Driving product growth together: Fast sports and microbetting

In the past 12 months we’ve seen growing interest from both bettors and operators in microbetting. With the opportunity to offer more choices more often in a fashion that’s timely and catered to specific matches, microbetting is likely going to be a trendsetter for years to come.

Across the globe as well as in markets like the United States, it’s important for suppliers to develop products that meet these new and changing tastes, and for operators to have rich content that bettors enjoy. Microbetting certainly fits this bill, but with tremendous opportunity also comes some challenges.

The microbetting challenge

As with any new innovation, there is a period of growing pains and experimentation to find what works and what doesn’t. What can be seen is there’s a balancing act to providing an engagement market for bettors and resolving it in a timely fashion while still delivering good performance for operators.

Providing bettors with an offer that’s enticing, engaging and an enhancement to their experience is the first step, and it requires a sound understanding of a given match not just based on historical data and trends, but what is happening in live. Live betting in sports isn’t new, but reading a match and offering a micro-betting proposition is still something the industry is fine-tuning. A snappy payout mechanism is also crucial, which means you need to be able to settle markets quickly. And of course, you need to optimise these markets so they’re delivering strong returns for operators so they don’t become a loss-carrying side feature.

In order to learn, refine and optimise a microbetting product, operators and suppliers alike need to build a dataset and trading history based on real-world, real-time examples.

Fast sports offers a large dataset

Microbetting products require actual historical data in order to successfully develop – fast sports products are uniquely positioned to build this dataset. 24/7 sports content that runs year-round offers operators and suppliers more opportunities to experiment and refine microbetting content than traditional sporting events.

The sheer volume of events means more opportunities to offer microbetting markets, more often. At BETER, betting content and data provider, we’ve launched new, fast 16 markets for all table tennis tournaments, managed by our team, to speed up proceedings and allow users to place micro-bets. With this, we’re aiming to allow bettors to place bets with the fastest possible outcome. For example, a “race to 4 points” market would be settled way before the end of an event.

With more experimentation in the actual environments where it will be used, you can rapidly scale the accuracy, efficacy and performance of your microbetting product.

Building a baseline for traditional sports

Leveraging fast sports content for microbetting has two important flow-on effects. Firstly, you can build a robust stream of 24/7 content with a highly refined microbetting offering.

Secondly, you can use the historical data, knowledge and best practices of fast sports microbetting as the building blocks for opportunities in traditional sports. Whether it’s using fast sports data and models to inform your choices, or building the knowledge and skill of your traders – you can take the experimentation, logic and learning from fast sports and bring it to the biggest matches in the world, across any sporting code.

This is particularly important for markets like the US, where the popularity of in-play, parlay betting is a strong indicator of the interest and uptake of unique product offerings that add lots of flavour to a sports match. Microbetting is the natural next step for in-play sports betting innovation.

Fast sports content doesn’t just give operators another profitable vertical with a constant stream of content for players. It’s an incredible opportunity to road-test microbetting and build products that broaden your offering and meet the needs of newer bettors with huge potential for future growth.

Written by: Sabov Evgeniy, BETER Sports Head of Trading