Better Collective
Better Collective is a sports betting affiliate conglomerate capitalizing on the top-of-funnel acquisition game in a secularly exploding market that's online sports betting. Every month, 65mn visits span across websites owned by Better Collective to gather knowledge and tricks and what to bet, how to bet, and where to bet on all things sports, and to a lesser degree, online casinos.
Think of Better Collective as a router for sportsbooks, or "operators". As a user — your average sports fan, routined better, or regular gambler — browses one of Better Collective's sites, they might click on a link to a sportsbook's or casino operator's website from a betting tip given by an expert tipster on one of the communities like bettingexpert.com or through a static in-depth educational iGaming guide like roulettegeeks.com that gives them insights into improving their betting strategy. As the user activates the affiliate link and signs up with an operator, Better Collective earns either a fixed amount in affiliate commission or shares a portion of the sportsbook revenue generated by the player losses from the acquired customer for as long as the customer remains active with the operator. Essentially, once the user has signed up with the operator, Better Collective's lead job is done and the money rakes in.
Why wouldn't sportsbooks vertically integrate and develop top-of-funnel content machines that could feed the sportsbooks with all these leads themselves, you ask? First, the affiliate model works partly because trust and brand value matter, at least in the largest of Better Collective's communities, and partly because the operators are perfectly happy to grow at a known CAC while trusting Better Collective's use of on-site data that filters users based on intent, allowing them to receive better-qualified leads more efficiently (lower CAC and higher LTV) than they might be able to gather themselves. Operators are investing considerable amounts into marketing activities, many of which bring very volatile levels of efficiency. With affiliate marketing, the operator can calculate and compare the return on ad spend (ROAS) to the cent, getting a clear picture of the returns they get from a bulky marketing budget. Moreover, it would take years or decades to reproduce a content library, and even then, there's no assurance that organic search engines would favor their content over the incumbent affiliates.
"[The operators] have a bit of a love/hate relationship with us. They really want to market themselves to our segment. All the users who come to our sites, that's their target group. At the same time, our consideration is the consumer and we compare odds, so we also help to create a kind of price competition."
Jesper Søgaard, Co-founder and CEO
I remember learning about the affiliate model around 15 years ago and found it an interesting way to create income and value out of written content, scaled without dealing with physical products. One piece of content created in a few hours could generate income hundreds or thousands of times over, since, assuming it's shareable and valuable to the user, anyone can access it while its popularity or age seniority gives it certain advantages in organic search positions and exposure on social platforms that can spark a flywheel. I remember dabbling with creating a few sites in a few niches (protein powders and home security systems) at a time when every affiliate niche felt like being in the playground state. I earned pocket change but never stuck to it or doubled down on anything because affiliate marketing, while interesting, still just seemed and felt like a side hustle.
The founders of Better Collective, Jesper Søgaard and Christian Kirk Rasmussen, stuck to it. A mutual interest in online casino strategies brought the two founders together during high school where they became close friends. In 2002, after graduating, they moved to Germany to enjoy a sabbatical year, and to pay the cost of living, they applied the casino strategies that worked at the time and set up a small hobby website explaining these strategies to Germans. The site attracted so few organic visitors that there was no affiliate income for some time until Jesper and Christian started talking about their strategies to friends and strangers during weekends. It was working but at a slow grind. Two years went by, and the two friends came back to Denmark to finally set up a corporation for their business in year 3, a year where their site generated ~€19k of revenue. At uni, they treated the affiliate business as their part-time hobby.
By 2006, annual affiliate revenue had grown to €67k, and as Jesper and Christian realized the business could provide them both with a reasonable income after their studies, it was also the year in which they doubled down, spending half of the year's revenue taking ownership of Bettingxpert, today the company's flagship product and the biggest social network for sports betting tipsters across the world. After that, it was a slow grind with geographical expansion and an acquisition here and there, and fast forward to today, the business has grown to a scale the founders couldn't have imagined. Today, Better Collective covers >30 languages with 700 employees spanning >25 countries, while its >2k brands/sites are tailored according to their specific regions and their respective regulations, sports, betting behaviors, user needs, and languages. Collectively, these sites have exploded to TTM revenues of €161mn.