Back in July, Wire Industries, Inc., a technology and media company that owns and operates the sports betting marketplace WagerWire, announced the establishment of FantasyWire and the Wire Media Group as independent verticals.
The move was taken to allow the company to operate fantasy sports products and other types of gaming independently of sports betting while accelerating the growth of its media and affiliate segments, which the company called “a natural evolution” of the business.
To learn more about this development and what the future looks like for Wire Industries under this new framework, Yogonet held an exclusive interview with co-founders Zach Doctor, Travis Geiger and Guy Dotan.
What led the company to take this decision, and what benefits are expected from this expansion?
This expansion was part of our day-one plans as the natural evolution of the flagship brand we founded in 2021. Over the past year, we’ve seen an increasing demand for niche, interactive experiences in both sports betting and media consumption. By creating these independent brands, we aim to capitalize on emerging opportunities in these verticals while maintaining the flexibility to innovate across different sectors.
The Wire Media Group leverages marketplace activity to drive a powerful flywheel of organic consumer awareness. The ability to sell your action not only unlocks the real-time value for the owner but transforms every bet into a story in progress. We’ve had interesting bets for sale reach tens of millions of impressions on social media and the stories picked up by major outlets ESPN, NY Post, USA Today, Bleacher Report, and more.
This expansion enables us to tailor our offerings, foster deeper community engagement, and create synergy between sports betting, fantasy sports, and media consumption. These moves are already generating new revenue streams while enhancing brand loyalty and user experience across our ecosystem.
FantasyWire is touted as powering “the first-ever DFS pick ’em marketplace on RealTime Fantasy Sports (RTS),” with trading also available on the WagerWire app. What can you tell us about this product’s proposition, and what benefits will players enjoy from accessing the same open market principles of WagerWire but in DFS?
By applying the open market principles that are central to WagerWire, we’re giving fantasy players a whole new way to engage with their entries. Historically, once a fantasy entry was submitted, players were locked in. With FantasyWire, players can now capitalize on strong starts by selling high, or they can hedge against underperforming picks to mitigate risk. It not only enhances the overall user experience but also increases engagement within our partners’ apps, as players continually reassess their strategies throughout each contest.
We’ve already witnessed high adoption of FantasyWire with existing RealTime Fantasy Sports players. We are seeing 5-10% of their total volume being traded on the market, which exceeded our initial targets. We have private data on cashout usage from a Tier 1 sportsbook showing that 6.5% of betting volume gets cashed out, so we are really encouraged that our baseline is already there and the upside is significantly higher.
Meanwhile, Wire Media Group has hit a new milestone by reaching 50M+ sports fans with its content in the first half of 2024. What are the keys behind this rapid rise in popularity? What sets Wire Media Group’s original content offering apart from other companies operating in the media space?
The key for us was creating social media accounts with which people naturally wanted to interact. We did this by being what we call a “good hang.” We were interacting and getting to know our fans on Twitter before we even told them what our brand was. By acting more like a sports fan than a sports company we were able to create an affinity amongst our early followers.
That affinity coalesced into an organic community, with followers contributing grassroots content that WagerWire would platform. We made our followers the stars of the show, and in doing so created genuine connections with the people who would become our first customers. When we announced our brand, they lined up and said, “How can we be part of this?”
We then brought together other like-minded communities of fans and creators into our “content collective” including Matthew Berry’s Fantasy Life, The Hammer Sports Betting Network, Pro League Network, Walter Picks, and more — and now we broadcast high-quality co-branded daily content on our pages.
A press release from July called media “an important piece” of the WagerWire ecosystem, tying all offerings together and driving a flywheel effect. Can you give us some insights on how this synergy between media and the marketplace works, and its impact on consumer awareness, engagement, etc.?
WagerWire turns every bet into a story. By changing the nature of a bet into a dynamic asset, each bet becomes its own piece of content and each bettor becomes the star of their own story. When a bettor posts their bet on social media, rather than just comment, their followers can actually buy into it and become a part of the story. We’ve proven this out on scale that regularly attracts the attention of major media outlets.
Media was always going to be essential to WagerWire because of the nature of marketplaces. We knew we needed to build a community even before we had a product so that we could have a liquid betting market from day one. Content was our strategy for how to solve what Andrew Chen of a16z calls ‘The Cold Start Problem’ of sparking initial network effects for marketplace businesses.
We’re proud to say we’ve never spent a dime on performance marketing and yet we have one of the biggest footprints of any start-up in the industry. Beyond that, WagerWire has never paid for a user. In fact, we make money for every new user that comes to us through our affiliate initiatives. Most of the players who download WagerWire sign up with our partner sportsbooks and fantasy apps, with whom we have affiliate arrangements.
Pair all that with the fact that Wire Media bears little to no overhead in the creation of its content. We flip the old network model on its head, achieving the same output as traditional media companies at a tiny fraction of the cost by leveraging AI and a collective of talented creators contributing daily content curated by a team who keeps its finger on the pulse, which we then post and our community amplifies.
The WMG content technology team leverages AI in its processes to aggregate content, analyze trends, and more. AI is a tool that we are seeing more and more companies mention when describing their processes. Do you see AI as playing a key role for the company? How much importance is innovation given across Wire Industries?
AI plays a critical role in Wire Industries’ operations, particularly within the Wire Media Group (WMG), where we’ve developed a proprietary engine that transforms longform content into highly engaging, snackable clips. This technology is key to how we repackage and distribute media across various platforms, ensuring we capture audiences with quick, digestible content while still delivering the depth of insight our users expect. By leveraging AI, we’re not only automating these processes but also enhancing them with trend analysis and adaptive learning to ensure we’re always delivering relevant content in real-time.
Innovation is embedded across all of Wire Industries’ segments. Whether it’s AI-driven user personalization, marketplace technologies that adjust live to consumer behavior, or the ability to create real-time, shareable media clips, we see AI as a catalyst for smarter and more efficient operations across the board. Each segment, from gaming to media, benefits from our relentless focus on technological advancement, positioning Wire Industries as a leader in both content innovation and user experience.
Wire Technologies is also building additional gaming verticals including PonyWire, ContestWire, and DataWire. What are the next steps for these verticals, in terms of going fully live and joining the Wire Technologies network, and what do you expect this ecosystem to look like when all verticals are launched?
We see marketplaces as the next step for an industry that is still maturing, so new verticals naturally expand our impact on the gaming experience. As I mentioned before, community and liquidity are the first steps for these verticals. The vision behind launching verticals like PonyWire, ContestWire, and DataWire is to create a robust and interconnected ecosystem that enhances both traditional and emerging forms of gaming. Each of these verticals is being built with a targeted purpose in mind, designed to complement our core platform while addressing specific demands within the gaming community.
PonyWire is focused on bringing real-time trading principles to the horse racing world. We’re currently in the final stages of testing, refining our marketplace to provide users with the ability to trade racing tickets and adjust positions in live markets. We expect to go fully live within the next quarter, pending final regulatory approvals.
ContestWire will extend our marketplace philosophy to larger-scale contests and tournaments. We’re adapting our technology to allow users to trade their entries in DFS 1.0 contests, survivors, brackets, pools, etc. Early beta testing is scheduled for later this year, with a full launch in the first half of 2025.
DataWire is a key piece of our ecosystem, providing proprietary data feeds and analytics not only for our own platforms but also for third-party partners. We’re working closely with sports data providers to ensure that DataWire delivers actionable insights in real time, which will power trading across all our verticals. DataWire is expected to go live alongside the final launch of PonyWire and ContestWire.
When all these verticals are launched, we envision a seamless, interconnected network where users can engage with multiple types of gaming assets—whether it’s horse racing, fantasy sports, or tournament betting—through a unified platform. The goal is to create a dynamic marketplace where users can manage their portfolios across different forms of gaming, with each vertical benefiting from the shared liquidity and data intelligence provided by DataWire. This approach will position Wire Technologies as a leader in creating a fully immersive, multi-vertical gaming ecosystem. When all is said and done, we want to be the one-stop-shop marketplace for any kind of wager.
Original article: https://www.yogonet.com/international/noticias/2024/10/02/80504–34innovation-is-embedded-across-all-of-wire-industries-39-segments-34
