Interview with Lucas Von Cranach, CEO, OneFootball

Can you detail OneFootball’s growth and coverage?

How did we grow and why did we manage to succeed in this industry?  It’s because we are 100% user centric company and we are mobile first.  The company exists for 10 years.  In 2009, we were one of the first thousand apps on iOS, globally and that’s actually how we managed to get out there and managed to grow a user base over the last couple of years.

How does OneFootball work with betting incumbents?

First, I think the importance is how does OneFootball work in terms of content.  What we are, it’s pretty simple.  It’s Facebook for football, without the social element.  Literally, when you’re a football fan of a team in the UK, you get all your content for your team in English and aggregate it through different sources, which brings customers back very often.  Not only consuming live matches but also consuming post, pre-match analysis and whatever content.  Through that engagement, we have 40, 50 sessions per user per month and three to five minutes time spent per customer.  We have a lot of touchpoints to actually put them together with our betting partners.  There are integrations like the 1X2 integration which we offer to our customers in almost all countries, where connected to matches, we let the user vote on a match and that’s the starting point of a funnel for then, driving traffic to our betting partners.

How can betting improve its product engagement?

I still believe that one of the biggest upside potentials for betting companies is to look at UX and UI of their value propositions.  I think that’s something that they don’t do.  What we try, not becoming a betting business but we try to take parts of bets value chain in order to have the best funnel in terms of conversions that the betting companies get the most traffic out of it.  But then, I see still, that the bounce rate is too high.  The registration funnel is literally not what companies expect and there, they definitely need to step up in terms of looking at design and user flows and really improving the experience for customers.

What future technology should betting and sports stakeholders be paying attention to?

I would not go for technology.  I would actually go for the evolution of where customers are.  In the end, we’re looking at acquisition funnels and betting companies have to follow customers.  Not the other way around.  So, when customers move more to Instagram or they go to Musical.ly or they have different experiences.  Actually, I mean, there’s always these augmented reality and virtual reality topics still not there but when that happens, betting has to actually adapt to that.  Because it’s very hard for betting companies to retain customers if they’re not moving into content and additionally, it’s very tough for betting companies if they would still acquire customers on TV because then, they would not reach the younger audience.

What are your thoughts about the US market?

We’re a platform.  So, we’re not in the betting industry.  We will really actively look at what is going to happen and let others burn their fingers first because it will definitely take, I would say, 10, 20 years until we really have an established business environment because there are still so many unknowns.  It’s literally state by state is ruling differently.  It’s pretty interesting to look at and we need to follow it because it’s potentially the biggest market, globally, except some markets like China and Asia but you need to keep a close eye on it.