Amaya will ânot invest heavilyâ in StarsDraft
Chief exec David Baazov says DFS market isnât big enough to justify big marketing spend
Amaya Gaming will embark on a different strategy to daily fantasy sports (DFS) behemoths FanDuel and DraftKings with its newly-acquired Vicitv platform, with chief exec David Baazov saying his firm will not invest heavily in marketing its soon-to-launch StarsDraft.com site. [private]
The gaming giant confirmed it had entered the DFS space yesterday through its acquisition of Victiv for an undisclosed sum. But Baazov said his firm would not engage DraftKings and FanDuel in their multi-million dollar battle to sign up players, and instead would capture market share âover timeâ.
âRight now when you take a look at some of the marketing spend [of the industry leaders] there are companies that are spending four to five times revenues, and that is not something that we are looking at doing right now,â Baazov told investors after Amaya revealed its Q2 2015 revenues yesterday.
âThe market needs to mature and become a little bit bigger. Itâs nowhere near being a material size today to make a difference. And so to just put up overlays to try and attract customers in the short term that doesnât have a return right now is not going to be a focus for us,â he added.
Instead, Amaya will look to cross-sell StarsDraft.com to its formidable database of US consumers, which the operator claims contains more than 25million players. âThe focus is going to be on leveraging the cross-sell of our database, our brand and our trust,â Baazov said.
â[This is] a brand that players trust and we are going to capture some market share which is going to be meaningful anyway, but the time isnât right now to go in and spend on CPA, the market still needs to have more players in totality,â he added.
FanDuel and DraftKings have claimed around 95% of the daily fantasy sports market between them, but at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in advertising, with DraftKings reaching a $250m agreement with ESPN earlier this year.