Does the World Really Need Influencers Making More Picks?
Winible Is Another Influencer-Backed Betting Startup
When there is money to be made in any industry — from sports drinks to snack foods — you can be sure that influencer personalities will be soon to follow. That has certainly been the case in sports betting, where Jake Paul has found a lot of success with Betr, among other personalities, by either starting up their own brand or just entering into partnerships with pre-existing sportsbook operators. Winible is the latest entrant to the influencer’s sports picks debate as it’s a startup that seeks to make it even easier for influencers to profit off their sports betting recommendations.
NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis is one of the more prominent names who has invested in Winible, a platform through which social media influencers can set up virtual storefronts where fans can subscribe for sports picks. Instead of influencers pushing picks or recommendations in messaging apps or on Twitch streams, they can do so on Winible, which provides them with in-app payment processing services. The setup is simple: An influencer creates a Winible storefront, fans subscribe, and then the influencers provide sports picks.
This week, Winible announced that it received $6 million in seed funding from Lewis and other investors, including a mix of sports executives and personalities like Premier Lacrosse League co-founder Mike Rabil (brother of Paul Rabil). The funding has been led by Inspired Capital, a venture capital fund co-founded by billionaire Penny Pritzker. Inspired Capital mainly invests in tech companies and has now entered the sports betting space.
Is There A Market For What Winible Provides?
While it feels like there might be an over-saturation in the market in terms of influencers being involved in sports betting and people trying to hawk their sports picks for money to fans and bettors, there is definitely some interest in what Winible has to offer. In addition to courting millions of dollars in seed funding from successful investors and venture capital firms, Winible says that it has 75,000 active subscribers after soft launching in 2023. That kind of rapid growth looks good for the influencers in the influencers sports picks debate.
The company also says that those subscribers have placed $30 million in bets with roughly 100 influencers. Those numbers aren’t going to shock anyone, and it isn’t exactly clear how much subscribers have been willing to pay for the right to have access to those picks — that number is critical because it represents Winible could become profitable — but it sounds like an auspicious beginning for yet another sports betting startup trying to make inroads in a crowded marketplace.
Whether it’s over and under betting, spreads/moneylines, futures bets, or even parlays, there definitely is the potential for Winible to carve out a sizable niche as a valuable home for sports betting creators with an established following who want to have one site handle all of their back-end work. It remains to be seen if influencers will want to give up some chunk of their earnings to pay Winible instead of just handling payments on their own but the idea is a completely reasonable and appealing one for certain influencers.
The Picks Need To Be Good
As with any sports betting professional, you’re only as good as the picks you make. You’re simply not going to be able to build and maintain a following if you don’t put in the work and provide people with intelligent, reasoned analysis that helps them win and not lose. That’s what gets lost in the influencers sports picks debate. It’s great to have big names on a platform like Winible, but bettors simply aren’t going to keep paying to subscribe to tail a personality who isn’t winning.
That could be an issue for Winible which is still trying to attract bigger-name personalities to its platform. Even if they are able to get those influencers with sizable followings, it’s on those influencers to continue to provide people with smart picks that are making them money. If they don’t, then bettors will stop subscribing, and Winible will lose out on revenue accordingly. So, the business model is naturally only as good as the picks by the platform’s influencers.
Nowadays, there are tons of ways for people to bet online, and even more people claim to have sports betting secrets and guaranteed ways to win. The difficulty arises when bettors are faced with separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, when deciding who is worth following and who just isn’t. That’s also a question Winible will need to grapple with because having unsuccessful (or unserious) personalities on its platform could devalue the product and turn away potential subscribers.
The company needs to do its own evaluations of its personalities to make sure that the ones on its platform deserve to be there and are going to keep people or are going to turn them away.
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