Q&A: Charles Cohen, CEO, Probability

EGR: What marketing methods do you see as the most profi table when it comes to attracting new players in the mobile sector?

CHARLES COHEN (CC): It’s all about going where the players are, and players are doing huge amounts of social networking and app usage on mobile. It’s definitely best going after mobile first ““ some will go through other media but it might not be as effective. For specifics, it depends on the brand and the target market, but the principle is that it’s a mobile service to be consumed on a mobile, so if you can find it on a mobile then you’re in business.

EGR: Is Betfair’s revenue share deal for mobile app developers something that others could realistically replicate?

CC: Gambling is not like social gaming ““ everything you do is regulated and, therefore, for a developer to put their effort into making a game is probably 10% of the work you need to put into getting something that is regulatory-approved and that works as a gambling product. The industry, not just mobile but also online, is littered with the dead bodies of people who have thought that a casino is an alternative to a Playstation ““ it’s not. What makes a great gambling game is not the same as what makes a great game.

EGR: Do you believe companies that develop mobile apps in-house have an advantage over those using third parties, or vice versa, given the speed at which the sector moves?

CC: The rules of economics don’t get suspended for mobile. It’s whatever works for each business based on what it wants to achieve. One thing that has become clear is that mobile is not going to get any easier. There were a lot of people running around a year ago saying there’s nothing special about mobile, that it’s just like the web but with smaller buttons, but that’s clearly not true. Of course, what that does mean is that the economics of doing it for yourself are going to be quite punishing, and here things depend on how ambitious you are. If it’s a core product for you then maybe doing it yourself makes sense, but otherwise companies can just as easily, or cost-effectively, get what they need from third parties.

EGR: Now that so many have a foot in the door, is getting it right first time becoming as important as simply being ‘first’?

CC: It’s like anything else, nothing is right first time but there are some basic things that you do have to get right, which ““ if you don’t ““ you won’t have any customers and there won’t be a next time. I would say the one thing that goes wrong more than anything else is payments. It is the operator’s responsibility to make sure the customer can pay for the service within the service itself. The technology that’s provided, if it’s just a game, isn’t going to help with that. I have had conversations with an online gaming business where they said “can we put the cashier function on the website and tell people to go back to the website to top up their account?”. That’s like opening a casino without installing a cashpoint.

EGR: What do you see as the next big driver for the mobile sector?

CC: Tablets are the next big thing, and I buy completely into this phrase that’s going around now about us living in a post-PC era. The market is reshaping, and personal computing power is tablets and smartphones. The leisure activities that people go through on their computers are going to be on tablets and smartphones, so the real big thing is who can capture the tablet. Unfortunately for people in the PC era, none of their infrastructure supports it. That is particularly true of things like payments, infrastructure for security, and registration, because so many of those systems rely on PC-based or web-based technology that does not translate across to the tablet or the smartphone.