Oddslife brings in Betsson co-founder alongside bold.dk launch
Arrival of Chris Duncan as CCO accompanied by agreement with leading Danish football website bold.dk.
Chris Duncan, a member of Betsson’s founding group, has joined social sports betting start-up Oddslife as its chief commercial officer.
Duncan, who co-founded the sports betting operator in 2001, has also invested in Oddslife as the business looks to expand its reach through media partnerships.
“Oddslife is creating a unique approach to social gambling by using media partnerships as its primary means of driving traffic,” Duncan said.
“Their acquisition and retention models have been well thought out and I am excited to be directly involved in the business.”
As part of this new direction, Oddslife has partnered with Bold.dk, the largest football news site in Denmark with 1.5m unique monthly users, on what CEO Rasmus Sojmark told eGaming Review represents the first of a “number of white labels with media partners in different countries”.
Oddslife offers tiered daily tournaments, categorised as gold, silver and bronze, allowing players to buy in with virtual credits and win credits that can be exchanged for prizes such as sporting memorabilia, match tickets or funded accounts with egaming operators. In addition it now offers a regular free “official Danish tournament”, which dot.dk players can sign up to via banner ads and a designated Oddslife section on the bold.dk website.
Sojmark explained that the initial goal is to push Danish players through to the local tournament and then engage them in the buy-in tournaments across its network of international sites. A Greek-facing offering is set to follow through a partnership with Sport-FM.gr, which is one of the top 20 most visited websites in the EU country with 2.5m unique monthly users.
“I feel we have a lot more interesting things going on than other social sports betting sites out there, and we’re hoping this allows us to form media partnerships for a number of specific markets,” Sojmark told eGR. “Unless the user experience is very different I don’t understand why you would bet for real money through a social betting site when there is nothing stopping you just having a second window open with a real-money bookmaker,” he added.
Oddslife was launched last year by Sojmark after his departure from EveryMatrix, where he served as commercial director for several years. The company has affiliate-style agreements in place with a number of Power 50 operators, such as William Hill, Ladbrokes and bet365, where players who sign up receive virtual credits which can be used in Oddslife tournaments or exchanged for prizes in the shop.
Its dot.dk site was initially launched in May 2012, in advance of the European Football Championships, but has been relaunched to coincide with the Bold.dk agreement.