Sports betting sites sell the ability to tell your own story

See Will Sports Betting Transform How Games Are Watched, and Even Played? After decades of resistance to sports gambling, team owners and state officials are laying the groundwork for it — with potentially huge implications by Bruce Schoenfeld in the NY Times. Excerpts:

"For decades, sports gambling tended to be a static experience. You bet on a team and handed money to somebody, and maybe got a slip of paper in return. Then you waited to find out if you were right. That changed when three American options traders moved to Antigua in the mid-1990s to create an online gambling business they named World Sports Exchange. Instead of offering point spreads, World Sports Exchange operated like a commodities market. Before tipoff, options on the favored Lakers, for example, might cost $60 each. Options on the Knicks, the underdogs, might sell for $40. At the end of the game, the options on the losing team would become worthless, while the options on the winning team would each pay out $100.

But here was the novelty: You didn’t have to wait until the game was over to cash in. If the Lakers scored the first eight points, the value of that $60 option might grow to, say, $72. You could sell it and pocket your $12 gain. You might then invest in the Knicks at a discount. Or you might wait for the price to fall and buy another option on the Lakers. You could buy and sell options, on either team or both, throughout the game. Once you’d started, it was hard to stop until the game ended. It was exhausting. It was also great fun. And even more than the other bookmakers operating beyond U.S. borders, which were handling traditional bets, it seemed to threaten the monopoly on sports gambling that Nevada’s casinos had long enjoyed."

"“Ted was able to articulate the value proposition of not just the betting, but the deepening of the engagement,” Guber says. Rather than customers, Leonsis thinks of fans as an audience. “He understood that audiences want experiences,” Guber says. “This gives them a chance to walk away telling their own story — ‘I saw this opportunity, I recognized what this player would be able to accomplish.’ When you have a tool that makes an audience more of a participant than a passenger, it’s a very vital and vibrant element.”"

"DraftKings and FanDuel, whose valuations are both estimated to exceed $1 billion, were founded on the same idea: curate a limitless number of fantasy leagues for profit, generated by participation fees, and let customers choose new players every day. For many fans, watching games quickly became the equivalent of monitoring their investment portfolios, except the investments were bets on individual players."