YOU HAVE FEATURED IN TRAFFICOLOGY BEFORE, BUT FOR THOSE WHO ARE NEW TO B90, COULD YOU TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF?
My name is Ronny Breivik. I’m the Executive Chair of B90 Holdings PLC, a company listed on AIM in London. We have recently undergone a transition from B2C to B2B performance marketing, which you rightly pointed out. My background comes primarily from gambling. I’ve been working in the sector since the mid-1990s, most notably with SportingBet on two occasions, being part of start-up and running M&B Poker Invest, which was the world’s first online poker website. I was part of creating Norway’s largest community for sports betting on oddsen.nu, which was later acquired by B90 Holdings, the reason why I’m now where I am. Recently, it’s been all about B90 Holdings in various capabilities and positions.
YOU TALKED ABOUT SOME OF YOUR PREVIOUS ROLES. HOW HAVE THOSE HELPED YOU ON YOUR WAY TO WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR CAREER NOW?
Thank you for that question. That is one I haven’t received.It helped greatly. I’ve been playing poker professionally, I’ve been betting on sports professionally. I worked as CPO in, at that time, Modern Times Group on Bet24 and then was Chairman at a small start-up called OddsAlive in 2001, which had lots of Norwegian celebrity investors. It helps you to form a 360-degree view. I like to think, I hope, that allows you to look at multifaceted problems in a way that allows you to come up with solutions you would normally need a committee or two for, so that’s at least the idea. I like to think so.
BRILLIANT. WE’RE GOING TO SWITCH OVER TO DISCUSS THE COMPANY NOW; B90 HOLDINGS IS A GROUP. HOW DOES BEING IN A GROUP BENEFIT INDIVIDUAL BRAND MARKETING?
If you want one word, it’s synergy. Synergies arise from having the same team analyse data across multiple business units and come up with conclusions that allow us to improve all of them at the same time. It allows us to make more money for our shareholders based on decisions we can take to improve the synergies, without getting too much detail on the actual business.
For instance, you get player X, send across to provider Y. We know a lot about what happens there and it helps us create better campaigns. It helps us create better content and thereby we can add more value to our end users. We can also provide a better deal for our partners on the operator side who will be acquiring traffic from us. So hopefully all parties win.
BET90.COM RECENTLY RELAUNCHED. WHY DISCONTINUE B2C GAMING OPERATIONS?
Discontinuing B2C operations makes a lot of sense. I will take a step back. Our sector is made up of customer deposits. That is what fuels the gambling economy. Then you look at the lifetime value of these players across these deposits. Then, our job as managers of B90 Holdings PLC is to find ways to extract the most from that. So, we benefit our shareholders and, as we have discussed very often, when you look at certain markets, 80-85% of the lifetime value can actually end up in the pocket of the market there, rather than the B2C. B2C firms have a higher back-office cost. You pay more for your payment processing and you need to pay for your platform. Then the customer acquisition cost... has risen by 8 to 10 times in the time I’ve been involved.
So for us, being a smaller player, a tiny player compared to the big players, Entain and BetMGM etc, we have to re-invent the wheel and come up with a plan that allows us to go to where we want to be. That has to do with the marketing part because there we have the knowledge and the base to provide the market what it wants; and with the economics being what I just explained, I think for us it was a very simple decision to make. It absolutely makes sense.
HOW HAS THE DISCONTINUATION OF B2C OPERATIONS IMPACTED YOUR AFFILIATE SERVICES?
It doesn’t really impact much. Other than that our affiliate services now are more complete... B90 as you see it today is not the finished article. There will be upgrades. From that perspective, it gives us an SEO platform. You can imagine again, the site has been around for quite some time, it has a lot of backlinks. We’re not starting from scratch as an SEO project on that one. It will allow us to target multiple deals in regulated markets where we want to grow and that is as simple as that.
HOW DOES THE GROUP MODEL OF B90 HOLDINGS POSITIVELY IMPACT LEAD GENERATION?
Well, again, it’s a holistic view that we take to our partners and our end users. It’s all about creating value for everyone and then balancing that. It is as simple as that.
For us, being a smaller player... we have to re-invent the wheel and come up with a plan that allows us to go to where we want to be
Trafficology is brought to you every month by the Gambling Insider team at Players Publishing. For all editorial enquiries please contact us at [email protected], and for advertising enquiries please contact commercial director Deepak Malkani at [email protected]. We would like to thank the following contributors to this issue: Casino City Press, Dmytro Mariievskyi, George Rover, Carson Hubbard, Bella DiGiovanni, Janice Duncan and Ronny Breivik. ‘What's love, but a secondhand emotion?’ - Tina Turner, 1984. Players Publishing Limited, all rights reserved.
