We’ve looked a lot at how the well-established gambling industry in Europe has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, but in the U.S., where opportunities are still opening up from expansion, the story is slightly different. Even if the business has shrunk down a bit, players still want to gamble, and our Becky Liggero Fontana was joined by Catena Media’s Michael Daly, VP of North America, to discuss what he’s seeing in the market.

The loss of sports was a shock for everyone, but Catena was well established to keep people entertained, and continue to find ways for them to spend their gambling dollar. “So Catena globally, we are a sports and casino affiliate, so obviously you know around March 12th when all sports essentially stopped or postponed indefinitely, sports came to an almost grinding halt,” Daly said. “The online world is where Catena exists or it dominates in North America, as an affiliate, and people still wanted entertainment. They still have a share of wallet that they want to spend and they started looking for options, and so our sites which focus on education and other things, and how to play online, how to get online, how to get a bank account, we’re really helpful to a lot of people. So we’ve done pretty well during this time of helping people get online.”

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The demand for sports content never went away, and that helped Catena find something to do with its players attention. “We took a couple of prong approach on what that it was going to be, because really it’s hard to know what they’re going to do, so ours was to be positioned for wherever they might go,” Daly said. “So you had the players who still wanted to read about sports or whatever they could, so we started talking about NFL Draft, and NFL futures, and NBA, and things that are much further out and what might the world look like, because that was also, everybody’s still questioning and there’s as many guesses as there are people probably.”