Online sports betting is one of the most innovative iGaming verticals available for affiliates to promote. The sports betting vertical caters to sports from all over the world and boasts a wide range of products – from fixed-odds and exchange betting to the fast-moving world of sports spread betting.
There’s currently so much buzz surrounding sports spread betting that we decided to sit down and discuss the phenomenon with Kevan Edgerton, Direct & Digital Marketing Manager at Sporting Index, the industry’s leading operator.Income Access (IA): Hi, Kevan. Can you explain the concept of sports spread betting to the uninitiated?Kevan Edgerton (KE), Sporting Index: Sure. Perhaps the easiest way is to compare it to fixed-odds sports betting. With fixed-odds, you normally place a bet on an outcome which can only have two results – win or lose. An example would be whether a football team scores a specific number of goals. Either the team does score the number of goals or it doesn’t. It’s all very definitive. With spread betting, wins and losses are on a sliding scale depending on how right or wrong you are. So winning is not just about predicting, say, the exact outcome of a match. With sports spread betting, the outcome of your bet is linked to how close you are in your prediction, for example, to the total number of goals in a football game.IA: That sounds exciting, Kevan. Could you give more detail on what makes spread betting attractive to players?KE: There are three main attractions. First, you can win or lose multiple times your stake. Broadly speaking, players can win much more than they can with fixed-odds betting. Similarly they can also lose much more.
Second, as you point out, there’s the excitement factor. It’s very exciting. Spread betting intrinsically links your bet to the action throughout the entire game – it’s really edge-of-your-seat stuff. With fixed-odds, your bet may be dead if the outcome you bet on occurs early in the event– say you bet a team scores only one goal and they score two in the first half. With spread betting, your bets can generally run for the duration of the action.
And third, in spread betting you can open and close bets in-play and not have to wait for the final result. So you can bank a profit or cut your losses mid-way through a game. In fact, Sporting Index were the pioneers of such “cash out” functionality.IA: How has the sports spread betting industry evolved since Sporting Index launched its online offering in 2001? KE: There’s been significant growth since 2001. We’re seeing more and more people trying out spread betting. They often migrate to spread betting from other online sports betting products as it offers something that they can’t get anywhere else, be it unique markets or the inherent excitement factor. A fixed-odds bettor may move to exchange betting and then migrate on to spread betting, where there’s more to it. Spread betting’s relative sophistication also means that it’s a lot more exciting than other sports betting products.IA: You’ve mentioned, football, Kevan. What other sports does the industry focus on?KE: Football is a core sport of Sporting Index and the wider industry. The FIFA World Cup in Brazil was huge for us. The Premier League, which is just starting, is big and the UEFA Champions League will be huge, as will La Liga.
While football is a dominant sport, tennis is very big as well. Golf is also popular and the Ryder Cup in September is going to be important for spread bettors. American football and baseball are also a large market. Then there’s Formula One punctuating the year and horse-racing events like Cheltenham, which is popular with our customers. Basically, whenever there’s a sporting event that spikes a public interest, you’ll see a corresponding spike in spread bettors.
Tomorrow we continue our in-depth interview with Kevan Edgerton of Sporting Index, when he’ll discuss sports spread betting players and the affiliate context. If you have any queries about sports spread betting, please get in touch with Kevan.*Sports spread betting may not be suitable for everyone and can result in losses that exceed your deposits, so please ensure that you fully understand the risks involved.
