Betby, the innovative sports betting supplier, shares its experience of approaching the market with a new product in a period of the pandemic. The software provider has built revolutionary sportsbook involving machine learning and artificial intelligence with premium quality data feeds, highlighted by the company’s Betby.Games range.

This year brought unprecedented challenges as the Coronavirus pandemic swept across the world, leading to cancelled sporting events, closures of casinos and plenty of uncertainty. Despite the concerns from representatives of various spheres and the numerous doubts about the ability of certain sectors to survive the crisis, the first half of 2020 has not become a disaster that many expected, highlighting the resilience of the gambling industry. If anything, it has seen agile businesses confront adversity and has opened up new growth opportunities across the sector.

Earlier this year, we launched Betby.Games, a new sports betting feed taking an AI approach to esports, giving sports bettors a recognisable product that wasn’t affected by sporting shutdowns. The easily integrated, fast-content module can run 24/7 without human intervention. The initial title, FIFA18 24/7, coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, producing some surprising results.

Firstly, not only had the total amount of bets exceeded expectations, partially due to the lack of sporting events, but the volumes of betting activity in general demonstrated stable and organic growth. As for traditional sports that were restricted due to the pandemic, audiences predominantly switched to alternative content such as virtual sports and Betby.Games.

Since sporting fixtures have returned, the longevity of the products has remained, with an uneven churn rate and significantly higher retention rates than other verticals.

During the pandemic virtual sports and Betby.Games products became substitutes for betting on offline events. These categories have compensated for the temporary shortcoming of sports events and allowed users to continue betting, but the new product range has demonstrated better user retention since industry began to bounce back after the shake-up.

Betby.Games gives a significantly different experience to virtual sports in a variety of ways, while giving impressive tangible results for operators. For instance, the average stake made on Betby.Games exceeds that of virtuals and shows a result comparable to eSports and live sporting fixtures. Despite the fact that the average amount of bets made on virtual sports per active day is slightly higher than the rate of Betby.Games, the latter demonstrates the significantly greater numbers of active days per month.

We believe that this difference is rooted in three important factors at once. First of all, we are talking about the demand for a substitute for betting on offline sports due to the lack of events, which was caused by the external reasons. Secondly, the novelty of the product and its rich portfolio of events played an important role and attracted the attention of users to Betby.Games. Finally, we would also highlight user trust and retention as a key reason.

Nowadays there are more requirements for businesses than ever. User trust is one of the main principles of competitive market success. In the context of Betby.Games, the elimination of human factors in the process of gambling allows users to understand the nature of their betting outcome, consequently gaining a loyal player. On the other hand, it facilitates a more comfortable and pleasant betting experience.

Launching products in a pandemic can be challenging, but by having content that is a true differentiator can allow operators to thrive. While the sporting shutdown posed significant difficulties, it gave suppliers a window to launch innovative products and try to gain significant market share.