In the Knup Sports podcast, host Ryan Knupple interviewed Empire Marketing CEO, Jeremy Enke, regarding the legalisation of sports betting overtaking that of poker and the barriers of entry for new affiliates entering the US space.
Reflecting on the speed of which sports betting is being regulated, Enke believed that poker or casino would be regulated first in the US: “One of the crazy things that if I think back to all these years is if I was to ever think about all these states regulating I would have envisioned online poker. The argument has been there since we were new in the industry. ‘Oh its a skill game’ ‘its legal’ ‘its not gambling’ but now its all sports betting.
“It’s crazy that there’s no poker and even to a lesser extent online casino – there’s only a few states that have casino.”
Knupple agreed adding: “It’s like sports betting jumped those industries somehow here in the United States and I’m not really sure how. Poker, there’s been talk for years that all of a sudden it’s like wait, sports betting legal and pokers not. I can’t keep it all straight.”
The discussion turned to how the state by state regulation framework could be causing a barrier to smaller and younger US affiliates looking to get into the industry. Enke, who has been in the industry since 2003 stated: “You look back to the early 2000 and there were thousands of affiliates. Now there’s a lot of big media corporations that control a thousand different websites. Being the big companies like that, they can afford to have attorneys and afford to have people researching every state getting licensed. If you’re just new to the game and you want to be a US regulated affiliate, man it’s tough. I feel for people trying to do that.”
Knupple talked of the complex process of obtaining a regulated licence as an affiliate in the US: “It’s such a tedious process to get your state by state licences, to deal with all the regulations and rules. From a website perspective putting up ads and things like that, there’s different messages for different states and different codes and all of this that you have to somehow make sense of on your site, that you reader understands. It’s a mess.”
Enke agreed adding that the cost of entry may also be disadvantaging newer affiliates from entering the market: “Jersey is a little bit different in how you have to get your vendor’s permit. Illinois, for example, you don’t have to do anything right now but then I want to say Indiana it’s like $500 – $1000 that you have to pay. What that’s really doing is squeezing the smaller affiliates out of the game.”
The full episode of the podcast can be found here
You can catch more episodes of Knup Sports on its YouTube Channel.
