Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for XLMedia's first Capital Markets Day. Let me introduce you to the team who will be speaking today. Together, we bring considerable media and betting expertise to XLMedia. I'm David King, the CEO. I joined in July 2022. I've had a number of CEO and CFO roles in the media sector. Caroline Ackroyd is an experienced CFO with a track record of value creation and has substantial knowledge of the gaming and leisure sectors. Caroline joined in March 2022. Karen Tyrrell is an experienced CPO and operational leader with a track record of delivering people-centric change, having held senior leadership roles in sports betting and gaming sectors. Karen joined us in September 2022.
Kevin Duffey is the president of XLMedia in North America and was the founder of Saturday Football Inc., which we acquired in 2021. Kevin is a successful entrepreneur and an experienced business leader. He is based in the U.S. Mike Werner is a commercial leader with a track record of growing revenue and leading teams both in corporates and startups. He's also based in the U.S. Cody Darwick is one of our rising stars. He leads the business development side of our media partnership business, which is now a core competency at XLMedia. He's also based in the U.S. Roman Israeli is based in Israel, leads our gaming business, has deep expertise in gaming, is data-driven, and has a track record of growing revenues.
We also have a talented team of writers, tech and product experts, marketing and other disciplines, all of whom are essential to what we do. Our goal is for you, the investor community, to leave today's presentation with a fuller insight into our business, our markets, and our growth strategy. What we do as a team is create compelling content that attracts engaged audiences and connects them to relevant advertisers. We bring digital media and betting together. We focus on sport and gaming. We differ from many of our competitors as we lead with great content on sport-branded sites, both owned and partnered, and we attract audiences who can then introduce the bet or the offer. Our sites engage regularly with sports fans, not just when they want to bet, so building trust and a sustainable relationship.
Kevin Duffey will say more. Cody will pick up on the benefits of the media partnership model. Today we're gonna focus particularly on the U.S. due to the sheer scale of the opportunity in that market. XLMedia has been re-engineered. We are the new XLMedia. This slide seeks to show the changes that we have made. We shifted our model to lead on sport with a strong gaming offering. We are prioritizing regulated markets. We have quality content-led sites that provide value to audiences. We manage Google compliance very carefully with specialist in-house SEO teams. We used to run thousands of thin sites. We now run less than 20 brands. We now have a lean management structure and are migrating away from old bespoke tech to a lower cost universal tech environment.
Shortly, Karen will explain more about how we use learnings in Europe to grow our business. The markets we are operating in will change continuously. In Europe, sport and casino markets offer hybrid deals, paying upfront for customer acquisition and then a profit share from ongoing customer betting. In North America, it's currently a CPA-led market, i.e., a larger one-off customer acquisition payment. In the U.S., the combination of periodic state launches legalizing online sports betting, the CPA model itself, seasonal sport, and operator marketing spend decisions means we see significant spikes in our revenues. We believe the U.S. market will move to the hybrid model over time. We're very well placed to work with operators to introduce the bet through our regular engagement with our sports audiences. We will be able to build a more sustainable, less spiky revenue stream. This will take time.
All this is underpinned by a clear strategy focused on sport and gaming, prioritizing regulated markets, expanding our owned and media partner footprint while exiting non-core and marginal activity. Caroline Ackroyd will expand on this point later. State launches will be an important part of our growth over the next few years. Let me say a little bit more about how we prepare for the state launches. We look ahead at legal and non-legal states and identify how we might build our presence in those marketplaces. We build content before it goes live. We engage the audience before it goes live. Then once live, we're able to introduce bettors to operators. As I say, the slide expands a little bit more on how we go about preparing for a new state launch.
The U.S. betting market is predicted to grow to over $19 billion by 2026. As I said, in the U.S., we currently participate in the operator advertising and marketing spend via CPA, the red line on the chart. Effectively, we are motivated to acquire the same customer for many different operators, and we're very good at it. As the market develops, we can use the power of our audience and our partners' audience engagement to drive hybrid deals where operators are open to it, and then we will be motivated to introduce the bet. The result will be that we earn a lower upfront CPA, but we'll also participate in the betting spend as a profit share, the blue columns. What is critical here is that profit share continues as long as the bettor keeps betting.
This slide shows an estimate of sports viewership and demonstrates the relative scale of different sports interest and the timing of when sports fans are most engaged. This is then reflected in our North American revenue profile from sport. This chart gives you a sense of the resulting financial seasonality as a result of the season and as a result of the impact of new state launches on our income. When a state goes live, pent-up demand creates a spike. It then moves to a more normalized rhythm. As you can see, New York was a highly anticipated launch. Gaming revenues, in our case, casino and bingo, are less seasonal, are stabilizing as this builds back and will deliver a more sustainable revenue stream.
At this moment, as a result of the penalty imposed on our old casino sites in 2020, our profit share from historic customer acquisitions is significantly reduced. As each year passes, so we build this back. You can see from the chart the casino, the green bar, and the darker blue bar, which is sport, show a sense of the underlying growth as new states mature. Mike Werner will say more, but we're also diversifying into new sport adjacent revenue streams to build new sources of sustainable revenue. Roman Israeli will talk to the casino model and how that builds sustainable revenues. Let me hand over to Karen, who will talk through our Europe portfolio.
Thank you, David. Well, now I'm going to share with you the journey of our European sports estate, which has undergone a significant change in the last few years. We have transitioned from a large number of sites with no or low brand equity and streamlined this to a few quality sites, each with grounded consumer value propositions. We have simplified each offering, refined the brands so that they have clear USPs, and identified interests that can underpin expanding into new markets and capture new revenue. We remain established in several key markets, the UK, Romania, and Finland, to name a few, delivering quality content and leveraging our social presence to further enhance our audience's enjoyment. We also have some of our EU estate live on Arc XP's platforms, which provides us significant opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
Alongside all of this, we have the expertise and experience of having worked with operators on hybrid deals for many years to deliver sustainable commercial models as the markets mature around us. In summary, we have retained and enhanced our quality in-market throughout the changes, providing the optimal platform for global growth opportunity. How have we leveraged this opportunity? Well, the mix of the U.K.'s highly mature market and expertise of XLM's in-house teams has created a perfect space for the business to consider how to evolve and grow, testing out what works and what doesn't work. Freebets was the first of our sites to move to Arc XP's platform. Combining Arc XP's leading capabilities in sharing content and geotargeting with the adoption of agile practices enables us to react faster to customer and operator requirements and really move at pace.
The learnings from this migration will enable us to plan the wider Arc XP estate rollout and minimize the impact of these significant technology changes. The platform itself provides us with significantly enhanced data sets, enabling us to plan for a more personalized experience, maximizing the engagement and enjoyment of our audiences, whilst also delivering high-quality customers for our operator and partner network. What do we do with all of this data? Well, it's still very early days, and whilst we need to keep the performance metrics confidential, I can share with you which metrics we look at to provide the insights to really move the business forward.
We place an emphasis on traffic mix, reviewing sources like direct traffic, which indicate brand awareness and brand recognition, alongside traffic that comes from social and organic SEO that indicates a brand's discoverability as well as our ability to attract new audiences. We look at retention, frequency, and usage metrics. Data around returning users, page views, and time spent have all become increasingly important. Finally, we look at revenue metrics, conversions, ad engagement, content type engagement, and page traffic. Even with all of this data, innovation is key, and it remains at the forefront in a mature market. We're working with exciting new formats for ads and messages to ensure we don't overlook society's need for human interactions whilst online.
We have recently implemented the new Universal Dynamic Offers Engine, which is key to improving and optimizing our click-through rates, and it will ensure that we are not just putting the same ad in front of the same person repeatedly and hoping for a different outcome. We can harness the data and the technology to drive the right outcome for XLM. How will we leverage these learnings for the benefit of the wider group? The U.K. now basically acts as our test bed for product development, framed with the outlook of global expansion. The Dynamic Offers Engine is a great example of something that we're testing in the U.K. and E.U. with a view to launching in the U.S. as soon as we can. It's much more than that.
Our experience in the U.K. market, the shift from CPA to hybrid model, the continual developments around responsible betting, we can share all of this with the teams in the U.S. We obviously continue to iterate and learn in the U.S. with each new state launch. Adding in all this knowledge has served in creating a repeatable playbook for new markets over time. Really importantly, we can also utilize our long-standing and trusted EU and U.K. operator relationships to enter the U.S. market in partnership and at pace. Lastly, we have first-hand experience of responsible gambling in the U.K., a marketplace where customers are treated responsibly, where we provide the entertainment that they are seeking. Entertaining audiences is central to what we do at XLM, and we will share our learnings with the North American team as they go on that journey.
Now I will hand you over to Kevin Duffey to share those plans with you.
Thank you, Karen. Hi, everyone. I'm Kevin Duffey. I joined XLMedia through the acquisition of Saturday Football in 2021. Prior to this, our team spent a decade building one of the largest independent digital sports media brands in the U.S. college sports market. My background is in building engaged sports audiences and monetizing that audience through a diverse range of revenue streams. It's exciting to bring this experience alongside our talented North America sports team and execute our vision and plans in this fast-growing market. Today, I have the opportunity to talk to you about our media properties and how we drive results with our engaged audiences. Before we do, let's quickly provide an update on the U.S. market and current online sports betting legalization.
Legal online sports betting is now live in about half of the U.S. states, with many more going through the process to discuss and explore legalization in the near future. Included in these are a few key states with very large potential sports betting populations, such as Florida, Texas, and California. I'll talk more later about how we're planning to capitalize on these markets. To remind everyone, we entered the U.S. market in December 2020 for the first time. Through key acquisitions and strategic media partnerships, we now have a substantial footprint. The combination of owned and operated portfolio brands and media partners achieves full coverage across the U.S. in both now legal and future legal betting states. By connecting with sports fans in their local markets, we can reach betters across the betting spectrum from the casual to the regular and to the core better.
While our media properties engage sports fans of all types, our sports betting-centric properties also give us an edge with the core better seeking in-depth insights and tools. Our O&O properties are sports media and sports betting sites designed to produce high-quality, high-performing content that generates audience growth, retention, and action. Our media partnership business includes sports media and news publishers and is designed to provide immediate access to additional audience scale in key markets. The combination of owned and operated brands alongside our media partner properties leads to unique flexibility and a substantial footprint of organic, engaged audiences that are motivated toward commercial action.
Our collection of U.S. college sports assets provide national coverage via brands that resonate and connect with the unique fan bases of each region. Over 182 million fans in the U.S. have a favorite college team that they follow consistently and are over 1.6 times more likely to have incomes higher than $100,000 compared to the overall population. With the foundation of Saturday Down South and Saturday Tradition, we launched two new brands in the last year to extend our Saturday college sports footprint. Saturday Road and Saturday Out West are new brands that engage passionate fandoms and increase our footprint in key future sports betting markets such as North Carolina, Florida, and California.
It's been exciting to see the enthusiasm of the fandoms in the local markets of Saturday Road and Saturday Out West as we've seen for years with Saturday Down South and Saturday Tradition. Through these brands, we have highly engaged audiences in major markets yet to legalize sports betting. As an example, our Saturday brands have large organic audience in Texas, Florida, and Georgia, which represent a combined market size of 63 million people. Our approach to driving sustainable engagement and repeat visitors is simple. We write high-quality, trustworthy content in a local and authentic voice. Our content creators are credentialed sports writers, but at heart, they are sports fans writing for sports fans. Crossing Broad and Elite Sports New York, both owned and operated, clearly demonstrate this approach as these properties cover professional sports across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, a combined market of 42 million people.
Authentic content written by credible writers in a local voice is core to establishing trust with the right sports audience. This connection is evidenced by the repeat visits to our properties and acknowledged by our sportsbook partners as delivering them high-value customers. Content is at the core of our business. Across our portfolio of both O&O and media partnership properties, our talented writers focus mostly around three main content types. Editorial and sports content aimed at meeting the needs of both casual and rabid sports fans seeking news, analysis, and commentary around their favorite teams. This content drives audience growth and engagement. Commercial content is aimed at both converting fans into new bettors as well as driving existing bettors to now legal sportsbook promotions and offers.
Lastly, our evergreen content strategy aims to produce high-quality how-to guides and informational pieces that are designed to educate and convert sports fans and bettors. Through data and technology, we are able to measure and optimize our content and our properties to drive higher conversion rates through personalization and dynamic ad products. As Karen mentioned earlier, we are honing in on metrics that move the business. We look at traffic mix. Brand health is critical to our portfolio, and as such, maintaining a diverse blend of direct traffic, social traffic, and organic SEO is very important. All three traffic sources are vital to people discovering our brands and returning with frequency. We look at metrics around retention and usage across all of our platforms, including web, newsletter, and even podcasts and video consumption.
Finally, for conversion, we analyze everything from traffic source, content type, and how offers and advertisements are presented to users to ensure we are maximizing the commercial opportunity. With engaged sports fans visiting our properties from both legal and non-legal betting states, we can diversify revenue streams with additional monetization approaches, leading to sustainable revenues and less seasonality. Mike will say more on this here in a moment. Our brands are continuously connected to our audiences. Engagement through the full fandom journey enables multiple monetization points. Through our media-driven brand approach with contact points pre-game, in-game, and post-game, as well as in between games, we can engage our audience with the right content and the right products at the right time. This expands our monetization capability. Our unique brands and content approach across the full fandom cycle means retention and sustainable revenue.
Now I'm going to pass it over to Cody, who will talk more about our media partnerships.
Thanks, Kevin. I'm Cody Darwick, Senior Director of Media Partnership here at XLMedia. I've been at XL for 3 years, from the early days of our North America sports business. As Kevin alluded to the value of our partners, I'm now going to speak to our media partnership business in more detail. XLMedia is a leader in the partnership space, given our expertise and experience working with premium media companies of all sizes. The partnership model is a core competency of XLMedia and an approach we've had repeatable success with over the last couple of years. Partners provide instant scale and immediate access to their engaged audience in relevant betting markets, creating a highly effective way for us to scale up our presence across the U.S.
We strive to work with trusted publishers that are additive to our overall portfolio. This includes both news publishers with sports audience and limited betting content, as well as specialty sports sites looking to build out a new betting revenue stream. Partners provide sports audiences. We provide the sports betting commercial content, and together we share in the revenues. We bring gaming industry experience, relationships with operators, premium betting content, monetization know-how, and regulatory assistance. This creates a new incremental revenue stream for our partners and is not easily replicated by our partners. The team's playbook has a track record of success with a diverse array of publishers. Our approach is very much a collaborative one, where we work with the partner to layer in a content strategy that fits their brand guidelines and is within their comfort level.
Our content team works around the clock to maximize the opportunity for our partners. This includes nights, weekends, and holidays to monetize the non-stop sporting calendar. We send media partners recurring revenue updates, handle all tracking matters, and facilitate a seamless month-end payment process. We seek to provide best-in-class client service to our partners and help them navigate the ever-evolving and complex betting landscape. Our portfolio currently reaches over 46 million monthly unique users in live and soon-to-launch betting markets, with another 46 million in states that could legalize in the future. This provides us with significant coverage as new states continue to legalize going forward. We've experienced great success as the betting partner for publishers, most recently demonstrated by a strong Ohio launch in January.
Some of the largest operators have provided anecdotal feedback that we're their top affiliate in Ohio, driven by the combination of our own brands and our exclusive in-market cleveland.com partnership. Over nine months before the Ohio launch, our team did a great job driving revenue for cleveland.com through its out-of-state audience. This gave Advance Local a strong first impression of XLMedia and allowed us to secure a partnership with their MassLive property. We very much look forward to a successful Massachusetts launch with the MassLive team. Coverage in key markets is a playbook we've had repeatable success with, as experienced by our partnerships with amNewYork in New York and Mile High Sports in Colorado. Combining the state-specific publishers with a significant national brand like Newsweek is a great complementary fit for our portfolio.
We're actively taking a data-driven approach to find new media partners that are additive to our business and meet our relevant credentials. I'll now hand it off to our VP of Partnerships, Mike Werner, to talk more in depth about our revenue growth and diversification plans in North America.
Thanks, Cody. The brands we represent, the sites that Cody was just speaking about, both our owned and operated and our media partners offer our operators highly targeted audiences in key geographic regions. These brands and media partners form our network. We are able to message to these audiences with sports betting offers, casino offers, daily sports fantasy offers, as well as placing brand advertisers on the sites themselves. Some examples of those are here on this slide, both Toyota and Bud Light. There's many other large brands working with us. They love these targeted audiences. As Cody mentioned earlier, the combination of our owned and operated and media partners gives us incredible reach and scale. We are currently the largest or second-largest affiliate for a few of the largest sportsbook operators in the US, we have been told. We have a very robust CPA-driven business.
Our focus on retention of users enables us to develop hybrid and rev share offerings, allowing for a more forecastable stream of revenue that grows predictably over time. We are in the very early stages of this here in the US, but have been doing it in the EU for quite some time. We're leveraging their expertise to put together these deals right now. A limited number of major operators in the US make up the majority of the overall market share. New key operators, including those we work with in the UK, are coming to market quite rapidly. Bet365. There's also new operators coming to market here in the US, such as Fanatics. Fanatics is a massive sports merchandising company here in the US, and they're building a sportsbook as we speak. We're in the very early stages of working with Fanatics.
We are also expanding into sports-adjacent operators to monetize in all states and to a much larger audience pool. Seasonality is inevitable in the business that we're in, and it revolves around key events such as state launches and sporting events. In order for us to get a more forecastable stream of revenue throughout the year, though, we're focusing on different revenue streams as well. Fantasy sports and casino specifically add a large piece of more predictable revenue in the off-season. Balancing out this seasonality is gonna be key and will come in many forms, as highlighted by each of the ovals in this slide. Each of the ovals here represents a different revenue stream, and I wanted to focus on a couple of them here. Fantasy sports, for instance, on the left-hand side, is legal in most states and brings in new addressable demographics.
Casino is the other glaring opportunity here that commands higher rates in some cases, and larger handles within the actual app itself. Those larger handles are key for the rev share deals that we're generating right now, and it's in demand all year round, which is very key as well. Roman will talk next about casino.
Thank you, Mike. Hi, I'm Roman Israeli. I'm leading our gaming unit from Israel, and I will take you through our focus in our gaming activity. Let's start this off with definitions. We define gaming as casino-related activities, such as classical table games, slots, and online bingo. We now operate a series of high-quality casino brands in the European and U.S. markets. Our sites went into penalty in 2020 and are now all out of penalty. We now manage them in a completely different way. We've spent time rebuilding our sites, building engaging features, and creating sustainability with a clear approach focusing on quality content and value for our users. We have also spent time mitigating risk while ensuring sustainable growth, focusing on experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
This is evident by the last four major Google updates. The most recent ones, December helpful content and link spam updates. We've seen clear organic growth on our main assets. Rather than just focusing on volume, we focus on targeted keyword management, identifying high-intent players who have shown clear interest in placing a bet. Once a vertical with thin content, we are now expanding the formats we use to include video, newsletter, social-first content, all to expand our relevance and reach. While having a very strong 45 and older audience with high available income, we're now approaching a new younger audiences with a video content offering. We are already seeing success with this in Sweden. This creates new monetization opportunities while enjoying affiliate revenue streams and looking for diversification.
iGaming, specifically casino, is a high-margin vertical, which enables us to enjoy both an upfront payment for acquiring customers, CPA, and long-term revenue share. It's less seasonal than sports betting and particularly popular in countries with limited daylight and cold weather, allowing indoor excitement activities, which increases the demand for it in the winter. In a very short span of time, we have seen our new management method work for casino.se. Our portfolio consists of two approaches. One being our four main gaming-focused brands, driving new acquisition and creating new revenue share with three language-specific brands and one new global gaming brand, which is Caziwoo.com. The second uses our sports, U.S. sports brands like Crossing Broad to reach casino bettors. Our focus is really simple. First-party data and a data-driven approach.
With the world going towards a cookie-less experience in 2024, we put emphasis on acquiring and retaining first-party data on a user level, which is critical to understanding the complete funnel from acquisition to conversion and retention on a user level, which in turn will enable us to elevate our view from users and visitors to actual customers. Now I'm gonna hand it over to Caroline to talk about our financial approach.
Thanks, Roman. I'd like to cover our business mix and how it's changed over the last financial year. We have shifted from largely generating our revenues in the gaming vertical to now generating 73% of our revenues from sports. North America sports is a significant proportion of those revenues, being 83% of the sports vertical. Gaming is now 21% of our overall revenues and is still core to our strategy and growth forecast for the business, particularly in the U.S. Moving on to our target business gross margin model. As we've previously stated, the gross margin generated varies across each of our different verticals, as they are underpinned by different commercial deals, CPA, hybrid, and revenue share, and that is influenced by the maturity of these markets.
Our gross margin is defined as margin as a percentage of revenue after deducting associated content costs, technology costs, marketing, and direct people costs. In the North America Sports, a CPA-led market, our owned and operated websites typically generate around 60%-70% of margin. For these websites, we incur all of the costs of building or buying those audiences by investing in content, SEO, and technology. Media partnerships, although have lower margins of 40%-50%, allow the business to rapidly access large audiences without significant investment in building those audiences. This is particularly advantageous for state launches. For our mature markets, we target slightly higher margins as the EU Sports and EU Gaming enjoy the benefit of tail revenues generated from prior years. EU Sports typically generates 60% in gross margin and gaming around 70% in gross margin. Moving on to our capital allocations.
Critical to all of our plans is the financial health of the business. I wanted to update you on the activities that we have implemented. Over the last six months, we've been focused on right-sizing the organizational structure by removing non-core activities, which has freed up centralized resources, allowing us to support high growth verticals in the organization. As an example, we've shifted our Blueclaw agency resource from managing external clients to supporting our North America and EU Sports verticals. We've been replacing legacy systems which were supported by manual processes with automated systems using best in class external technology providers rather than building in-house. This has reduced centralized tech resources. We have removed costly management layers by deeper integrating our acquisitions and centralizing shared services resources. By removing these legacy organizational structures, we flatten the layers to improve communication and culture across the company.
As you've already heard at length from the teams, we are also focused on fewer, better, and high growth brands rather than volumes of website with lean content. We want to invest for the future, so we've been reinvesting our capital to promote innovation and further create value for our shareholders. Like many other businesses, we will continue to look at our cost base and how it supports our revenues and take opportunities to further reduce costs and run a lean organization. Furthermore, our priority is to ensure that we have sufficient working capital over the next financial year to make payments relating to acquisitions of CBWG and Saturday Football of $8 million.
We're focused on ensuring we are holding cash reserves to allow us the flexibility to manage the impacts of seasonality in the business that we've experienced with the shift in business mix from gaming towards sports vertical, which is highly seasonal in the U.S. We think about our cash reserves and how this will evolve in the future. As we expect U.S. operators will over time transition to hybrid and revenue share deals as they come under increased pressures to show profitability, that may impact the timing of revenues that we receive within the organization as we currently receive one-off CPA fees. We also need to be cognizant of the timing of state launches and when these revenues will be received. We're mindful of the current macroeconomic environment and climate.
Our partnership with operators relies on the continued investment in marketing spend, as well as consumers continuing to participate in gambling. Even though the U.S. market is relatively new and it's unknown how customers will behave during a recession, the gambling sector has been traditionally recession-proof. Finally, I'd like to state that the business is stable and cash generative. We are prudent about cash management in both the way we fund our current initiatives and our plans to meet our future liabilities. Thank you, and I'll pass you back to David.
Thank you, Caroline. Thank you to all the speakers and to you the audience for letting us take you through the business in more detail. If I may, a brief summary before we move on to questions. XLMedia suffered badly from Google penalties. That is behind us. We now run a business on quality content. We have a good sports business in the U.K. and are building back our European casino business. We're not seeking to overreach by spreading ourselves too thin in too many markets. We are focused on North America, and when we are ready, we will explore new markets as well. We're exceptionally well-placed to move to the hybrid model in the U.S. when that happens. In the meantime, we will maximize revenues from CPA and new state launches while building out the new revenue streams that we've already talked about today.
In addition to personalized ad experiences like Dynamic Ads, we're also exploring some other exciting innovations that we will update you on once they're live. Thank you very much. Let's move on to questions.
Thank you. We've had a number of questions submitted on the platform. The first of which for you, David, if I may. Given that you've been with the business for a while now, what are your initial impressions of XLM, and where do you see the bulk of the growth coming from in the near to medium term?
Right. Well, thank you very much. There have been a number of questions coming in. Just to be clear, we're obviously going to answer as many as we can, but a number have come in, financial questions, some of which relate back to the half year. We're obviously gonna pick up financial questions at the full year when we publish our results. We'll focus primarily here on the operations of our business. To your specific question then, my first impressions were extremely strong. You've met the team now. Very capable team. Extremely well embedded into their market.
The focus that we've had since I have joined the organization has been very much on simplification, removing management layers, as we've spoken about, replacing legacy technology, focusing on fewer better brands, as we've said, and critically integrating our US acquisitions and preparing the business for further growth. Just to reiterate, that growth can come from many places. New state launches are obviously a critical part of our growth. Diversification, as Mike has outlined, is also, we think, very important to building future sustainable revenues. As we've said, we do believe that as the market grows and expands, the hybrid deals will come into play, and we're extremely well-placed to participate with operators in the hybrid profit share model.
I mean, it's also worth noting that while the casino launched online live betting earlier than sport, there are only five online states live in North America at the moment. There are many, many more states in the U.S. that can go live over the coming years. Again, as we've said, we're well-placed to participate in that, and that will be a key focus for us going forward. We've spoken about Europe. We're upgrading our sites, we're improving our content, and we're creating new innovative ways of delivering value to our customers, as we've said. Dynamic Ads has been given as one example, and as I said, as more innovative ideas are rolled out, we will communicate those to you. Casino, we made the decision very clearly to retain casino, not to sell it.
We see it as a strong business opportunity for us, both in the European markets and in the North American markets, as I've just said. We are no longer running thin sites. We now run a small number, as we've said, of high-quality sites in good markets with high-quality content, led by an exceptional individual who is data-driven, has enormous experience in driving audiences and has a lready giving us clear evidence of the growth opportunity that we can see and the stabilization of those markets quarter-on-quarter. I think growth can come from many, many areas, and I think we're very well-placed to enjoy that growth over the coming years.
Thank you, David. The next question is: what is remaining in the earn-out payment schedule? How much was the Israeli tax settlement, and how much can be released from the tax provision in the balance sheet?
Okay, thanks very much. Caroline, would you like to pick that one up?
Sure. Although this isn't a financial update, I'll give you a little bit of the highlights and sum up some of those questions. From an earn-out perspective, we have earn-out payments relating to CBWG and deferred payments relating to Saturday Football. In this financial year, 2023, we anticipate we'll pay around $8 million in relation to those payments. Into the following year, 2024, we anticipate we'll pay around $7 million. In relation to our tax liability, which relates back to the years 2016 to 2020, we've settled this liability with the Israeli tax authorities, and that is $3.6 million. Thank you.
Thanks, Caroline.
Thank you. The next question is in relation to your operations. How have you changed your operations with a view on the management layer reduction, and what effect will being lean and the existing non-core have on your business?
Caroline, would you like to pick that one up?
Yes, David. There's been 4 main activities that the business has been reviewing over the last kind of 6 months. We've recently announced the business is exploring a sale of one of its non-core activities, which is personal finance. That is expected to have a financial year impact on the business for 2022 of a $1.5 million loss. We hope to improve that. We've also looked to reduce our external agency costs by removing any low profitability external clients and then refocusing those resources on growing our owned and operated sites. We've also looked at the management layers in particular around North America sports and EU sports with a view to actually bringing executive management closer to the operations within the organization.
In addition to that, we've continued to relocate and rationalize our shared services team, which started back in 2021, by either centralizing these activities but overall reducing the costs. We'll provide more financial information around that. In the results presentation, which will be around about March
Thanks, Caroline.
The next question is, how much do you expect to spend on capital expenditure and restructuring in 2023?
Caroline, another one for you, I think.
Sure. We typically spend around $5 million-$6 million in CapEx. We'll continue to spend roughly around the same going forward, and there's three main activities around that. There's the continued investment in our Arc XP platform. We're looking to migrate our North America assets onto that platform in the future and our casino assets. The second element is around legacy technology in the organization. Where we can improve both our data capabilities in order to improve conversion of our traffic, that's an investment that we're looking to make. Lastly, where we can be more efficient, both from a process and operational perspective, we're looking to invest capital there. In relation to restructuring costs, this will be significantly less going forward.
We do have some activities which we have, which we've actually taken action at the beginning of this year in relation to our non-core activities, which we anticipate will fall into this financial year.
Thanks, Caroline.
The next question is in relation to the U.S. Can you elaborate further in terms of how the team prepares for a new U.S. state opening? Do you work to a set formula? What states are currently considering legalizing online sports betting? In particular, with the recent news coming out of Georgia, can you speak to the footprint there?
Kevin, would you like to pick that one up, please?
Sure thing. Thanks, David. Well, I'll start with Georgia. With respect to the State of Georgia, we're indeed monitoring the activity and excited to see potential progress there with regard to sports betting legalization. We are well-positioned with our portfolio to capitalize on a legal sports betting future in the State of Georgia, specifically with our property Saturday Down South. A little bit more generally speaking, our approach to preparing and executing a state launch is truly a repeatable process, with the caveat that there are, you know, some specific variables and nuances with each state that we that we do consider. The process includes identifying the O&O websites and potential media partnership properties that are well-positioned to capitalize on a new state.
Ahead of the launch, we deploy intent-driven content well in advance of a state going live, and we work with operators to secure promotions for the targeted audiences. Lastly, we mobilize our content teams to take full advantage of the high leverage windows immediately following when a state goes live.
Thanks, Kevin.
Sticking with the theme of the U.S., do you expect the regulation market in the U.S. to accelerate, or has all the low-hanging fruit states now regulated and is in place going too slow?
Let me take that one. I mean, during 2022, we saw 4 states launch, New York, Louisiana, Kansas, and latterly Maryland. This year, Ohio went live in January, and Massachusetts is due to go live in March. No other states are currently certain to go live in the current year. We know that California attempted last year to legalize online sports betting, that wasn't voted through. We monitor this area very closely. We obviously don't want to predict the timing. We don't determine when states will either seek approval to go live or indeed ultimately choose to go live. Clearly there is a lot of talk around some of the larger states, such as Texas, we would love to see Texas, Georgia, as we've already said, go live.
At this moment, apart from the two states I've stated, there are no further states due to go live in this current year. I think this talks a little bit to what we've already spoken about how in successful we can be in driving the CPA model during state launches and indeed, of course, in the normalized rhythm that follows, but that there are significant spikes in our revenues when the states go live. As I've said, we don't determine when that is, nor ultimately, are we in a position to significantly influence when they go live either. As I say, we monitor it very, very carefully and prepare, as we just described, well in advance. Thank you.
Thank you, David. Switching focus to Europe, can you explain the rationale for maintaining your European casino footprint? Are there, for example, operational or strategic synergies that exist?
Caroline, perhaps you'd pick that one up, please.
Yes, certainly, David. I think maintaining our established EU casino footprint has several strategic benefits. Firstly, as both Caroline and David have alluded to earlier in the presentation-
In the affiliate world, particularly where rev share deals are prevalent, casino revenues really help to stabilize and balance out sports betting revenues, which are both unpredictable in their nature and sporting events which follow a set seasonal calendar. When audiences aren't enjoying sports, it really gives them that alternative source of entertainment. Secondly, by bringing the European sports and casino teams closer together operationally, we can really benefit from shared commercial deals, shared knowledge, and shared industry best practice, which goes along with operational synergies in how we structure the teams. Thank you.
Thanks. One extra comment from me, if I may. I think knowledge sharing goes in both directions, clearly. The experience we've had in Europe of the hybrid model, I think we can share with our US colleagues. Similarly, some of the ways in which our colleagues in the US drive content to engage with audiences is something that we can bring back more into the UK and our European businesses. As I say, by bringing the businesses closer together, by removing some of the layers, we're able to share these ideas and approaches, you know, across the Atlantic, as they say. Do we have any other questions?
The next question mentions a comment from the presentation. You said that your future state depend on the hybrid model in the U.S. Can you say more on your progress working with operators to launch the hybrid model? What will the dip in revenue look like?
Right. Well, let me pick that one up. I think to be clear, what we said is that we believe that the market will, over time, in the U.S., move from CPA-led market to the hybrid market, and we believe that's for a number of reasons. That's particularly the case that it's obviously expensive for operators to acquire new customers. And equally, we as an affiliate would like to have a more even sustainable revenue stream. As has happened in Europe, we believe that the market will migrate. We know that one or two operators in the U.S. are already exploring profit share deals with a smaller upfront payment and then a profit share going forward.
We have already explored with some operators and are actively exploring how that might work in the U.S. market. I mean, just to remind everybody what that means. It's a smaller upfront payment and then an ongoing participation in the betting activities of that individual. We clearly ultimately don't determine when that will happen. As we speak, we are actively engaging, as I've said, with operators. We believe that that builds a sustainable relationship. We're very clear that our constant engagement with fans and with sports fans in particular, every day through our sports sites allows us to engage, as we've explained, pre-game, in-game, post-game, in between games.
Therefore, we're not only able to encourage them to take an offer which might lead to a CPA, we can also encourage them to participate in having a bit of fun and betting on a particular outcome or a particular event within a game. We think we're very well-placed. To talk specifically to the dip, clearly, if this is a very gradual process, any dip in our revenue stream will be more modest. If this were to happen at a very rapid pace, which we don't expect, but if it were to, then the dip would be more severe. Nevertheless, the important thing here is that this is about building long-term sustainable revenues. Do we have any other questions?
We have a question regarding the core competency of the robust media partner business. Can you provide more detail on how these partnerships are constructed and the parameters? How long are they, and how do you plan to meet the growing scale?
okay. Kevin, again, if you wouldn't mind, I'll ask you to pick that one up again.
Sure thing. Yeah, our media partnerships are a very important part of our business, they're typically deals that are 2 or more years in length with a revenue share that's based on website authority, the traffic profile, and the market in which the partner exists. With regards to capacity and scale and meeting the needs, it's worth noting that our content operations are really structured around content type rather than by website or property, so it enables us to really scale up our operations to meet the needs of additional markets or additional partners. I might add that just our team is extremely flexible.
They're able to swiftly move and operate across our portfolio of O&O sites and media partners to maximize the current week or the day, the event across the sports calendar, whether it's a specific market or a specific property.
Coming back-
Thank you.
... to the theme of the U.S., do you have sufficient capacity and content to support the expected U.S. expansion?
Kevin, I think you've answered that, but please have perhaps go again.
Sure thing. No, I mean, it's, to repeat myself slightly, I think our key is that we are structured around content type. It allows us to really maintain flexibility, a lean cost structure, and to be able to scale up our content and needs as new markets enter the picture or we add new properties into our portfolio.
Right. Thanks, Kevin. I mean, I note we've just hit 3 o'clock. I'm very conscious we don't want to take up too much of everybody's time. We very much appreciate everybody for flying the question. Shall we take a couple more questions then draw to a close? Is that all right? If we have any more, that is.
Yeah, no problem at all. The next question is in two parts. The first of which, are you the number one or number two in your market, and who are your main rivals?
Well, I think we've already said that, you know, in Ohio we were advised, of course always anecdotally, that we were the number one or two with a number of the operators in the launch of the Ohio marketplace. We have to be very honest and say, of course, we won't be number one or two in every market. That will change over time, depending on market, depending on timing, et cetera, et cetera. We were very pleased to obviously perform so well in the Ohio launch. Yes, we can claim number one or two. We can't claim it in every, as I said, all the time nor in every marketplace. Our main competitors is a judgment call.
It's often claimed that Better Collective and Catena are two of our main competitors because they operate in a similar space as affiliates, both in the casino space and the sports space. We perhaps are weighted more heavily towards partnerships and have smaller casino businesses than they do, partly a result of the history that we've already described. They're the two obvious candidates that are usually associated with being two of our competitors.
The second part of this question, there are several large states where you don't have any partnerships. Pennsylvania, Nevada, for example. Are you planning to add partnerships?
Well, first of all, we obviously recently launched, as you know, a partnership with Newsweek, which gives us coverage of all the states in the U.S., as we've said, both legal and non-legal. When they go legal, we already have a footprint there through Newsweek. We also look at each state as we've said. We identify our presence, the scale of our presence, and what sort of level of presence we need in those markets. If we use Pennsylvania as an example, we already have a very strong O&O presence in that marketplace. No, in that particular market we are not looking for another partner. If we take Nevada has very specific rules around online gaming.
In our opinion, it's not a particularly attractive marketplace for us at the moment, and so we don't participate in that particular state at this moment. There are one or two other states where we don't participate for because they're unattractive economically to participate. We wouldn't rule that out if those economic circumstances change going forward. We are looking at new markets. We are looking at partners. We have criteria which clearly are commercially sensitive that we won't be defining, but that help us guide us to what sort of partner and which market.
Of course we're, as we've demonstrated, proactive in looking for partners in new markets that we can start to monetize as we did with cleveland.com in the legal markets with their out-of-state audience, and then once live work with them on their in-state audience with, as I said, the power of cleveland.com driving the Ohio performance that we've recently enjoyed.
Thank you, David. The penultimate question is, aside from sports, what's your take on the U.S. gaming and casino legalization? Is this a potential opportunity for XLM?
Well, aside from sport, I mean, we have talked briefly, perhaps should talk more about fantasy sports. Fantasy is legal in most states. We are small in fantasy at the moment and it's very much a challenge for us as a business to significantly build our presence in fantasy across all the legal states using our existing footprint and indeed working with our partners. In terms of casino, as I said earlier, there are only 5 legal U.S. states that allow online sports betting and casino. We are present particularly in those where we have a strong footprint through CrossingBroad, as I think we mentioned earlier, but we have a relatively modest presence in those other states, and we are actively looking to build our presence in those other states.
Number one, yes, the existing states present an opportunity for growth for us and as and when new states go live, for example, were New York to go live with casino, that would be another opportunity. Clearly I have no insight at this moment as to when that might be, but each state going live presents yet another opportunity for us to grow and to expand our reach using our existing and our partner footprint. I think we have time for one more question, and I do appreciate everybody staying with us while we do this.
The final question is, what are your key strategic priorities and what does success look like for the new XLM?
Well, I think we've, you know, in this presentation talked a lot about what the strategic priorities are. I think being a lean organization, highly responsive, where management and operations are close together is fundamental as a base camp. I think we need multiple sustainable revenue streams. I don't want to be over-dependent on any single type of income stream, as we've already talked about. All of this takes time. We've said in the past that our growth will not be linear. It's quite clear that with spiky revenues from CPA it will not be a linear growth. Nevertheless, as I pointed to you, there is underlying growth within our business. We have said we might see some dips, when there are no launches in significant periods. We are, as we've already said, very well placed to grow.
As Mike, I think spoke very eloquently about, For us, I think growth comes in continuing to enjoy and drive CPA, working with operators where they want to do so on the hybrid model, getting our fantasy business off the ground, building out our casino proposition in North America, expanding our advertising to display advertisers in North America, rebuilding our European sports assets, which we've already talked about, where we think there's considerable opportunity to rebuild and regrow those. As we've said, we suffered badly from the penalties imposed on our casino assets. As you'll have seen briefly from the chart we've shown you on casino.se, we have started to see some significant volume growth in terms of engagement with our audiences, and we think we can repeat that across our sites in casino in Europe.
We believe that is another source of growth. I think our growth comes from a diversified business, very, very focused on data, very focused on content, and very focused on SEO. Always being very, very careful to ensure that our SEO team, Blueclaw, keep us very, very much on the side of Google's algorithms. I'll call it a day there if I may. I just wanted to say thank you very much to firstly, all the speakers. Secondly, particularly to the audience who we very much appreciate you taking the time to listen to us. We hope very much that we've given you a much deeper insight into what we do and how we do it.
We very much look forward to talking you through the financial performance of the business at the end of March when we produce our results. Thank you very much to everybody.