truly dead.

Sign of the times

In its last annual report Sky Bet reported 82% of its revenue came through mobile (for the year ending June 2017) and this usage is replicated at slightly lower levels across its peer group. Mobile is the dominant platform for all activity in the target 18-35 demographic for the sports betting sector, with desktop and laptop usage an increasing irrelevance.

Operators also benefit from the nature of mobile betting, which encourages less browsing and more impulsive user actions. Mobile users will tend to bet more frequently and be more loyal and there has been a consistent effort to drive up mobile traffic and activity over the past two years. But operators are being pushed into this by their users as much as they are trying to drive the transition themselves.

UK telecoms regulator declared the UK a “smartphone society” in 2015 but this is truly the case in 2018. For millennials it’s now an integral part of life with a recent survey by Deloitte showing 96% of 18-24 year olds owned a smartphone, checking it around 90 times a day, and a majority admitting they used it too much. But it’s not just this age group which is increasingly reliant on mobile with the same survey showing nearly 75% of 55-75 year-olds had “ready access” to a smartphone.

What comes next?

Against this context it’s easy to see why Sky Bet made the decision it did. But what will be interesting is how much of the market follows suit. A casual glance at the desktop products offered by the major operators shows how little care and attention is given to the non-mobile products in 2018 and it would not be a major surprise to see any of its rivals make a similar move.

During a year where most of the major UK operators showed single-digit growth, Sky Bet grew revenues 38% in the year-ended June 17 and is believed to have maintained double-digit growth through the rest of the year. It has also led the biggest change in the sector seen for some time with its RequestABet product now the dominant marketing tool used by nearly all the major firms. In short Sky Bet have become the firm others are trying to look like, with both bet presentation and marketing offerings looking increasingly “Sky-like” across the sector.

The use of a single responsive platform for the sports betting product is not a radical one in the UK sector. Ladbrokes moved to a single html5 platform shortly after linking up with Playtech in 2015. But this latest move by Sky Bet feels far more significant, coming as it does from a position of strength. This is not an operator attempting to strip costs or improve efficiency to catch-up with the market, but rather, to try and extend its lead over it.

As such we would expect other firms to follow suit and accelerate mobile development over the coming year as they look to keep pace. But the change is unlikely to benefit everyone equally. Not all operators will have a similar user profile to Sky and it’s not clear if the desktop customer is worth giving up on just yet. And, crucially, there is an important outlier to this trend.

The window of opportunity

Over in Stoke there has been a very different approach to this rising mobile trend. Back in March bet365 rolled out a new desktop platform and its developers spoke of the rejection of “mobile first” for a more omni-channel approach. With a more international focus, and a greater focus on live sports streaming, it’s perhaps an understandable difference of opinion but it does demonstrate that there is unlikely to be a single “correct” approach to the modern online environment.

Not every firm has the luxury of bet365’s huge technology infrastructure and resourcing, and it’s likely most will opt for a similar mobile-only strategy as Sky Bet in the coming months and years. But where there is consensus there is opportunity. We saw in the rush to mobile in the casino sector during 2016/17 some operators such as Videoslots step into the desktop gap left behind and take on a section of market share.

It’s conceivable the same could happen in sports betting, with a savvy operator targeting a more considered and higher staking player type with more immersive content, data and streaming. But it would take a very brave operator to attempt to build a business on desktop in the coming years and this battle is likely to be fought alone by bet365. In the wider online sports betting world it seems the war is going to be fought not on mobile first, but on mobile only.