Rivalry, the Toronto-based sportsbook and igaming operator targeting Millennials and Gen Z, and operating in 20 countries, are reporting a 50 percent year-over-year increase in betting handle (CAD$105.7 million) and and a 22 percent year-over-year increase in revenue ($8.7 million) with the release of their Q3 2023 results (ended Sept. 30).
The company reported that marketing spend was reduced 13 percent. Gross profit was $4 million, up 90 percent year over year.
Of note was a statement by Rivalry co-founder and CEO Steven Salz that results like this and a $14 million cash infusion announced earlier this month mean the company will be in a position of profitability in the first half of 2024.
“In our regulated market of Ontario, we’ve seen betting handle increase by more than 400% from Q3 2022,” Salz said. “We continue to see encouraging trends in Ontario and are benefiting from the crawl, walk, run strategy we discussed in the past. We’re optimistic about this market going forward into 2024 given the economics and growth that we’re seeing.”
Casino grew to half the company’s betting handle in Q3 ($50.4 million). Recent casino-product launches, including a custom-branded-slots category, a new original game Cash & Dash, and the release of Casino.exe on their iOS mobile app in Ontario, set the stage for continued growth and increased player-wallet share.
Salz said despite some headwinds in sports betting, they still grew year over year and generated the second-highest handle and revenue in any quarter in the company’s history.
“On the sportsbook offering itself, esports still represents the majority of our sportsbook handle, but the traditional sports segment on Rivalry has been growing,” Salz said. “Rivalry leverages esports as an entry point, a top of funnel into a demographic of bettors who can be cross-sold into a broader product mix.”
“This has been one of the contributors to the increased average handle per customer we’re observing over time, which is up 29% … versus the first nine months last year. We’ve done particularly well with NBA fans, given the global popularity of basketball among Rivalry’s demographic.
“Building on this growth, we recently launched Rivalry Ultimate Fan, a free-to-play fantasy-sports app, to engage the next generation of basketball fans in a unique way. This app allows us to keep Rivalry users and fans within our branded ecosystem as much as possible and upsell them to real-money products, and it has internal monetization mechanics that generate revenue within the app and prizing that is unlocked and utilized on the main Rivalry product.”
The company reported that year-to-date betting handle has increased 127 percent, revenue 70 percent, and gross profit 175 percent over the first nine months of 2022.