Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:03 - Let's talk ESPN Bet launched a couple of months ago.
00:06 You know, certainly Pennsylvania,
00:09 one of the huge sports betting states in the country.
00:12 And that just continues in terms of promotions.
00:16 This seems to be working for what they're doing.
00:19 And I wonder from your perspective,
00:20 do you think that this continues
00:22 in Pennsylvania with ESPN Bet?
00:24 - Yeah, let's talk some money, Greg.
00:28 Let's talk some big money in terms of those promotions.
00:31 And I think it remains to be seen
00:34 just how long this will last for Penn Entertainment
00:39 and ESPN Bet moving forward.
00:42 But as they did launch that ESPN Bet app on November 14th,
00:47 and more than a dozen markets around the country
00:51 were getting more and more data every week
00:54 from new states where ESPN Bet is live.
00:58 And a handful of those states do share promo data with us.
01:03 So in Pennsylvania, which is obviously one of the states
01:07 that shares that promotional dollar amount,
01:11 we saw that Penn offered nearly $15 million in free bets,
01:16 which might not seem like a lot on the surface,
01:23 but when you compare it to a lot of the other operators
01:27 in the state, it certainly outpaced all of them.
01:30 And as obviously they're trying to make a push
01:34 into the market in November
01:36 with their first two weeks of wagering there.
01:39 And it helped.
01:41 Penn had $66.8 million in handle across the ESPN Bet app
01:46 and some retail sports books
01:51 that Penn operates in Pennsylvania.
01:54 And that was one of their best months ever
01:57 from the time when they were operating
01:59 the Barstool Sportsbook.
02:01 Now, what's interesting about the big promotional spend
02:05 is sort of has a little bit of a trickle down effect,
02:09 if you will.
02:10 The operators are able to deduct that promotional spending
02:15 from their taxable revenue.
02:18 So you obviously can pull that dollar amount
02:21 from one side of the ledger
02:23 and reduce your tax bill to the state.
02:25 So because ESPN Bet had such a heavy promotional push
02:30 in Pennsylvania in November and elsewhere,
02:33 specifically in Pennsylvania,
02:36 we did see that that taxable revenue
02:39 was one of their lowest totals of the year,
02:43 just over $10 million.
02:45 Overall across the market for Pennsylvania in November,
02:48 $934.1 million, a new record,
02:53 back to back months of record handle there
02:56 in October and November.
02:58 Craig, like we've talked about seemingly every week here
03:02 for the last month or two,
03:04 just another month, another record handle
03:07 in one market or another across the US.
03:11 And we'll see just how long that trend
03:15 of big betting volumes,
03:19 a little bit of a tongue twister there,
03:21 big betting volumes continues into the new year here.
03:26 (upbeat music)
03:29 [MUSIC]