Penn Entertainment, owner of ESPN Bet, announced the latest integration between its US sports betting app and the media giant, ESPN, which will allow customers to link directly with their Disney ESPN accounts.
The First Step of Many
Penn Entertainment paid the Worldwide Leader in Sports $1.5 billion over 10 years to not only rent those four eponymous letters but to also gain access to ESPN’s vast media outlets. One of the key elements of the deal was getting linkage between the two sites so that customers could click back and forth between ESPN and ESPN Bet. The ease and facility of being able to do so would attract new customers and bolster ESPN Bet’s numbers.
After nearly one year since ESPN Bet’s launch on November 14, 2023, this critical integration between the two apps has finally occurred. ESPN Bet customers now have “the ability to seamlessly track upcoming, live, and settled bets within the ESPN app and on ESPN.com.”
“Bringing this new feature to market is an important step as we work to create a fully interconnected media and betting ecosystem between ESPN and ESPN Bet,” said Aaron LaBerge, chief technology officer at Penn Entertainment. “Account linking allows us to better serve and engage our users by unlocking key personalization and promotional capabilities. This feature is just the beginning of deeper integrations that will further differentiate the ESPN Bet experience.”
It is estimated ESPN has 181 million monthly visitors, which will allow them to explore the ESPN Bet app more fully. This is only the beginning of what Penn announced will be many more complementary integrations between the two apps.
Seamless Integration
The initial discussions between Penn CEO Jay Snowden and ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro concerned keeping users and visitors from straying to other apps where their sports bets might be stored. The goal was to have sports scores, news, and fantasy leagues found on ESPN seamlessly integrated into whatever sports betting app chose to pay ESPN its fair share for this opportunity.
“When we think about the fan, ESPN Bet and the ESPN app are inextricably linked. And so, moving between those two environments and where you want to consume content and how you consume it, we aren’t going to necessarily care where that happens,” LaBerge said during the company’s Q2 earnings call. “And so that line, obviously, we’re currently working with ESPN to make sure it makes sense. But the goal is that you can move between these apps really fluidly and get what you want, where you want it. Like for example, when we have account linking in November, if you place a parlay on ESPN Bet, it’s going to appear in the ESPN app. You have to do no work. It’s going to be seamless.”
One of the major advantages of getting in sync with the biggest sports network in the world is that it allows exposure in all its mediums, and now that the two apps will be inextricably linked, the marketing and promotional expenditures can continue to decrease. ESPN Bet is already capturing millions of sports fans, so it is less reliant on splashy free bet promos that have been the fulcrum for other relative newcomers like Fanatics and bet365.
Penn’s third-quarter earnings call on November 7th will give investors an idea of how the introduction of the New York market has affected the financial outlook and its plans for greater assimilation between ESPN Bet and ESPN.
