It’s become an industry all of its own, and it welcomes changes with open arms. Affiliate marketing companies reside in an interesting space. They’re not quite operators, but they seek the same sports betters. They historically weren’t media outlets, but mostly, but now they’re respected sources for news and analysis. This shift in identity as formed an industry populated by businesses with unprecedented power and flexibility. On the international side, FourCubed brought SharpLink an industry respected operating team with decades of combined experience in conversion through affiliate marketing services and expertise, and securing recurring net gaming revenue contracts with many of the leading iGaming companies, including Party Poker, bwin, UNIBET, GG Poke, 888 poker, betfair and others.
As part of our strategy to deliver unique span activation solutions to our sportsbook and casino partners, in November of 2022, we executed the first phase of a planned multi-phase rollout of our U.S. focused direct to player business with the launch of the state-specific affiliate marketing websites. These state-specific domains are designed to attract, acquire, and drive local sports betting and casino traffic directly to SharpLink sportsbook and casino partners, which are licensed to operate in each respective state. In connection with our national audience aggregation and phase direct to player revenue growth initiatives, phase two of our plan will be implemented in the second quarter of 2023 when we launch a sports betting education hub for the experienced and novice sports fans.
This will be a robust educational website dedicated to teaching new sports betting enthusiasts, the fundamentals of, and the winning strategies for navigating the legal sports betting landscape. The third and final plan phase of our direct to player strategy will focus on introducing an entirely new content experience in the fall of 2023, which we expect to bring all our affiliate marketing assets together in a hyper-local fan centric experience. Our plan is to power a targeted and personalized sports betting and iGaming environment that organically introduces all fans to our marketing partners through relevant tools, free-to-play games and high quality content. The result is expected to be a premium conversion and monetization solution that allows us to achieve our audience building objectives while delivering quantifiable conversion results for our sportsbook and casino partners through our proprietary affiliate marketing properties.
Dodi Handy: So what kind of revenue contribution then can we expect from our affiliate marketing services business unit this year? I mean, do you have any idea on that?
Rob Phythian: Yes. The SharpLink generates revenue from both our Affiliate Marketing Services International and United States segments by earning a commission from sportsbook and casino operators on new depositors directed to them via our affiliate marketing network in the European markets where we serve and via our direct to player websites in America. Depending on the terms of our marketing agreement with each operator and the type of license SharpLink has been granted in a particular state by its regulators, commissions may be paid to us in the form of cost per acquisition or by sharing in net gaming revenues generated by the depositors referred to the operators through our direct to player properties. As Bob noted in his review of our financial results, affiliate marketing is already proving to be an exciting new revenue building channel for SharpLink, because this is a slow and steady audience build by nature we’re confident that our affiliate marketing business units will continue to ramp and ultimately prove to be among our largest contributors to SharpLink future revenue growth.
For some better perspective on what is possible, take a look at the revenue performance of companies like Better Collective, or Gambling.com. They’re all international companies focused on building out their affiliate marketing platforms in the U.S. While there are peers who are a bit more mature than SharpLink, their 2022 revenue results speak to the size and the opportunity of this market and we are going to be hard and fast to secure a big piece of it.