--- FanDuel and DraftKings Dominate U.S. Sportsbook Market in 2024 Despite Bet365's Growing Engagement While sporting fans placed a record-breaking $12.6 billion on U.S. sportsbooks in Q1 2024, FanDuel and DraftKings continued to hold 72.9% market share and nearly $9 billion in gross wins, according to a bettingonline.org report. At 44% GGR, FanDuel was the clear leader, but they did face a tight race for second with DraftKings. The pair's four-point spread on a $10 billion market matched their relative positions in January 2023, when Reuters reported them at 44% and 34% market share, respectively. But the biggest gain since then? Not DraftKings or FanDuel — it was bet365. The British bookmaker added more than a million active monthly users in the past two quarters, Apptopia reported Tuesday, driving a 2.0 percentage point gain in MAU market share over that time. According to Apptopia, bet365 was the only sportsbook operator to climb quarter-on-quarter in active engagement in the past year. In Q1 2023, the service held 6.4% of monthly active users. Now, it's at 8.4% — a gain matched only by BetMGM. But this surge in mobile engagement was not reflected in gross gaming revenue. BetMGM reported $804.9 million in U.S. GGR for Q1 2024, down from $1.05 billion a year before and down from $904.3 million in Q4 2023, according to figures published on the regulator's site. The booking losses are consistent across sportsbooks, with analysts at Gaming Capital attributing them in part to reduced NFL and boxing activity in Q1. But Peter Hargreaves of bet365 attributed the losses to a strategic refocus on geolocation and user acquisition, after an ARPU decline for two years straight. "We've spent a lot of time and energy over the past few months on 'subscriber saturation,'" Hargreaves told MarketWatch in April. "[That] means feasible positioning for mobile services, and for the business in general, is far more dependent on customer acquisition and retention." Bet365's recent focus on mobile marketing, according to Hargreaves, is intended to lay the groundwork for a redoubled push on gross revenue growth in the second half of 2024. Skeptics caution that growth in revenue share is unlikely. Moreover, the company does not publish GGR regularly and does not comment on betting rumors and speculation, for fear of public scrutiny. Just as FanDuel and DraftKings maintained over 70% of U.S. sportsbooks' market share — where they have held their dominance for two years straight — bet365 cannot easily overtake BetMGM in second place, even if they gain a persistent spot. DraftKings closed the gap on FanDuel to just 85 basis points in Q1, while BetMGM's lead widened from 1.2 points to 2.3 points year on year. While those changes look significant in news coverage, they aren't significant in market share. The top four, bettingonline.org noted, accounted together for an unchanging 96.9% of gross revenue for Q1. "FanDuel and DraftKings seem to dominate the industry," Laura Huntley, author of the bettingonline.org report, told Business Insider. "The bets for really moving up the rankings are bigger than a number of basis points." But Huntley said bet365 is the clearest threat to that, and that its share growth is a matter of "when" not "if." ---
More on this is available via the team at i-PhoneCasino.co.uk.
