ESPN Bet & FOX Bet Cannot be Compared

It was always just a matter of time. ESPN was going to put its weight behind a sportsbook in some form or fashion eventually. We may not have known exactly how it was going to happen, but the safe bet was always that it would.

This fall, the speculation becomes reality with the launch of ESPN Bet. Coming so closely on the heels of FOX Bet’s failure, plenty of people have asked the obvious question: is this a good idea?

While the question is understandable, these are two wildly different situations. ESPN has a leg up on FOX right now and will get an even bigger one once its OTT streaming product launches. FOX Bet failed, but not because there is no market for a network-branded sportsbook. It was just the wrong network.

Peter Jackson, the CEO of Flutter, knows what ESPN Bet is capable of. His company owns FanDuel, far and away the leader for US marketshare amongst online sportsbooks. Last week, he told analysts that ESPN Bet is “certainly going to be a formidable competitor” when it launches.

Jackson is not just a competitor with knowledge of ESPN and Disney’s marketing machine. His company was the engine behind FOX Bet. He can tell you exactly where an ESPN partnership has advantages over one with FOX and what that will mean in terms of access and appeal to users, especially the coveted new and casual bettors.

Last month, Neilsen released data on cable subscriptions in the United States. It showed that FS1 has pulled ahead of ESPN in terms of overall distribution. That is something to celebrate if you are FOX. It’s a major milestone for the ten-year old network.

What isn’t worth celebrating are the head-to-head ratings. ESPN is way out in front. FS1 does best when it is showing live sports and the programming around live sports. Major League Baseball, NASCAR and international soccer have been reliable performers throughout the year. The studio programming? Not so much. Now, ESPN does better showing live games than studio programming too, but the disparity between the networks is worth noting. 

If you are a television network trying to use the power of your name and your reach to launch a sportsbook, you need personalities that are cultural touchstones. FOX has a few, but not enough. They are on sometimes, but not often enough. The FOX Bet promotion built around Terry Bradshaw was great, but he is on TV as part of the über-popular FOX NFL Sunday once a week for 18-22 weeks per year and then the show is just gone. It isn’t exactly conducive to keeping FOX Bet top of mind. 

ESPN’s most popular names and faces are Stephen A. Smith (on every day), Scott Van Pelt (on every day), and Mike Greenberg (on every day). It will soon add Pat McAfee who will be on every day. I am sure there will be special promotions for the new ESPN gambling app branded around Monday Night Football, the NBA, college football and more, but those game broadcasts will not be the only high-profile native promotion for the app.

Whenever ESPN finally does launch the direct-to-consumer version of its channel, the ESPN Bet capabilities can truly be kicked into high gear. Dave Portnoy acknowledged that he stood in the way of the Barstool Sportsbook getting approved by a number of state gaming boards. That is a big part of the reason he and Penn worked out a deal to go their separate ways. Now, Penn has two to three years to get the approvals it doesn’t already have and make it easy to bet on the games you are watching on ESPN’s streaming service with the click of a button.

There were any number of reasons FOX Bet failed to grab the marketshare it thought it could. Lachlan Murdoch listed a number of them last year when he spoke to Axios and called the venture “disappointing”. 

Sometimes, it is good to be second to market. A road map of where not to go and what to do better is pretty valuable when entering a new space. Dropping into a starting point that a competitor got to by doing all of the heavy lifting is pretty valuable too. 

I commend FOX for for the effort it put into FOX Bet. I understand why that app’s fate have some in our industry raising their eyebrows at ESPN’s partnership with Penn, but these are two very different situations. It’s not hard to figure out which one you would rather be in.