“We believe the opportunity for new affiliates hasn’t gone away”

What was the primary motivation behind founding the Third Planet Affiliates, and how does it differ from your previous ventures like PocketFives and US Bets?

Our last business was fairly successful in the affiliate space, but we came out of it believing there was a lot of upside we hadn’t been able to capture and still plenty more available if we put enough time and money into it. Particularly when you are a nimble, flexible start up with founders who are heavily involved in the day-to-day operations, there are plenty of opportunities to outmaneuver some of the bigger players and gain market share.

We mostly just believe the opportunity for new affiliates hasn’t gone away, and our knowledge and experience put us in the right place to capture some of it. Regarding my previous ventures, PocketFives was focused entirely on poker, which was all the rage when we launched in 2005.

We were able to make a good amount of money early on, but the opportunity faded in later years as player pools fragmented and marketing budgets collapsed. US Bets was more similar in nature to what we’re doing now – a business focused on high quality content and fundamentally sound SEO.

We’re trying to inject more ingenuity into some of our features in ways I can’t fully detail yet. But let’s just say the sites will have some modern features that weren’t front of mind 6 or 7 years ago. The other big thing about US Bets was it was mostly a network of state-focused websites (we later acquired SporstHandle and launched USBets.com as national sites). For now we’re solely focused on larger, national sites. We’re also entering into the lottery space for the first time and putting a larger emphasis on promoting DFS and Sweepstakes this time around.

You and Cal Spears have a long history of collaboration, starting with PocketFives. How has your partnership evolved over the years, and what makes it successful?

Cal and I were friends and roommates before we were business partners, and started PocketFives in the apartment we shared with one other friend (who was in law school and is now our lawyer) in 2004.

We’ve got a long history of interpersonal trust and appreciation, but we’ve also got complementary skill sets and ways of looking at the world. We’ve both grown valuable networks in the industry over the last 20 years, and between us are able to leverage a large number of connections.

Third Planet Affiliates recently acquired Props.com. What was the strategic reasoning behind this acquisition, and how do you see Props.com fitting into your overall business model?

The first two sites we created were lotterygeeks.com and casinoreports.com. Each was created to target a single vertical in the industry. We decided not to get involved with sports off the bat because of present competitive dynamics, but always planned to have our eyes on potential acquisitions.

I don’t think either of us believed we’d find something quite this attractive as quickly as we did, but it ended up being a really terrific fit for both the team we have on hand and the ambitions of the company.

Could you provide an update on the current status of Third Planet Affiliates’ licensing across the United States?

We’re currently licensed or close in Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We haven’t yet started applying in any other states as of yet. That will likely change at some point in the future.

As someone who has successfully sold businesses to major industry players like Better Collective, what are your long-term goals for Third Planet Affiliates?

Everyone on the team is proud of the work we do and our place in the industry, and we’re not focused on selling in the short term or long term. We just want to build websites with good content and stay on top of the pulse of the industry.

If we have an opportunity to sell some or all of our sites some time down the road, of course we’ll consider it. But the plan right now is just to build and try to grow traffic and revenue.

How do you view the current trends in online gambling and sports betting? What do you believe will be the key drivers of growth in the next few years?

WRT to the US market, state-by-state proliferation has obviously slowed down quite a lot after several years of rapid growth. The business continues to grow and mature, however, and we believe it will continue to do so for years to come. There’s always the possibility big new markets in Texas and California and some other decent sized ones like Georgia, but who knows when any of that is going to happen, and I don’t think shareholders and gaming executives are all that focused on future state launches like they were for years.

So I think we’ll see a lot more focus on driving customers into higher yield products (read: parlays, casino games and casino-like games) and customer retention, and somewhat less on flooding TV with ads – though we’ll still have a lot of that too. There will continue to be a huge push to get more types of gambling legalized in states, and particularly you’ll see states like New York, Ohio and Illinois keep trying to get casino games green lit. But my guess is that’s at best a slow and steady process, if there’s progress at all.