SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Rob Black, B2B Sales Director at Spotlight Sports Group, provides insight into the company’s content hubs product and how its capabilities help take the strain out of delivering a content-rich experience for bettors. 
Rob, by way of introduction to the content hubs product, can you provide some background into the capabilities of Spotlight Sports Group’s content hubs?
The real beauty of our Content Hubs is that they let operators and their customers enjoy high-quality betting content which enhances the sportsbook experience but without any level of technical strain on the operator’s side.
Our content hubs are built utilising a combination of key components from all our products, including Superfeed content, bespoke editorial and a number of interactive elements. The content hubs integrate our premium sports betting content into bespoke hubs on our partner’s platforms.
In addition to the content, which is the backbone of the hubs, we develop our hubs to match our partner’s branding and include live odds integration and add-to-betslip functionality to create a true one-stop-shop experience for prospective bettors.
We have the technical expertise required to develop these hubs for bookmakers and media companies in any language and for any sport. Our content hubs can create content in more than 70 languages, allowing us to help companies around the world drive engagement with our sports betting content.
When did Content Hubs start to become a key part of Spotlight Sports Group’s proposition?
Our partners started to generate interest in the content hubs since we produced the first one for the 2022 Winter Olympics. We created the first hub for Svenska Spel, a Swedish operator, and saw great success immediately.
Since then, we have produced 15 different content hubs for our partners and the success has been due to our ability to supply valuable content and technical expertise without any heavy lifting for operators.
With the content hubs proven to generate engagement, drive revenue and provide an excellent user experience they have become an essential product for us and our partners.
Since you and your team have created a handful of custom betting sites for your partners, have you seen any particularly insightful data from the audiences that visit the sites?
As you mentioned, we have developed these content hubs for a variety of partners but, more importantly, we have made the hubs for a variety of sports and sporting events.
Our team has created content hubs for the Winter Olympics, the World Cup and the Cheltenham Festival among others and the outcomes remain clear.
Across multiple partners and content hubs, we have seen 49% of visitors place a bet during the same session while 71% of users surveyed like the content we showcase.
We are still waiting to see what the outcomes of our Cheltenham Festival hubs were for this year but we expect them to fall in line or exceed what we have seen in the past year-plus of creating these hubs for our partners.
Due to high levels of success across these content hubs we have upgraded them to have season-long functionality. This means the hubs can now be integrated into our partner’s platforms for a full sports season rather than for just one-off events.
Why do you think these hubs have been so popular with your partners for big sporting events?
When it comes to the key sporting events throughout the year the competition level certainly takes a step up. Many companies need to succeed during events like Cheltenham to hit their targets, so the desire to stand out increases.
We know from a variety of trials and from customer feedback that content works in terms of improving engagement and betting performance. The content hubs allow our partners to differentiate their content offerings for their audience, which in turn helps maximise key betting-interested audiences during the largest events of the year without a huge technical burden on their internal teams.
As the year moves along should we expect to see any upgrades made to the content hubs your team creates?
I think a key change you will see in relation to our content hubs is their usage beyond one-off events. Our partners have seen the abilities the hubs have across consecutive weeks and we know that the hubs can be better used across longer periods of time.
For example, we have the ability to create content hubs for our partners that help them stand out for an entire season of the Premier League, the NFL or any other major sport. Bettors are always looking for an edge and information that will help them make a betting decision and these content hubs have proved successful in doing just that.
If you want to learn more about the successes and capabilities of our content hubs you can connect with our team here.
