Welcome to Better Collective's Capital Markets Day here in Copenhagen. Thank you to everybody who decided to show up here physically with us. It's great to see so many people, and also to everybody behind your screens at home. I know that more than 300 people externally have signed up, we're very happy and pleased to see so many people show interest in our company. Better Collective was incorporated exactly 19 years and five days ago here in Copenhagen. Five years ago, we were listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm.
Today, we're mainly gonna be focusing on that latter part of the journey, meaning from the IPO up until now, how we've performed operationally, financially, but we'll of course also be focusing about the future, where we want to go, how we expect to get there, and our strategy leading us towards our vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group. My name is Mikkel Munch-Jacobsgaard, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at Better Collective, and with me on stage, I have Amalie Juel Maglehøj, my colleague, and we will be your go-to people today. If you have any questions of any kind, please just reach out. Also tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, if you want to learn more about our company, set up a meeting, anything like that, please just reach out.
For now, Amalie, would you please take us through the agenda?
Yes. Thank you, Mikkel. Hi, everyone. Today, we have divided the day into four sections, the first one being a little introduction to the Better Collective group. We will focus on the future strategy and the vision for Better Collective. Second part, we will dive into our markets, the third part, we will hear about other sections of the group, as such as our esports division and our paid media partnerships. The latter part is a Q&A session that will be live in this room, but for everyone out behind the screens, you have a little question mark you see on your screen, you can tap it, and then you can write in your questions. You can do that already now.
We would very much prefer that you do that as they come to mind, your questions, so we are not bombarded here at the end with all of the questions at once. Who will you be hearing from? You will hear from no less than nine presenters here. I will not go into details with presenting them. They will introduce themselves as they come here to the stage. The first two ones you will hear from is Jesper and Christian, our two Co-founders. Without further ado, I think we should get this show started.
Thank you so much. It's really good to see all of you and, well, both here in the room and definitely also all of you sitting behind the screens. I think Christian and I, we are really proud of the interest we're experiencing in Better Collective. The small thing we started many years ago, it's humbling that we now have such interest in the company. The video you just saw is things done in Better Collective. You saw some snippets of documentaries, some podcasts that we do, features of many of our sports media brands. It's really a sign of how broad the group is today and where we're heading.
That's actually what I wanna speak a bit about now, is that, you will along the day with the, all the presenters, you're gonna see a lot of very nice graphs that will go, fortunately, most of them from down here and then up to the right. That's the kind of graphs we love seeing. Because we have seen a lot of success since we did the IPO of Better Collective almost five years ago. To me, it's not the most important part. It's not what I really hope you'll take with you from today because that's our new vision. Our vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group because that's a massive opportunity for our company and one which I'm personally very, very excited about.
My name is Jesper Søgaard, and I'm the Co-founder and CEO of Better Collective. With me on stage is my Co-founder, Christian Kirk Rasmussen, who's our COO in the daily business. I'll just start out giving you a very quick sense of where Better Collective is today and why we believe we can achieve the vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group. This is Better Collective of today. I think let's start at the upper left corner. You'll see we have a global audience of more than 150 million monthly visits coming to all our brands. That's a big number, and I'll later on sort of compare that to other businesses out there.
If we dive into how that sort of spreads out, you'll see we have more than 30 million monthly visits coming to our different local sports media brands, meaning, a site that caters to the Greek market or a site that caters to the Danish market. Here we have smaller leading media assets. If we go specifically to the US, which is a very, very big market opportunity for Better Collective, we're also there in a leading position with the brands we own there. We have Action Network, Vegas Insider and numerous others, and a total of more than 20 million monthly visits coming to our brands there.
We have the global part of our portfolio, meaning English language sites where the audience will come from all over the world, and within this group we have some very big esports brands, and we have a reach of more than 100 million monthly visits coming to that portfolio of brands. We have done numerous acquisitions since 2018, 28 to be precise, and we own these leading esports communities. This is the foundation from which we believe we can still continue to grow, and we can aspire to become the leading digital sports media group. With that, Christian, will you give a brief rundown of the past and what's happening now?
More than happy to, also a warm welcome from me. Really happy to be here today. It's not so often I get out, great to see so many faces here and also those of you behind the screens. I'll just try to take you through a little bit through memory lane. First picture you see here, that's just after our high school. Jesper Søgaard and I, we know each other all the way back to high school. Here, I want you to take you back to, that's already in the 90's. Here, together with my dad, we were big sports fans, we were also big sports betting fans. You have to imagine it's a normal weekend. My dad and I will go to the local kiosk.
We'll fill out this betting slip where you needed to predict 13 games and predict the outcome of these. We would go back, we would be on the couch, and we would be watching one of these English Premier League games or whatever that would be. At the same time, we would be really excited whenever a sound like dong came into the screen because at the same time, they would slowly scroll the team that where something has happened in. That would be a score. Maybe you would see West Bromwich coming into the screen, and you're just cheering, "Okay. Please, home game. Home game, goal," when you, when that came to the screen. That passion for sports and sports betting started already there.
When we went to high school together, we pretty quickly discovered that we had that same passion together. We actually made the first website together back in 2002, describing to other people who would like to bet online at that point or gamble online, how they could safely onboard their to operators. That website we made, yeah, 22 years ago from now. If anyone at that point would have told me, "Hey, Christian, in two decades, you will be a listed company, you will have all these fancy offices around the globe," I would not have believed you. Let me try to explain you how we got there. I like to describe it as us taking a big elephant and biting it into three big bites.
First period I would like to describe, I would call that the startup phase. That's from the early zeros up until 2008. I will introduce the second period in our lifetime of Better Collective. We can call that the organic growth phase. It will be from 2009 until 2016. The final stage, which we are still in now, that's what I would like to describe as the M&A phase. I'll come back to that in a later slide. For now, let's go back in the years again. In the last part of the startup phase, Jesper and I, we're just finishing university back in 2008, and the business starts to boom. That year we make EUR 800,000 in revenues and an EBITDA of EUR 700,000.
We are living together at that point, cost at absolute minimum, that really made us believe, "Okay, we are onto something here." Let's start to invest in real employees, real offices. Let's go out and invest. We do. We built a fantastic organization. I'll come back to that. We really grow. In 2016, we have really grown a great core team in Better Collective. We can also sense that because we start to get some quite attractive offers from some of our competitors in the industry, who at that point are a lot bigger than us. We don't like the thought of giving up control. We much rather focus on the business and execute because we can see this huge growth opportunity still in front of us.
That basically leaves us with one choice because we also very aware if we want to have the best deals in this industry, we need to keep on growing, and that's when we start to buy other companies. Before leaving this slide, I'd just like to say that I'm also very proud that we have been profitable all years in business and also with some decent growth rates. Coming to this slide makes me really happy. You see some of the logos here from some of the brands, which is a part of Better Collective today. These brands that you see here on the screen, that's Founders, Co-founders who are still with us today. Before I come back to that part, I would like to describe just how we as Founders also built Better Collective.
I think first job that Jesper had, that was both a front-end and back-end developer. And, I think it's fair to say that Jesper's capabilities are probably best spent elsewhere.
Definitely.
I also had many hats on throughout the years. I can remember back in 2010 when the business started to get more serious, that I was running daily operations with the websites, but also, I was also part of the finance, HR, and the legal. It was really not a happy moment for me, to be honest, when by the end of each month, for example, when we had to pay out salaries, because I would need to be very diligent on subtracting vacation days, adding the monthly bonus, and then paying out, and it had to be at the right date. I was almost about to puke from this task in the end. Luckily, as many times before, we hired some really competent people to take that for us.
That, I think we have been pretty good at hiring people who are a lot better than us throughout the years. Take a couple of years later. At that point, we had really successful managed in the search engines from an organic part. For the paid part, we had absolutely no clue, but we knew we wanted to be in paid. What did we do? At that point, we hired Gavin from, who you will also hear from later. It's good Gavin is not in the room here. Because Gavin, he had a talent for the paid stuff, a lot better than us. At some point, Gavin also realized, we need someone who's really good in paid within Facebook as an example.
He would hire someone who was a lot better within Facebook marketing than him, and so on and so on. This is how we build Better Collective, based on so many talented people. I'm really proud of that. When I talk to other founders, I know they built their baby just like that. Step by step, building it up and hiring people who are a lot better than them. At some point in time, you come to a stage in the company life cycle where it's really, okay, wow, you made a good business for yourself. Then what about the next step? Could also be exciting just to take that next step. For us, I think that happened maybe in, yeah, 2017, where we decided to do the IPO.
There was a lot of paperwork and boring corporate stuff that needed to be done to get there. It's something I never wish to do again. Sorry, Flemming. That just had to be done for us to take the next step. I think many founders will realize at some point that, okay, we've come this far. Now if I want to go to the next stage, I need to make a choice. This is exactly when many founders, they come and talk to us because we can help them with some of this, what I like to call boring stuff, and they can focus more on the business. Some businesses we integrate a lot, some business they kept more alone, and they can just focus on their business and growing their business.
Then we can all drive towards the big goal because we all have that in common, and that is to be the leading digital sports media group. It's something I'm really, really proud of. You will actually hear from two brands today Presenting later you will hear from Patrick from Action Network, and you will hear from Per on HLTV on their journey as well.
Thanks, Christian. I think the way we run and manage our business, and it has been so right from the start of Better Collective is, we want it to be a sustainable business and we wanna do things in a proper way. Sort of picking up on the founder part and story, I think that also resonates with a lot of founders that we think long-term, and we wanna do things right. I think that has also been a very important part of them joining Better Collective and why I also believe that in the future we'll be able to be the attractive acquirer of very exciting businesses. Well, touching on the sustainable part of the business.
I promise you I didn't pay this guy to tweet what you see here, but it's something that really makes me proud because as you can tell, this is a user of our Action Network product, the app where you have the BetSync functionality, where you can automatically in the States track any bets that you place into the app, get a total overview of profit-loss, something which the sportsbooks are not gonna give you. The person who tweeted this outright says, "This makes me more responsible better, and it helps me be accountable about the entertainment I get from this." I think that's exactly the role we want to have in this industry and this ecosystem.
We wanna add a lot of value, we wanna take part in the excitement and fun of sports and sports betting, but we wanna make sure that it's in a responsible way. I'm truly proud of a user not having been paid to tweet this. We also have another example on the slide you see here of a product by a company we own, Mindway AI, the Gamalyze product, which we have on our leading brands across the group, where you can do a self-test in terms of your relationship with sports betting and whether you are just a healthy leisure entertainer of this, or if you should be aware of potential risks related to your engagement with sports betting. The very neat thing and why this is a powerful product is that it's a game you play.
It's simply just based on your behavior, engaging with the game, and you'll get a risk score and be able to truly understand whether you should be aware of your entertainment with sports betting. The normal way of doing this is a survey, and as you can probably guess, and I think many people will know, there is a pretty big bias that you may not be fully honest with yourself when you have to answer questions like, do you have a healthy relationship with how you bet? Is it affecting your daily life? In this game, it's just based on behavior. A really nice product.
Apart from this, which is actually the main part of Mindway AI is the AI detection tools that we sell to all the sportsbooks out there in order to help them with their big, big databases of players to determine, like, which is the healthy part of my player database, which is at risk, and which is a problem gambling part of the database. It's something where we're very proud. We actually work with many of the leading sportsbooks. Mindway AI have done a fantastic job of firstly developing the product and secondly bringing it to market with a lot of success. Sustainability goes into what we do, and we care about it, and it's really a 360 exercise for us in the business.
Starting out with the foundation of Better Collective, where we incorporated in Denmark, even though we at the time didn't have any business at all in Denmark, no revenue, no sort of activities towards the Danish market. We still felt it was the right thing for us to incorporate in Denmark and pay at the time 25% corporate tax, now 22%, and we're still proud of that. We also got quite some skepticisms and like people really not fully understanding why we would do that when we could just move to Malta, and we could have much lower tax, or we could, you know, incorporate in many exotic parts of the world, which we did see a lot of our colleagues and competitors do at the time. That was not for us.
What we have learned over the years is that has turned into become a very strong competitive advantage to the business. We've also been able to attract a very experienced and skilled board of directors with senior business leaders from all over the world.
I remember, while we did the IPO, and I went on roadshow, and I had so many meetings with some of you in the room here, I think the most common question I got was, "How on earth did you get that board of directors?" I would say, "Well, they seem to buy into how we do things and how we run the business." I can proudly say that it has really served as a competitive advantage for us to think like that and act like that. Another part is in terms of financing to the business. We know we are financing cheaper than the competitors because we have access to high-quality banks in Scandinavia, which they don't.
It goes on to today, and we're far from done with being responsible and developing the business. Now it's very much related to actively engage in diversity agenda, equity and inclusion. We have in our industry a very strong tendency to see male, both employees in our business, but in general in the industry. We do our best to bring female talent into the company. We really believe in that diversity. I'm very proud to say that we actually have 43 different nationalities in Better Collective. Again, to me it's thinking back at the two of us, and now we have 43 different nationalities in the company, something I'm proud and proud of and a testament to it being a truly global business that we run.
In the operations and the business that we do, we play an important role for all the regulated markets where we are active because we are the top of the funnel making sure that all the sports fans who wants to engage with sports betting, they will actually end up with a regulated sportsbooks that has a local license, pay local tax, and have protective measures in place for the players. Unfortunately, that's not 100% who will end there. There are unregulated operators which will also take some of these players, but we play the role of making sure as much as possible and with our reach to funnel the sports fans into the regulated environment where they have a safer and better experience.
During the years, we have won numerous industry awards, and that's something we always celebrate and we have both had the pleasure of going to stage, pick up an award, and it feels great each and every time. I actually wanna highlight a specific set of awards where I haven't been the one going to the stage, and that's our compliance awards, that we several years in a row have been winning compliance awards. I highlight that because that's not just very nice that we're on top of compliance and do things right, but it's also a business enabler for Better Collective because the sportsbooks are business partners.
They are simply just pushing more budget towards us because they know they can trust our offerings, that all the brands we operate, they will be fully compliant, and they don't have to worry about brand repetition and being compliant in the market they operate. Local initiatives within the group, we have in particular in our office in Serbia, Niš, which is the biggest office we have in the group with more than 300 employees. We have created academies where we take in young talent right out of university. We give them a very tough six months where they spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of search engine optimization, which is a core expertise in Better Collective, and the same we do for search engine marketing.
We are actually expanding the number of academies that we built in order to develop talent that fortunately very often end up becoming Better Collective employees. Speaking about awards and getting awards, we have also started handing out awards because we believe that in certain markets where we have a leading sports media brand, we're in a great position to benchmark the offerings of sportsbooks. We know they take it very seriously, so they want to win those categories. It could be customer service. It could be best app product. When we benchmark that in a given market based on user data, we can get a very credible result of that market. It helps sportsbooks be ambitious about what they do, and it helps all our users to get the information they're actually looking for.
Finally, really the bread and butter of Better Collective is the recurring revenue that we have in the business. Right from the beginning, we have always favored the long-term potential of a revenue stream rather than the here and now, just recognizing immediately, and that you'll hear a lot more about when Gavin enters the stage.
As I said, I just wanted to come back to that last stage, or not last stage because we're still far from done. That M&A third growth stage that we are in right now and that we are executing on. I'd like to take you back to 2017 when we started to execute on these M&As. We did eight acquisitions up until the IPO in 2018. At that point, we had been bootstrapping all the way.
Our bank facilities in terms of debt were maxed out, and I really also want to say thank you for the banks here in the room for the trust in us. We bootstrap all the way to the IPO, and the IPO was all about getting further funding into Better Collective so that we could continue that M&A journey. We did. We executed another 20 M&As. Combined, 28 acquisitions has been onboarded one by one. Of course, you need to run a tight ship when it comes to finances. Therefore I'm really excited also to welcome next to the stage our dear CFO, together with Jesper Søgaard, who will take you through this part of the journey where we really, with a fierce hand, have been running the financing, finances and integrations. Please welcome to the stage, Flemming Pedersen.
Very good to have you on the stage also, Flemming, especially it was nice to get an adult in the room during that IPO process. I think Christian described it quite well. Now I'll just start out with the operational performance of the IPO, or since the IPO till today. Then Flemming will come back in a second and then go through the financial developments of Better Collective since the IPO. We have grown a lot, and I think it's worthwhile just to have a look at like what was actually Better Collective of 2018. You see it on this slide. We had more than seven million monthly visits coming to our brands.
We had revenue of EUR 40 million in that financial year. High margins of EUR 16 million in EBITDA and almost 250 employees at the time. Just on the back of the IPO, we had a market cap of SEK 2.2 billion and roughly 40 million outstanding shares, a little more. We were a European business, you'll notice that we have three offices marked on the map you see here. Headquartered in Copenhagen. As I mentioned, the big operational office in Niš that has been developing ever since. Fast-forward till today, we have 20x-ed the number of monthly visits coming to all our brands. The revenue is up more than six times, almost EUR 270 million.
We are still a high-margin business, so we have seen EUR 85 million in EBITDA. We are closing in this year to employee number 1,000 in the group, and I'm sure we'll be celebrating that sometimes during the year. The market cap of today is SEK 10 billion, and this has been accomplished with limited dilution to the shareholders. Now we're at 55 million shares outstanding. When we look at the offices and the group of people involved, I already mentioned the 43 different nationalities, and you see now a lot of offices all over Europe. We have three in North America, and we'll have Peter on stage later on speaking about the LatAm opportunity. There we now have an office in Rue du Cherche-Midi. We have become a truly global company and business.
We've also developed and expanded the offerings of the business. In 2018 and prior to that, we were what is dubbed an affiliate company because all our business evolved around attracting traffic into our site, leading it on, recognizing revenue. Over the years, we have now increased the focus much more on the user loyalty coming to our brands, taking part in the retention of these users, making sure that our brands are first in mind to these users. With our vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group, we simply wanna build on that. We have learned that when you have such a strong brand where users go instantly on a almost daily basis to you, it's very powerful.
With the skill set we have, we can both grow audience, and we can grow the business related to that. We started out in the bottom of this graph. Again, today you're gonna hear about all these different units of our business. If we start in 2018, it was the digital sports media part. Fortunately, it's still growing, and it has been growing nicely since the IPO, and we definitely expect it to continue to grow with the performance of delivering new customers to our business partners, the sportsbooks. We have also added media collaborations where we team up with the largest media groups globally, and we handle their sports betting content section and do a full service solution to them. Again, giving us much more reach and also very nice co-branding for our leading brands.
Lastly, we, in 2020, with the acquisition of Atemi Group, added the paid media business. As said, you'll hear more about that, but that has sort of been the growth in terms of business units of Better Collective, and all of them are fundamentally and underlying growing. That is why we have seen a lot of growth and why we believe we'll continue to see a lot of growth. When we did the IPO, you go through that rather unpleasant section where you create the prospectus, and there you have to list a very large number of risks. More or less any risk you can imagine, you're gonna feature it there. What I'm extremely proud of is how we've actually been able to attack each and every one of the risks we listed there.
We've brought down a lot of the exposure we had in the business in 2018 to make it a much more diversified and stable business today. Let's start with the example of how we get traffic. In 2018, it was very much Google-dependent. 60% of the traffic would stem from organic search results in Google. That's quite significant. Now we're below 35% of our traffic stemming from Google, and that's just for our web properties. We now also own very big apps where we are not dependent on Google. We've really been able to bring down that exposure. There was also a topic of having a large customer at the time, and the good thing is it's still a very, very big customer of ours, much bigger than back then.
It's not as big or nearly as big when we talk about the share of our revenue. It's now below 20% for the largest customer we have in the business, and at IPO time it was roughly 50%. I think that's a big accomplishment by Better Collective. I also said we were a European business, so almost all revenue came out of the European market. As we did the IPO, it happened to almost have the exact same date as the repeal of the PASPA Act in the US, unlocking the market opportunity in the US I dare to say we have been able to position ourselves well there. Now we have about 40% of our revenue stemming from the North American market, and we see LATAM with high growth. Essentially, we've diversified also from a geographical perspective.
The revenue streams, the business models we apply, where we still have our CPA revenue share performance-based models, where we have given a KPI, the number of new depositing customers that we send to our business partners ever since the IPO every quarter handing out that number. That has been growing extremely strongly and have brought a lot of business and will continue to bring a lot of business for us. We're also adding new ways of monetizing on top of this. We now have a pretty big advertising section in Better Collective. We have subscription on numerous brands. Also here we are diversifying and finding new ways of driving revenue.
That is now a toolbox we can apply whenever we work with an existing sports brand or when we acquire a new sports brand, because rarely they would be applying all the business models that we do, and I also dare to say they won't be as good as we are. That was the operational part of the time since the IPO. Flemming, I'll now give you the chance to say a bit about the financial development.
Thank you, Jesper. The adult in the room. Thank you. The man with the boring tie, you can choose. I joined Better Collective six years ago, and I had a very nice job in a big Danish-listed company, and I had two rules set out for myself at the time. I would never work in a company where the majority owners were managing the company, and I would never work in the city center. I met these two guys, and I changed my mind. Spent a lot of time understanding the business, where they were heading with this in the private setting at the time, and basically bought into the vision that we are discussing today.
Starting out with the IPO, which was the facilitator for accelerating the already decided M&A strategy. I can see that I'm not the only adult in the room, so likely a lot of M&A experience in this room. Running a public company at the same time as acquiring companies is difficult. It also requires that you basically run a very tight ship. I would claim that we have done so. We have every year set out financial targets very concretely, and we have lived up to them, all of them, in the five years that we have been on the stock market.
It's our legacy and something that has also been important when discussing to shareholders, when we have been discussing to banks that we actually can live up to what we promise and that we can manage and integrate so many companies. I would have liked to show many more numbers on this slide. Mikkel and Amalie said it was ugly. They are hidden. I have evidence behind this great thing up here. It is really our legacy. It is also inbuilt in all our employees' incentive schemes and their bonuses. All know that failure here is not an option. I remember even during COVID, we had to meet our financial targets, of course. If you go back, there were no activity.
When you are living from sports betting, and there were literally only table tennis in Belarus, and there were horse racing without real horses to bet on, that was a tough one. We asked our employees to step up, so they did and we got through it and basically delivered. When you go back and think now they have put out new long-term guidance and guidance for this year, they will live up to this. Remember this slide? We will. Yeah, I should actually say that my employees gave me this one that just said EBITDA because they got so tired of hearing me saying it so I could just wear the cap instead. Anyway, we have been busy bees acquiring 28 companies.
We have invested close to EUR 600 million in new businesses that we have onboarded during this time. They have not been equal size, they have not been equal in their direction or their meaning. I'll come back to how we actually group them and where we would like to head with this going forward. We have find-financed all of this in different ways. We have gone to the stock market, starting with the IPO. We have also been able to access bank financing as Jesper touched upon. That's quite unique in this industry that you can actually tap into classic industrial bank financing.
As Jesper said or Christian said, I think it was, our banks have been with us on this journey because we live up to our promises and also because of the values that are in the company. That's just not words, but when you sit with compliance in a big bank and they have to nod to your facilities, that's as important as living up to the financials today. As we have grown, we have getting a sizable operational cash flow, so this sort of wheel has starting really to turn for us that we can buy companies, we can increase the funding that is available for us to buy larger and larger companies. I like this wheel. We have not just acquired companies, we have also created value.
With half of this shareholding residing with founders, management, and board, we are so focused on capital allocation and how we spend the money. It needs to create value, otherwise we don't do M&A. We have increased the revenue by elevenfold, earnings by ten. At the same time, we have doubled the number of shares compared to 2017. I can also summarize it in the mother of all KPIs, earnings per share, that you can see on the screen going up here at the same time as the absolute earnings are growing. This is really what we are focused on when we acquire long-term value. Sometimes it takes some time. You can see there's a dip when we acquired a big company in 2021, Action Network.
We went deep in the pockets and had to wait a bit for the profit, but we knew it would come. This is how we think capital allocation all the time. M&A has evolved. In the start of the initial phase, the first two years, I think our horizon was to roll up all affiliate companies in the European market. That was what was out there and what was on the radar screen, and we just started acquiring, gaining size, gaining good brands in local markets. At the same time as we IPO'd almost, something happened in the U.S. Not that we took notice of it because it was not really something that we paid attention to, but the federal ban on sports betting in the U.S. was lifted by the decision of the Supreme Court.
The state of New Jersey won the Supreme Court Court case against the federal state and thereby, opening up for each state to regulate online sports betting and also online casino. Now it's a state matter and not a federal matter. At the time, we were not really sure how many states would embark on this. Was it just New Jersey that had this good idea? But our M&A focused, focus was really turning to the US and we acquired a company called RotoGrinders, that was embedded in what is called daily fantasy sports. With that, we got an organization, we got a profitable company knowing about US sports and US sports betting as a start.
We started to focus on where can we find the big traffic sources, the next one was one of the big ones, Vegas Insider. You have to excuse me. One of my better finance jokes is that there's no voice like an invoice, but today it's my voice that is not really working. Sorry about that. The US became a big part of our equity story. Yeah, it was a bit of a dad joke, I know, but. Our focus turned to the US and that has been with us ever since. Now there are many more states that have opened up for sports betting. Just last week we saw Massachusetts opening, and we will hear much more about that.
In 2020 we did a what turned out to be a very important acquisition. You will hear more about that later. The London-based Atemi Group specialized in paid media marketing. We acquired that and turned the business model. That has really been very successful. I will not dive more into it because you will hear Gavin Moore tell about it. It's really an exciting story also to learn about how the internet works basically. In 2021, we did our largest acquisition, the Action Network. We dipped our toes some years earlier trying to acquire it, not for sale. In 2021, we engaged in the first control process. We won it. $250 million we paid for Action Network. At the time, they didn't earn a dime.
It was a big risk for us, but we knew this was the best sports betting asset in the US, and we are fully convinced still that is the case. If we boil all this together, we started off buying iGaming media, as we call it, affiliate performance marketing companies, typically locally focused. Today, our focus is mostly on the two blue ones, sports media. That doesn't necessarily earn money on betting, but simply have good sports content. You will likely know some of them, daily users of live scores or whatever, sports sites that you go to find your results or find tips. We have also learned that we can earn money from this through our media partnerships, where we since 2019 have teamed up with big classic media. Also, you will hear more about that.
The Daily Telegraph, like the New York Post, that we are the Swiss blade that can monetize all that digital traffic. We will likely still buy affiliate companies, but it's likely not to be first priority going forward. The ambition to become the leading digital sports media group, that basically is our aim and I'll showcase a small one that we acquired in the Netherlands, SoccerNews, classic sports media with content, sports news, results, whatever you can imagine. Had 10 million monthly visitors, big in a country with 17 million people. But still, we acquired that one and a half year ago. Before I'll say any more, save my voice, then we have a small feature on what SoccerNews is. What we did after the acquisition of SoccerNews was basically to move it to our own tech stack.
We increased our focus on the content, how you actually present content on such an asset. We took over all the commercial deals and deal-making that the company had at the time and basically moved it on into our commercial team. A lot of more stuff beneath the face of the product has been done, but the result has been that in one and a half year, we have multiplied the revenue by five. Acquiring such assets and applying the skill sets that we have both in content making, SEO and all the other skills that you will hear more about, and not least our commercial teams and engagement with the sportsbooks, we believe makes us the right owners of such sports media.
My last slide is that when you do 28 acquisitions in such a short time, you build up a big knowledge base on how to do and also how not to do, Jesper. Because everything is not successful, and sometimes it's sleepless nights and headaches, but I think we have worked through most of it. In totality, no doubt it has been very value-creating. It has given us scale, and as I said before, it has really given us a lot of value in the company. We have learned, I think, how to integrate companies and also how not to integrate, because some of the companies and brands, they need to be left alone with the good people that are running them.
There, I think we have tried to balance it so Better Collective is the umbrella company that can really facilitate all of this. Where you get access to the whole machinery, but not necessarily destroying the brands. I think also we have learned how to work with founders that have, you can say, taken the big step of selling their businesses. Some of them have become quite wealthy in doing that and still want to work with us because it's fun and engaging. I think that's that latter part, that is really a case-by-case thing. You need to work with salaries, incentive structures. Should you pay them in shares? How long time should you keep them? All of that.
I can tell you it's not all that have founded their own businesses that wants to be in a big corporation. With those learnings, I'm confident that we can take the next leap and buy more companies, because this is an integral part of our agenda and a well-oiled machine, I would say. Jesper will put more meat to that bone now on the vision.
Thanks a lot, Flemming. I'll now dive into the strategy and the vision. I think Flemming quite well described the position we have today of really having
A lot of expertise and practice with buying exciting businesses and making sure they function also in the Better Collective umbrella. As I also alluded to early on, we feel, sense that many founders buy into our vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group. Let me just simply take it word by word. Why sports?
Sport has that very, very unique ability to bring people together, and it's not really related to where you're from, what kind of life you live. People really come together to watch sports, to engage with sports. The other rare capability of sport is that it's in the moment. When I, tonight, will be watching Denmark, Finland. Well, for those 90 minutes, please don't disturb me because I'm focused. That's what I wanna watch, and I really don't care about much else.
Today, not many things actually has that ability to keep us locked in and focused while it's a social venture. To us, that's really unique about sport, and that's why we love being involved in sports. It's also a very, very big market. To be honest, I was surprised when I saw the numbers you see here or the comparison you have here. This is search intent and interest based on sports, politics, business and travel. Apparently, people don't care about politics. At least sports is much bigger, and it's bigger than all of the others. Again, I think it's a testament to the global nature of sports and that it's relevant to any given individual. I think we have something really unique here with this unbelievably big market where people engage and are in the moment.
We are then zooming in on the digital online part of all of this because what we have learned starting Better Collective all the years back is that we have always had a very, very nice tailwind of underlying growth because more and more came online, and it's still happening to this day. It will continue to happen. It's really supporting the underlying growth and ability to invest in this area and business. Then the media part. Let me start with just the revenue of Better Collective. Last year, we had revenue of just about EUR 270 million. What you see here is that even in our legacy market, the bread and butter that sort of created the company, sports betting affiliation, we're the market leader there, and we have a share of approximately 4% to 5% market share.
That's not a lot, especially considering that we're the market leader in that. You then take all of the advertising sportsbooks do, then we are down to 1% to 2%, We think we are extremely relevant for that already now and have been for several years. So much growth still to be had just with what I would call really the core and legacy part of our business. Where it then gets really exciting, I simply don't dare put a number on this, is when you venture into the media part of sports. All the sports ongoing, the interest shown around that, the brands that advertise and want to get exposure towards sports. That would be brands like Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Ford, all of these big global ones, Mastercard including, which is actually already a customer of ours.
They wanna engage with the audience that has a passion for sport. If we take a look at the audience of HLTV, which is one of the leading esports, we own the brand which has similar authority within CS:GO as FIFA has in football. We wanna go esport by esport, country by country to scoop up all these leading digital sports media assets. That is unlocking this really exciting opportunity, which personally excites me and just want me to go at it. I promised you I would come back on that $150 million number. What does that mean? What does that say? Well, let's look at some of the peers in the digital sports media landscape. We have a leader, ESPN.
They have about 700 million monthly visits to their online channels on web. So we are not the market leader in this area. We're roughly five x from getting to their position. Again, it's a kind of challenge which excites me, and at the same time it feels, well, we can do that. Like a vision 10 years out, I truly believe that we can get to that position in terms of the audience that we have. We are already now on par with Sky Sports, Yahoo Sports, more or less, in terms of the reach we have within the digital sports media space. In terms of 10 years plus potential, again, I think this is a 10x opportunity for Better Collective. For Christian and me, it has always been about the 10x.
When we hit that first EUR 100,000 or EUR 10,000 even, revenue in a month, well, the 10x of that, what's that? How can we achieve that? So forth and so forth. I now have that similar, "Okay, 10x we can do with this vision." It's exciting. The question is also quite obvious, what is a digital sports media group? It is a lot of things. I'm not going to mention everything you see on this slide, but what I want you to know and understand is that, well, a lot of what we do is already related to that. We have sports data, and we have a lot of it, and we present it in many ways to our audience.
We engage with media in our form of our media partnerships, and we have our existing sports betting communities, which is also very related to the entertainment of sports. We also have things where we are, in recent years have been growing and developing the parts. Apps is a much bigger focus of ours now. Social media communities, we still have a lot to do there, but we believe it's an important area to have reached in order to become the leading digital sports media group. Podcast is a completely new universe, and I'm sure most of you in this room, like five years ago or maybe 10 years ago, you didn't listen at all to any podcast. Now it's probably part of the everyday routine, listening to podcasts. We have been expanding there, and again, there's still a lot to do.
We also wanna grow new areas. More local sports media. We wanna enter the live score market because, again, I'm sure a lot in this room and out behind the screen, you check that live score app fairly often. I do at least. These capabilities that we are either already have or we are adding to our business, it's what we're gonna use in the next phase of developing these sports media brands. We stand on a lot of core strengths related to business model, toolbox of advertising skills, marketing skills, and a diverse mix of business models. What we are now venturing into is we, as an example, we'll have a new set of KPIs that we for now use internally. That is direct traffic to our brands. It's a very strong indicator of whether or not you deal with a true brand.
Do people come there instantly? To give you a sense of the kind of brands I speak of, you're all familiar with the ones you use. It's the one you go to on a daily basis. You open your laptop or smartphone, without thinking, you type the URL or you just go there, and you don't even think about it. We own a lot of such brands in niche areas, some niches being bigger than others. As I said, HLTV, FUTBIN within the sport of EA, those are very, very big communities where you have that behavior. We also have Wettbasis in German for all the geeks really wanting to know all details of the upcoming German Bundesliga.
What we have been able to demonstrate is that we can grow this audience, and we can monetize it well with our diverse business models. In terms of the content we deliver, it will be deeper, it will be more authority content, because that's required to build such brands. You will hear a bit from Per about sort of the brand journey of HLTV later on. It's quite impressive. When you take these different building blocks, and I just described that we own some of these brands, we're even more excited about sort of the opportunity to continue to find these and acquire them, because we do believe we're the best owner of digital sports media brands. We know how to grow audience, and we know how to monetize them, allowing us to invest even further into the user experience of these brands.
That's a playbook we have in mind.
Utilizing the different areas that we have in the business where we are stacking on top of each other the business potential and thereby growing the overall revenue and earnings of Better Collective. This thinking, combined with the vision, has led us to present some new financial targets released this morning where we wanna see growth in revenue of a CAGR of more than 20% from 2023 to 2027. We will continue to be a high-margin business delivering strong cash flows, an EBITDA margin before special items of 30% to 40%, and this will be achieved with net debt below three times EBITDA at the end of the strategy period. Most importantly, at least when I think as a shareholder myself, it's without any form of dilution.
We can achieve this with the existing growth and cash flow and the access we have to financing in the business. Thank you very much.
Thank you. That was the first part out of three. Now we have a small break, 10 minutes. Yeah, at home, you can do whatever. In here you can go out and enjoy some coffee, and there's some water down here. I'll make sure that you're all in the room before we start again. Thank you. We'll crack on with the second part of today where we'll take you through our markets. We'll start with our European and being our legacy market with Christian, our Co-Founder, and Karl as well. Thank you.
Welcome back. Hope you all just managed to stretch your legs and maybe get a coffee. We just saw from Jesper big growth number, big revenue number that we need to achieve out in 2027. The remaining part of today will be all about how to get there. We'll start off with Europe, and with me on the stage, Karl has joined me, who is heading down all commercials in Better Collective. We'll be talking about Europe. You'll just see a few slides from me, then you'll see some really interesting graphs from Mr. Puk. After that presentation, you'll hear on North America, you'll hear South America, you'll hear on three of our global initiatives being esports, media partnerships, and paid. We zoom in now on the digital sports media, and you will see a growth here.
Just referring to North America being up next, South America being up next, esports being up next, all in this bucket of digital sports media. I'm sure you're already thinking, "Oh, yeah, North America, South America, esports, that's where the growth is. That's what we're here for. That's what's really exciting." Yeah, that's right. I also look forward to hear from Mark and Patrick and Petra, Per on that. Before your mind starts to drift now and just zooms out for the next 20 minutes, I would just like you to pause for a second because it's true, yeah, to some that Europe might look stable, boring, lots of compliance, but we are seeing strong growth here in Europe, and that's what we're gonna tell you more about. Europe to us, that's the bread and butter. That's where we come from, and that's where we have expanded from.
Let's dive in. You heard from Jesper in the beginning that we have around 30 million monthly visitors to all of our European brands combined. Let's take a few examples. You already saw SoccerNews in the Netherlands. On that site, if you're into soccer news, you can read between 50-100 news articles a day on that site. Let's go to Greece. Our flagship in Greece, Betarades, huge sports community. You can go into their chat 24/7 and discuss sports. Here in Denmark, we have our local flagship called SpilXperten. I go to that site every morning with my morning coffee. I read on what's on today, read about what are the experts saying, and then I place my bets.
You're probably wondering, "Okay, so what is he betting on tonight for Denmark-Finland?" I'll not reveal that, but I'll just say that if Denmark leads in half time and full time I will be extra happy tonight. As I told you before, I've been betting online for quite a while. Actually, the sportsbook where I placed the bet this morning, I opened up the account 15 years ago. Imagine, Carl, if you had signed me up on a Better Collective affiliate link 15 years ago, you would still be making revenue from me day by day today. Here in Denmark, it's normal to bet online compared to going to the local kiosk, which I used to do back in the days. More than 50% prefer to bet online compared to betting offline. In many southern European countries, that's not the case.
Here, less than 50% will prefer to bet online. This is exactly some of the growth that we are tapping into. There is still so much growth out there that we need to capture. With our local brands, we are more than happy to safely onboard these users to maybe their first experience online. Now, I'll just be showing you a short video of some of the brands we run, and then Karl will take over and show you some really interesting graphs for here in Europe. Here we go.
Hello, everybody. It's my pleasure to be presenting Better Collective's first Capital Markets Day. My name is K arl Pugh, and I'd like to start introducing myself by rewinding 12 years ago when I first started out in the affiliate industry as an affiliate manager at bet365. One of the first accounts I was introduced to was betting expert, run by two gentlemen, Jesper and Christian. Internally, I was made aware that this was an account to keep an eye on and a company going places. Fast-forward those same 12 years and entering my fifth year at Better Collective, having relocated my wife and two children to New York last summer, I'm here representing BC today as their VP of Business Development and M&A on a group level, and their Chief Commercial Officer in North America.
With that, I'm gonna guide you through BC's commercial position in the European market. Europe, the most advanced regulated gaming market in the world. Many of you on this call and here today will be aware of the headwinds it seemingly faces. However, the graph behind me illustrates that the gross gaming revenue has grown from EUR 11 billion in 2016 to EUR 28 billion in 2022. Growth continues in more immature markets like the Netherlands, Italy, Romania, whereas more mature markets like the UK and Germany seemingly challenged. The key conclusion on this slide, though, is the 25 regulated markets in Europe continuing to enjoy growth, representing a 16.5% CAGR in GGR for the period.
Before I dive into the details and the underpinning metrics, I want to emphasize the underlying bedrock that our European business has been built on, aligning ourselves with the long-term winners. Commercially aligning ourselves in this way is crucial, especially when considering our primary commercial model is revenue share. We pride ourselves on the relationships we've built with our sportsbook partners, coupled with our ability to make a large market feel small with the localization and the local brands that we have. This has resulted in 60% of our European revenue coming from our top six customers. Bear that in mind because it will be replicated in my US slides later on. Okay, the graphs begin. Time to get into a bit more detail.
The graph on the left you'll recognize from my previous slide, a more condensed version reiterating the 16.5% CAGR in the regulated European market. On the right, I am comparing BC's performance revenue growth in contrast at 33%. BC has outperformed the market by two x. Even in a perceived troubled market, BC finds ways to grow where our competitors are pulling out. In my opinion, there is no better home for a sportsbook's marketing spend than Better Collective in Europe. We deliver. When compiling the European narrative, it would be remiss of me not to deep dive into the juggernaut and my birthplace, the UK. The UK continues to lead the way from a GGR perspective in Europe, representing 30% of the market. Since 2021, most of you will be aware of the headwinds with the White Paper's imminent release.
It was so imminent, it still hasn't come out. Sportsbooks have reacted and reshaped their businesses focusing on player protection and responsible gaming, and that's reflected in the 4% CAGR that you see for the period since 2018. Conversely, Better Collective has shown a unique ability to pave the way as a leading digital sports media group in the UK, testimony to our paid publishing and media partnership divisions. Our 64% revenue CAGR is only just the beginning, and I'm gonna illustrate why on the next few slides. Same graph again on the left, Better Collective's 64% revenue CAGR. However, what I really want to highlight is that graph on the right. This is conveying our UK NDC CAGR. We have seen a 79% CAGR in NDCs since 2018, and most importantly, 80% of those have been delivered on revenue share contracts.
Bizarrely, our investment in revenue share is only just beginning in Europe, and especially the U.K., and eventually our revenue CAGR will catch up with the NDC CAGR and exceed that on the right. I'll leave you on this note for this slide. 75% of our U.K. NDCs for that period were delivered in the last two years. Okay, one last recap before I get to the climax. It's definitely going somewhere. This is Europe in totality. On the left, our year-on-year European NDC growth reflecting a 23% NDC CAGR. On the right, all you're seeing there is the roll-up effect year-on-year until we get to 2023. 81% of all of those European NDCs were sent on revenue share contracts, and 42%, as the graph highlights, of the total NDCs were sent in the last two years.
Now we do get to it. One of the most important slides that I will present today. It's one of my more technical slides, and I would encourage everybody in the audience to download and review later. Take this one home, not Flemming's ones, even though he will say differently. The graph on the left is a factual representation of a cohort of European players sent to a tier one operator on revenue share contracts. The blue line illustrates the rate of NDC churn over the last five years. As you can see, after year one, 75% of the NDCs have churned, leaving 25%, which remains extremely flat through until year five. The green line illustrates the revenue share value that we extract over time. At year one, we have only realized 25% of the total value of this cohort.
Modeled until year five, where you can see we obtain 68% of the revenue share value, and extrapolated, if I continued this graph, that would peak at 10 years, the players have churned, and we then really realized the full 100% value. To the right, a very kind reminder on my side that in Europe, 42% of the NDCs we delivered came in the last two years. 31% of those were delivered last year in 2022. Lastly from me on this slide, we are currently outpacing European NDC growth in 2023 year to date versus 2022, and the value we are yet to realize cannot be understated. A beautiful representation of everything I just articulated over the last few slides. We are acquiring new NDCs faster than the existing base can churn.
You can see the snowball effect here from 2018 to 2022, bear in mind everything I've said about the NDC trajectory in Europe, what is that snowball gonna look like in the future? This gives us a fantastic platform to realize our vision in Europe of being the leading digital sports media group. Okay, as alluded to off the top, we're under no illusions to the headwinds some of the more mature markets in Europe face. This slide showcasing our biggest European partner on revenue share demonstrates the robust and recreational database metrics that we have. I'm gonna guide you through a little bit from the left. Our average deposit value has decreased since 2018 from EUR 32 on average per player to EUR 30. This is the headwind seeing on the top.
The responsible gambling measures the operators sportsbooks have put into place, the RG measures sitting there on top, it forces the average deposit value down. The average bet size has remained pretty constant over time, moving from 15 to 16 2018, 2022. That's a very recreational database and is reflected in that average bet size. Despite those two, sports wagering has increased 41% since 2018. The sports win margin 4.5% back in 2018, 3% in 2022. Lots of factors pushing this down. Regulation, taxes on the top, all the RG, all the player protections, it does force the sports win margin down. The last point speaks for itself. We have increased our European revenue share in absolute terms by 210% in that period.
Despite all the pressure sitting on the top of that, we can grow revenue share, and we will continue to do so in Europe. Our databases reflect the changing landscape and player profile that is occurring in Europe, and the recreational and sustainable nature of our database is evident, and it bodes well for any other future regulatory changes that come in Europe. Okay, a slight gear shift on my side now. I spent a lot of time discussing the historical legacy performance business, and now I want to pivot a little bit for the last few slides. Where we're pacing to achieve our vision. The numbers you see relate to the media spend we are generating from one leading sportsbook. You can see the obvious trajectory, a standing EUR 0 start in 2021.
We delivered EUR 4 million in 2022, and we're currently pacing to EUR 11 million in revenue from that single partner. This really is testimony to how we are growing the sports media side of the business, selling local sports content, media, video and audio, as Jesper alluded to off the top. We have recently onboarded a fully dedicated brand partnerships team, and our plans for 2023 involve growing out that sales team, adding more sportsbooks to the media mix and investing in new media and talent in Europe. Most importantly, without cannibalizing the traditional performance metrics. This is all incremental sitting on top. I remain excited as to how this picture will develop in 2023 and beyond, using all the learnings from the US and the assets that we've acquired. The future of Europe remains bright.
The graph highlights the expected 8% GGR CAGR from 2023 to 2026. With our robust rev share databases, I showed you that in the slide, the NDC growth and scale trajectory again fully demonstrated and backed up and the incremental media revenue that we're now folding in on the top, I remain confident that we will continue to execute and deliver to achieve our vision of being the leading Digital Sports Media Group. Last but not least, I think our European business and winning formula in Europe has been clear. We built up a performance marketing business anchored in recurring revenue. More recently, we are folding in media revenue on top. The US is a different beast.
We had a huge head start on all things content, media and product with the Action Network, and we're only just beginning our journey in how we extract maximum value from our recurring revenue streams. Marc and Patrick will take to the floor shortly to expand more on this, and then you've got me again later on the commercial landscape in the US Thanks very much.
three, two. Good evening. Welcome to Action.
[inaudible]
Hello, my name is Marc Pedersen. I'm the CEO of Better Collective North America, and I am also the group SVP of Business Development. Watching this video and looking at all of you out there, we've come a very long way since we started out in North America. Not many of you are probably aware of this, but we actually started out in North America all the way back in 2014.
2014, what some of you are thinking, what was going on over there? The truth is not a whole lot. We did get a license for iGaming in New Jersey. Being a sports media company, iGaming was just our way of dipping the toes in a market with the hope someday in the future, we had no idea when, but in the future, hopefully sports betting will be regulated. It took a long time of flying forth and back, building relationships and driving almost nothing. As it has been mentioned earlier, just before the IPO, PASPA was overturned, and sometimes I like to contradict Flemming, and I'll do that here because some of us did pay attention to it, and thankfully, we did have a plan with all of the funding we got in from the IPO. We're looking at the market.
We have none of the traditional affiliates present. There's nothing that we've done in Europe. What do we then do? How do we become a leading operator in the United States? We had a quite short list of potential M&A targets, and we over the summer and of the autumn of 2018 engaged in conversations with a select few, and I'll run through all of them because they're all on this page. We looked at Vegas Insider that had tremendous audience within sports betting. We looked at Scores and Odds, part of the same deal. We looked at this new startup, venture-backed, rapid growth Action Network. To please Flemming, we also looked at something that was driving profits.
We looked at RotoGrinders from a DFS, daily fantasy sports perspective, where we would be able to monetize or not the entire, but around 40 states in the US through the DFS offering, and at the same time, as it was mentioned, get knowledge about sports betting in the US. Patrick, who will join us later, met with me and a few others from Better Collective within his first week as CEO of Action Network. Patrick, at the time, didn't want to sell, or he wanted to sell at the right price. There was some disagreement on what the right price was. Flemming had his hat with EBITDA. At the time, timing was not right. It was not a match. Come the early summer of 2019, the acquisitions first of RotoGrinders and then Vegas Insider and Scores and Odds were completed.
We had a really strong presence and felt really good about the market at the time. Fast-forward a couple of years, Patrick got a little soft, maybe not, but we ended up getting Action. Action was always the crown jewel for North America from our perspective. It has the best products and had the best audience. By the summer of 2021, we managed to acquire Action Network. Half a year later, when Ontario was looking to regulate in Canada, we acquired Canada Sports Betting to secure a leading position in Ontario as well. That led us to a position at the end of the year with a very strong product portfolio, a very, very talented team of around 250 employees. On the shoulders of that team, we managed to accomplish more than $100 million in revenue, and that's for US alone.
Quite an accomplishment and something I'm very proud of, and I think we've done a tremendous job going from zero and burning quite a lot of cost on flying forth and back to having more than $100 million in revenue within four years. I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Okay, that's great, but what's next? What's coming?" If you look at the map, you'll see the gray, the gray dots represent all the states where we are currently not live. We are live in 20 states, meaning there are still 30, and if you count DC, 31. 31 states where we are not present at the moment. Either sports betting regulation in those markets does not make it feasible for us to be live, or there's simply no regulation.
As some of you know, many of us from the company are from Jutland, so we like to be a little bit conservative, and we like to hit our targets. We are not anticipating a rapid growth, and we are not anticipating a very green map in a very short timeframe. This year we've seen two states come online, but we have no expectations of further states. We are approaching this very conservatively. Any time a state comes online, we are by far the best positioned in the market to capitalize on that. If we're conservative on states, where will the growth come from? A lot of it actually comes intrastate. This is a snapshot of the handle development in Colorado.
For those of you who does not know what the handle is, when Christian was mentioned he bet on the game today, he probably placed 20 DKK on some bet. That 20 DKK is the handle. All of the players and their wagers going in combines into the handle. As you see, the year-over-year growth here is quite significant since Colorado went live in 2020. We can see future growth in all the states in which we are live. The states are still not mature. Remember, the oldest state, New Jersey, has been live for five years. We are still in a very, very early phase of the adoption of sports betting. I'm sure some of you are thinking, "What does handle matter for you guys?" Traditional affiliates, they're all on CPAs, meaning the future value doesn't really come into play.
Thankfully, Karl took sort of away my point by saying that we are engaging revenue share in US There's more to it than that. If you look at our revenue mix and our revenue streams in North America, they are very diverse. The CPA revenue share we already touched upon, but we also monetize our audience through CPM sales. That is basically banner sales for every single visitor coming in. We sell sponsorships to our partners, to Mastercards of the world, and we sell subscription products to our users. Maybe it's news to some of you, but around 20% of our revenues in North America is from subscription products of users having recurring subscriptions on our platforms every single day. We have a very, very diverse and long-term sustainable revenue mix in the US.
I'm sure the skeptics around will say, "Okay, but we've just seen states coming out and proposing parts of your, proposing a ban on parts of your revenue mix, namely CPA and revenue share." You're absolutely right. We have seen that, and we have also dealt with that. A couple of months ago, early February, the state of Massachusetts proposed a ban on the CPA and revenue share model. Subsequently to that, we engaged with some of the sports books, with some of our competitors, and with the National Council on Problem Gambling to engage in conversations with the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. I'll call them the MGC.
Through those very constructive dialogues with the MGC, they realized the value we offer to the market through education, through empowerment, and as it was said earlier, through funneling players into the safe and regulated sports books in the state away from the offshores. Taking all of that feedback into consideration, the MGC totally reverted their stance and allowed for CPA and revenue share in the state. We feel confident that the same arguments and the same dialogues will happen in other states, and it is a path where we are very confident in our position to engage with the regulators in other states as well. Now I think we covered most of the external factors in the market, covered how we are positioned.
I'm sure some of you are thinking, "What are you actually doing?" Patrick will give a much better picture of what we actually are doing day to day, but I'll tell you a little bit about what we've done so far, finding synergies and integrating with our brands. If you look at the box to the left, you'll see that everything we do in North America is powered by a central organization that provides editorial content, a commercial team, tech, HR, finance, SEO. All of this is centrally powered, and you can even add paid media to it. All of this is run centrally, meaning we have integrated our products. We are leading the products, leaving the products to focus on what they do best, and that is to drive the best user and product experience.
That's all well and fine and big fancy words, but what does that actually mean in terms of how do we compare against the market? The graph to the right that just popped up will show you that. We have outperformed the market growth almost double over the last two years. I feel very strongly and very confident about our position in the market and our ability to capture both short and long-term growth in North America. To show you a little bit better about how we do that, the CEO of Action Network, Patrick Keane, will join us on stage now and talk you through Action Network.
Thanks, Marc. Hello, everyone. I'm Patrick Keane. I'm based in Better Collective's North American headquarters in New York. For all of you who haven't been there, we'd love to come see you, or for you to come visit us. It's a great office on 23rd Street, close to a lot of our partners like FanDuel, and some of the leagues which are a little further uptown. To tell you a little bit about me, I'm a founding angel investor in Action Network, and that was about eight years ago. Since in the last five years, I've been CEO of Action, and we continue to grow and build and innovate and really exciting. For me, this is my fourth visit to Copenhagen. I love this city. Hope to come back more often.
I'm a big fan of milestones. We've talked a lot about the acquisition of Action Network, and that in a few weeks will be exactly two years ago. Incredibly impressive growth for our team. Fleming, yes, we are very profitable. You said something about not making a dime. This is a very profitable business, which I'm gonna walk through for everyone. You know, one thing that's also really interesting for me, I've had the opportunity to work at a lot of large, big media and technology companies, including Google and CBS and startups as a CEO and executive. One great thing about Better Collective is we've the resources of a large company, but also we are nimble and able to execute like a startup.
That to me is incredibly exciting and will continue to operate in that fashion. What is Action Network? We're sort of three things in equal measure. one, we're a content company. We create content at scale, 50-plus pieces of content a day, all geared toward informing a sports bettor and helping them make decisions on how they bet. On the right there, you'll see we're also a technology company. One of the things I'm most proud about at Action is the quality of our products and the quality of our technology, and that technology is what gets users to come back, be highly retained, be sticky, and that we're ultimately able to monetize. In the center there, you see audience. We in the US
have the largest sports betting intent audience in the millions of users. We're incredibly excited to continue to grow that platform through award-winning content, incredible technology, and products to serve that audience. A few of our bona fides, if you look here, this is App Store data for the Apple App Store. Action Network is the only media company that's in the top 10 of sports betting apps. You see a lot of operators, partners of ours like FanDuel, and Barstool, and Caesars, and MGM. We are the only content asset that's part of that and technology asset, which we're incredibly proud of. Again, that's due to extraordinary content and great products which really engage users. It's incredibly exciting to see our place in the rest of the sports betting community in the U.S.
The team has talked a lot about the five-year anniversary of PASPA, which is May 14th, just in 52 days. As I said, I like milestones and dates. Since that overturn from 2018 to today, we've achieved some incredible metrics just at Action Network alone. 103 million users, incredible. 3 million app downloads. Organic search, SEO is incredibly powerful for us. Nearly 120 million searches. Better Collective has talked a lot about becoming a leading sports digital media company and being in the same breath of the ESPNs of the world, et cetera. We're approaching over 300-plus million video views, almost or more than 35 million podcast downloads.
Really trying to increase our creative palette of assets for content that are incredible to monetize for Carl and team, and also just really engaging users. Getting back to the product side of the conversation, we've tracked 300 million picks in the Action app. To give you a little context, users are able to select and track their picks through the app, and that's been done manually, again, 300 million times. An incredible product. App sessions, we're incredibly proud of our app, as I showed before. Then Mark talked a little about what bets or about what Handle is and BetSync, where we work with partners where you're able to place a bet at an operator that is automatically synced to the Action platform. That's been done to the tune of north of $1 billion.
Again, this is just since the passing of PASPA, and we're now at 50+% of the U.S. as an addressable audience and opportunity, and we look forward to that continuing. Again, incredible products and great milestones. One thing I think a lot about in terms of the opportunity, and you as investors and existing shareholders, I think this is one of our more important slides, is what is the addressable market and the opportunity to reach users in the North American market? On that far left, I see examples of what I would call the casual sports fan. Maybe you've placed a few bets, maybe you're in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts became legal last week, you wanna bet with friends when you go to a Celtics game.
That's those users that maybe look at scores at ESPN, maybe they read content at CBS Sports. That's a huge audience in the hundreds of millions and is one opportunity that I think we can address here. Those far middle and right, I would say, are really the corpus of Action Network users of today. They're slightly more sophisticated, they bet with higher regularity, they bet with higher redeposit rates, and they bet more consistently. For the LTV track, these are some of our most valuable customers. They use our great products like BetSlip, or BetSync, and QuickSlip, which I'm gonna show you shortly. We have those users, and we're gonna continue to retain and monetize them. For us, we like to talk about sort of ends of the pool.
We need to get to the shallow end of the pool where there's net new users and less sophisticated bettors. We're creating products and content that really delight those users. Again, we need to grow and monetize them, most importantly. To look at the evolution of Action over the past 6 years, on the far left, you see our original app, which was really product-specific and technology-specific. I mentioned being an angel investor in Action 8 years ago. The original app was really pick tracking and a little bit of content, and really, again, focusing on very sophisticated bettors. As you move down the timeframe, you can see the Action app looking maybe a little bit more like ESPN if you're a user, or Sky, or something that has a little bit more content, and again, data is important, but more content-driven.
On the far right where you see one of my favorite golfers, Rory McIlroy, who's playing this week at the WGC in Austin. I love to bet on golf. I don't know if anybody else here does. You know, you see an experience here where we have our media center where you can actually engage in videos and content and find our podcasts. From a monetization perspective, on the top there, you see that offer from one of our sports books. We're able to marry technology, incredible content, and monetization. We satisfy our users, we satisfy our partners, and those are incredibly important. I mentioned QuickSlip, and I'm gonna cue a video in a second that will walk you through what I think is one of our most compelling products.
What QuickSlip does, it does a few things in equal measure. It allows you to, through our Action platform, place a bet where you start the experience at Action and you're seamlessly frictionless, able to place that bet at FanDuel and soon to be other partners. I'll let the product speak for itself, and it's an incredible one. If we could cue the video. Pretty cool, right? Again, I'm just incredibly proud of our product teams that are innovating daily. We have over 50 people on our product and technology organization that are doing everything they can again to really delight those users, engage them, and drive revenue for our partners. I'm a big fan of data. I mentioned I worked at Google a few years ago, now it's called this weird name Alphabet, whatever.
If you look at the sort of four horsemen of the lead in the consumer internet of today, it's Apple, it's Alphabet, it's Amazon, and it's Meta Google. What do all of those businesses have in common, and why are they so powerful? They're the leaders of first-party consumer data. They have you through apps, through commerce, through lots of other engaging products. At Action Network, I really believe we have this opportunity and exist today as one of the biggest owners of first-party bettor, B-E-T-T-O-R data because of BetSync, because of Quick Slip, because of the ability to track your picks on our platform. Also, Mark mentioned subscribers. We have over 100,000 subscribers at Action. Those are highly engaged, again, probably that deeper pool user.
Again, $1 billion north in BetSync spend through the platform. Again, this is all anonymous. I would not wanna scare anyone to think that we're holding user data to a degree that is not inappropriate. We're GDC compliant. We do everything that we can there, but it's really important that that data is powerful. Our CRM database, that's people that we hit through email and through alerts through our products, is approaching 3 million. These again, are avid bettors that we're gonna try and expand into a universe of less avid bettors. Lastly, a marker that we're incredibly proud of is that 300 million picks tracked. As Mark and others have shown the other assets that are part of BC North America, which are important ones that we grow, Action Network is really our largest asset.
It's driven the most revenue. It's really kind of the anchor product when Carl and team are selling our commercial assets to partners. It's really the talent of our content teams, the quality of our product at Action that really drive a lot of that success. We also have a number of incredible assets in North America. We mentioned VegasInsider, RotoGrinders, FantasyLabs for the daily fantasy user, SportsHandle, which is really more of an editorially driven product that is the reference brand for sports betting information and covers the business, which is great. ScoresAndOdds, which is more about kind of live odds. Lastly, we are a North American business, so Canada Sports Betting was an incredibly important asset.
When Mark and I, and Jesper Søgaard, and team were thinking about North America and the opportunity to really have these brands have a more consistent look and feel and have them feel more like a family as opposed to a number of disparate assets. You look today and we're recasting and rebranding all the assets. They're gonna have that same name, but we're changing the look and feel a little bit. Action is gonna be at the center of that network, and this will have powerful network effects from driving audience to driving our partner revenue, and we're gonna benefit from being kind of one family, and that family is Action Network with the other brands supporting it. Incredibly excited, great to meet you all.
As I mentioned, would love to have you in New York at some point and, I think I'll throw it back to my friend, Carl. Thank you. Thanks, Mike.
I'm back. Thank you to Marc Pedersen and Patrick Keane for showcasing all of our U.S. assets. You're stuck with me for a little while longer, this time wearing my Chief Commercial Officer hat in North America. Over the next few slides, I'm going to backfill a little bit of the commercial context on how we are investing commercially for the long run in North America. I'm not gonna go through this graph and walk you through the sportsbooks. I think everybody's familiar with that. What I am gonna repeat is our success story in Europe is that it's crucial we align ourselves early with the long-term winners in the market. Long-term winners in both sports and casino are already beginning to shake out, and we are positioning the commercial framework accordingly.
Importantly, iGaming, despite being live in only 4 states online, represents 40% of the GGR. Only one commercial model can give us access and benefit from that rollout for the existing players we send: revenue share. Our early mover advantage in revenue share has been well documented. Through the course of the next few slides, I'm gonna walk you through how we are progressing alongside how Better Collective is not restricted from generating revenue from only the new NDCs that we deliver. This slide maps out how we actually align ourselves with the sports book's needs and their priorities. What we do is we meet them where they need the most support. We offer them new customer acquisition at scale across our paid and publishing divisions.
With that comes market share for the sports books. In addition, we provide sportsbooks with the highest ROI of any of their marketing spend. Our transition to revenue share supports this even further. Through our unique and innovative products that PK outlined, we're also able to retain those customers for the operator, and that's a big thing to them. They've spent a lot of money acquiring those players. We've seen it all. We've seen the quarterly reports. They need to retain those customers, we have the audience and the products to do that. Lastly, our ability to drive NDCs across both sports and iGaming, giving our sportsbook partners the access to the most valuable cohort of players is something that differentiates us. What makes us different to our peers and what is our USP?
Patrick walked through a lot of these things. On the left you see the traditional sports media, very proficient at driving significant traffic and generic sports content and media. In the middle, are traditional affiliate competitors, very good at lead generation, very good at having high betting intent traffic, and very good at efficient marketing spend. It's pay to play. You send a player, you get paid. Better Collective to the right, combining best of both worlds in the U.S. and North America. We are the one-stop holistic shop for a sportsbook's marketing dollars in North America. How do we commercialize it all, I hear you say? Very simple. A three-pronged approach across acquisition, engagement and retention, and media and branding. I'm now gonna talk a little about each of those different revenue cohorts and their progression and trajectory over the last few years.
The first one, I don't think it needs any introduction. Our NDC acquisition grows at scale. From 2019 to 2022, our NDC CAGR was 170%. Our sportsbook partners know they can rely on BC to deliver market share across our paid publishing and media partnership divisions. With the impact of each state launch comes the opportunity to invest in recurring revenue, and that's what we do. The NDC spike that we drive in those early weeks of a state launch, it's crucial to tap into that recurring revenue and not take the CPA option. My next slide will show how we were making the right investment decisions for the long term. Our revenue share development continues at pace.
We now have six US sportsbooks on live revenue share contracts, and as the graph illustrates, we have moved from 4% of our total US NDCs being sent on revenue share in January 2022. Fast-forward 13 months, 63% of our US NDCs in February 2023 were sent on a revenue share contract in the US. As my European slides demonstrated, we know how to align ourselves commercially with the long-term winners in the market, and that's exactly what we're doing in North America. Our journey of recurring revenue really is only just beginning. I remain confident that Better Collective is investing for the long run with the biggest sportsbooks in the US market. My slides wouldn't be complete without the old favorite snowballs, but it's actually true. Akin to Europe and the huge success we've enjoyed, this revenue share snowball will come.
We've been such early adopters in revenue share versus our peers and competitors. The likelihood of iGaming being rolled out, potentially not imminently, but in the next few years, gets me excited. I remain extremely confident again in our recurring revenue business in the U.S. Before I dive into the media and sponsorship revenue, I would like to thank PK again. He set me up with a lot of these slides showcasing our talent, our quality media that we produce, and the content offering that we have as a U.S. group. The graph behind me illustrates the growing demand for our content and media portfolio. We generated $15 million in revenue over the last few years, ramping significantly to represent 15% of our September 2022 revenue. Importantly, it's not just endemic sportsbooks that we are selling to.
Our media headstart in the U.S. versus Europe means we are also able to fold in non-endemic revenue into the mix, as illustrated on the next slide. It's a nice slide, this one, and we're really proud of the companies who are continuing to invest and buy our media and audience year after year. Whether that be non-endemic beer advertisers like the Athletic Brewing Company or the traditional sportsbooks like FanDuel, our growth brands remain strong, and we plan to invest even more in key talent and media over the next 12 months to meet the demand from our advertisers. Finally, this is the last cohort that I mentioned and the most nascent channel, and this one really does get me excited. It's engagement and retention revenue. I tip my hat once more again to PK for showcasing our proprietary products in QuickSlip and BetSync.
This highly engaged audience utilizing these products is exactly what our sportsbook partners wanna be in front of. We first started commercializing this during my arrival in the US in July, August of last year. You can see the trajectory of growth here is extremely impressive. We generated $1 million in revenue in the first 6 months of being live in a testing phase. With over $1 billion in our products flowing through there since the repeal of PASPA, I remain extremely confident that this will become a key growth revenue channel for BC in 2023 as we start to scale this up. Lastly, this final slide is gonna highlight why I do remain so encouraged about the direction of commercial travel in the US and North America.
Again, a reminder, our peers in the U.S. are restricted to certain revenue streams given the audience and traffic that they drive. You've got the traditional sports media, huge content warehouse, huge media traffic. They engage users, no doubts about it, but they primarily commercialize it on those CPM and sponsorship revenues. The betting intent isn't there. That's why the sportsbooks come to us. Your traditional affiliate, again, qualified traffic, very, very good, refer NDCs, it's CPA that they're utilizing primarily as their commercial model. Better Collective, our offering includes that qualified traffic, it includes the products and integrations, it includes the content and the media. What we're able to do is deliver the NDCs, drive the subscriptions and pick sales, retain the players for the operators, and I can commercialize that whether I sent that player originally or it was one of my competitors.
They're now using Better Collective's products, if they're using Better Collective products, I can commercialize that, which gives me access to such a bigger player database versus our competitors, we also engage the users with the quality media that we produce. My sweet shop is below. It's revenue share, it's hybrid, it's CPA, it's subscription, revenue share, fee per bet, percentage of handle, the sponsorship sitting on the top, advertising, and CPM. That is the commercial dynamics that go into that $100 million number that we delivered in 2022. That's it from me. I wanna thank everybody for listening to me, taking the time, and hopefully believing that we are developing our journey on being the leading digital sports media group. It's now my pleasure to introduce Petra, who will guide you through the growing opportunity in Latin America. Thank you.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. Very nice to be here and to see so many of you, and also you guys that are behind the screen. I will be talking about Latin America and a little bit more about the future today. You have heard a lot from Jesper and from all the other speakers about our vision to become the leading digital sports media group. You also heard both Carl, Patrick, Mark, speaking about the growth, our growth in Europe as well as North America. If you want to become the leading operator or the leading media agency, we actually had to be beyond Europe and North America. My background is from emerging markets. When I was 15, I had a picture of Machu Picchu in Peru on my wall.
I was dancing salsa. I dreamt about traveling the world. I did, or maybe I worked myself around it rather. I have worked and lived in China, Central Eastern Europe, Africa, and not least Latin America. Today, I will be speaking about my favorite region, which is Latin America. Let's dive into it. We have a dual growth strategy. We grow through M&As, and you have heard from many of the speakers our successful growth trajectory within that. We also see, and I think the last presentation also showcase the abilities and the capabilities that we have acquired and that also leads us into having much more power to actually grow organically with what we have acquired and taken that into new geographies.
Even if I will be focusing on Latin America today, that doesn't mean that we are not looking at the other regions. Both Africa and Asia, and the big countries within that, are highly relevant for the long term, and they are on our radar. When we see something of interest, we will take that opportunity, we will plant a seed, and we'll see it growing, focus on it, and to see what that will deliver to us in a 10-20 years horizon. LATAM is our growth region 2023. Why? It's extremely fast-growing, not only from the gambling perspective, but also from the digital advertisement perspective. It is also so that our customers are already there. The main sportsbook have been there for a very long time.
Myself, I was over celebrating the 10 years anniversary playing soccer in Peru for Betsson 2018. That was 10 year. There are a lot of sports books that have been active in this region for a very long time. We have good traction. We already seen our winning formula working also in this region. We started off in Brazil and in a few selected markets, and with that kind of evidence of that it works, we will continue to build on that. It's part of our global scalability. Let me dive a little bit more into each one of those points. Growth. This region is outgrowing or outpacing a lot of the others. I know it doesn't mean that Europe is not relevant or US is not relevant.
They are highly relevant, but this region is growing really, really fast. You have certain markets here at an extreme pace, while others have a little bit lower pace. Argentina is one of those examples that is really, really growing fast right now. On top of that, or I would say that if you go into Let me go into the next slide instead. On the top of that, you have the digital advertisement spend. It's also outgrowing or growing more or less by double. This is the non-endemic opportunity that we see now with our new vision, more diving into the sport advertisement side, not only the gambling side. We can take the advantage of this. You heard Patrick speaking about the social media. If there is anything that this region is all about, it is social media.
98% of all the users of Facebook, they're only on the mobile. 80% of them discover new brands through Facebook. Another 60% through Instagram, TikTok 15%, and so forth. You get the picture. We need to be where our consumers are, where the sport fans are, and not least where the future generations are. We have seen that, and we have really strong things within the group, and we will continue to invest in ad technologies. We already have spoken about an investment around EUR 10 million in this region, and that will continue, and it will also be enhanced by strategic acquisitions within the area. When it comes to this region, it's easy to say Latin America, perfect, easy. No, it's not so easy. You can also not say that it's Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking.
What you have to look at it's each country as a specific market. They're very different from each other. They do have the soccer passion in common. Except for that, there is a lot of differences. I was speaking about the advertisement market and how that looks like. If you look at ads in this region, 30% are still only translations from English or from Spanish. They're not at all adapted for this market, and the consumers know that. It's small differences sometimes, the words we're using and so forth. There's one example is how we actually call your national team. In Ecuador or Peruvian would call their national team the Selección de Perú, while an Ecuadorian will call it El Tricolor. They are not even close to each other.
When a sportsbooks have the ones that early went in, they didn't make any distinctions on that. That was fine 10, 15 years ago. Today, it's not fine any longer. They expect you to use native speakers and to actually adapt to them if you want to be successful. Because if not, they prefer to play with their local sportsbook that are advancing at a very fast pace. Let me dive a little bit deeper into a few of those markets in the region. I don't know how many of you that have traveled around in the region, but if you had, you will see that there is quite distinction between them. First, we take Brazil, the biggest market. I think if you look at that in most sportsbook, they are speaking quite a lot about the market.
Since 2018, their marketing budgets in this region has increased massively. Today, if you look on the Brasileirão, the men's league in Brazil, 19 out of the 20 sportsbook have a sponsorship from a sportsbook. On the female side, the same number is 11 out of the 16 teams has the sponsorship there. The sportsbook industry is all over Brazil. There are around 400-500 sports book active in the region. That's a huge number. Mexico, not growing as fast as Brazil, but still on a decent 13%. However, the advertisement growth is beyond 30%, and that's an attractive number. Mexico is a little bit different. It's a mix between Latin America and the U.S. If you look from a sportsbook perspective, most of the sports book use the U.S. product for Mexico.
That's a big distinction between the rest of Latin America and Mexico. All those things you will only know if you're actually active within the region and you take the time to understand what the local sports book wants and so forth. The Mexicans, they love the US football, they love MMA, they love baseball, but they also love their Latin soccer. The interesting part with Mexico is that it's not only the Mexicans in Mexico, it's also the 60 million Hispanic population in the US. Out of those 60 million, 40 million are Mexicans. We're not only talking about the Mexicans in Mexico, we're also talking about the Hispanic population in the US and the potential of reaching them because they prefer to consume their media in Spanish, and they still cheer for their local teams. Finally, you have Colombia. It's a little bit smaller.
It's EUR 50 million, not so small from a European standard, but small from a Latin American standard. There you have 16 licenses today. I would say 5 of those are of any importance or have reached any significant size. The 2 largest ones coming from the offline world in or being local. You have Rush Interactive and RushBet coming in from the U.S. and just blowing the market away and being extremely successful online despite everyone saying that it can't happen only online. It can. That is also this trend that we are benefiting from, the growth in just the traditional growth coming online from the offline world. All that they have in common is the passion for soccer. It's not only about male sport, even if it looks like that sometimes, especially if you cover it in media.
You also have the potential of women, and what we see today is a growing trend of the female soccer, not least. This year we have the FIFA World Cup for women, and I think that it's now we see much more about that being broadcasted and so forth than we ever done before. From this region, you have Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Costa Rica already qualified for it, and it will be covered. On top of that, you have Copa América Femenina, which is the big regional tournament for women that is also happening just after FIFA. I think that we will see also an increasing demand and interest for and coverage of the female soccer.
We spoke a little bit about this before that we have a lot of different brands within our region, but we also have different, we can use them from, for different, kind of growth opportunities. We have the ones that were basically more or less born global. Esports is a good example, and Per will be speaking more about that. We have what I call the global brands with a little bit of twist that is basically the Dust2, powered by HLTV. It's a local site coming from the HLTV, our esports site or CSGO site, which then goes deeper into and actually adapt itself to the local audiences.
We launched Dust2 in Brazil in Q2 last year, and we have had a very nice traction from it, and we're going to build on that moving forward. This also enables us to go after not only the betting customers or the sportsbook, but also the big non-endemic brands such as the consumer goods brands. Finally, we have our used brands, and I think you saw how much ad technology and really exciting stuff that we have in the Action, and we see that we can take that brand and that technology into more markets, and we will. RotoGrinders is another example. It's a fantasy product, and it's one of those products that is really good to use in the early stages of a developing market.
That is also something that we see as a potential, not least in emerging markets, like the ones that I'm focusing on. What will we, what will we then do in Latin America, and what is it that we are going to, you know, what is it that we have in front of us? First and foremost, we're going to apply the winning formula that we've been seeing that we have seen working really well in Europe. Key thing is that we have to be in the region. We established our first office now in Rio. The second one will be in São Paulo, and then we're continuing into the Spanish-speaking part of the world. We are going to use, what I said, our affiliation foundation while we're enhancing the social media, which is key for success in this region.
We are also building up new strong media partnerships to help us to grow even further and even faster than we had before. We are building with those native teams and with the local foundation that we're building up. We're also building a very strong understanding of the sports fans that will make us more relevant for all the advertisers, both the local one in the region, as well as the international ones that wants to establish themselves and grow in the region. Finally, we are going to complement that with strategic M&As. That is something that we have on the radar all the time, and we make sure that when someone wants to sell, we would be the most attractive buyer of their assets. I'm super excited about what we have here today.
I'm really excited about this region and the potential that it has for us. We had to continue and continuously improve, and we had to force ourselves to always be on top or on our tippy toes when it comes to competition and everything else. I know that we can do that. Latam, it is vamos.
Thank you. That was the second part of the day. We're done with the markets. When you come back from a, I think, for all of us, well-deserved break, we'll go through our media partnerships, esports and paid media. For now, 20 minutes break. You all know where the coffee is, I'll be out there clapping when we need to go back. Thank you. Hello, everyone. The windows are 90% closed in here, I think I can start out our third part of today. You've heard about how we built Better Collective, you heard about our markets. What you're gonna hear about now is in 3 section, how we leverage all of this outside of our core business being the sports media business. First, Christian will take you through our media partnerships.
We have HLTV founder and now also senior director of esports in Better Collective, Per Lambæk, who will take you through the HLTV journey, but also talk about FUTBIN. Finally, we end with Gavin, who will take you through our media partnerships. At the end, we still have the Q&A planned. I'll just remind everyone, especially at home, that please just type in your questions as we go along because then we have them ready when I will read them up out loud in here. I of course expect all of you to have your questions prepared already. For now, I will invite Christian back up to the stage for the last time probably today to showcase and talk about our media partnerships.
Thank you, Mikkel. Also welcome back to all of you. I hope you had a chance to just get a cake or two. In this part of the presentations, I'll start out by going through our first global initiative, and then as Mikkel said, you will hear from Per afterwards on the esports global initiative and finally from Gavin on the paid initiative. Media partnerships. It's been a massive success for Better Collective. Just thinking back 4, 5 years when we made the decision, Jesper, to execute on media partnerships, it's one of the best decisions we've made. If you recall Jesper's slide back from 2018, we had around 7 million monthly visitors coming to our owned-and-operated sites. We had all this great data, tech, content that we'd been working on for 15 years, and we really felt it deserved a bigger audience.
We went out in the market, we packaged all this great content, and we went out 4 years ago, 2019, and at that point, teamed up with two strong local media. We already knew that one of these media had been trying out to do sports betting content themselves. They hadn't succeeded, maybe due to lack of data, resources, focus. What do I know? We teamed up with them, and we created a win-win. I think you recall the first number here, 150 million monthly visitors to our owned-and-operated sites. It took us two decades to get there. If you include the media partnership reach, we're actually now reaching a total audience of 300 million monthly visitors if you combine all the media partnerships that we have now teamed up with.
In just 4 years, we have 2X'd the audience that we are now able to reach. Just think about that number for a while. You think, "Well, how is that possible? What are we doing?" Let me show you a short video of how we do media partnerships in Better Collective. What we've really created here is a win-win with the media partner. They come with a big authority, big audience, and huge traffic. We come with great content, great SEO skills, best deals in the industry, and we tie that all together and package a win-win for both the partner and for us. We're done. We've teamed up with many traditional media out there who are strong household newspapers around the globe. Probably some of you are familiar with some of these.
I'd like to give you just one example, the New York Post. New York Post, it's been around since 1801. That newspaper is more than 200 years old. I think there's a good chance that probably those of you here in the audience, at some point in your life, you've paid a visit to nypost.com. I've had also before creating a little sports betting section for them. If you're not familiar with New York Post, I recommend you to go in tonight, go to the menu, and then you scroll down, and then you see Sports Betting. That's created by us. A little more than a year ago, there was no sports betting section on the New York Post. We created that section for them, meaning their readers, they are now able to read about sports betting, how to safely gamble online.
At the same time, it's also ranking really well in Google. They're also able to get a new audience into their site because they get a lot of traffic in from a source like Google. Maybe that audience, they will consume our sports betting content. There's also a really good chance that they will also be interested in reading some news. That's a new audience for New York Post as well. If you are on that sports betting section tonight, then you'll also see that it's co-branded with Action Network. That's a new audience for us. Just coming back to the presentation Patrick also had, that's exactly the shallow end of the pool, that audience that we would like to attract. New York Post, that's just one example. Teamed up with many local media that you see here on the screen.
Something really exciting that we just did a couple of weeks ago, that was announcing the Goal.com media partnership. Goal.com is a global soccer news media. We actually launched immediately in 3 different languages and are planning to launch in many more languages together with them. I'm extremely excited about the media partnership opportunity, and so are the media partners. Our pipeline for new potential media partners, it has never been stronger than now, and I can't wait to execute it. Thank you so much. Now we move on to the next global initiative, Senior Director of Esports, Co-founder of HLTV, Per Lambæk, welcome to the stage.
Thank you. Hello, everyone. It's been a long day, so I'll start out with a video just to set the mood. Yeah. I created HLTV together with my partner, Martin. We started nearly 21 years ago. We started because, let's face it, we were basically terrible at the game, we wanted to do something with Counter-Strike, right? We figured, let's build something instead. We sat down to build HLTV. We actually didn't even meet in person for the first year. We just solely met online and organized the development of the company that way. It also means that now we have 42 years of experience in the leadership group for an esports company.
I think that's not many of my other esports companies can present that many years of experience. Then what for many is considered a very young and upcoming industry, for us, we've been doing this for more than 20 years, right? We know what we're doing. I imagine that, of course, everyone here uses HLTV all the time, but if there's just one or two details you maybe don't know, I'll just go through what it is we actually offer. HLTV is by far the leading Counter-Strike media. We feature everything from match coverage, so extensive coverage of the matches before they start, who's playing when and where. After the matches, live scores while the matches are going on and after they're over, how did the match go?
we have all the statistics as the only ones basically. We feature MVP awards that we hand out after the big tournaments. We decide who was the MVP of a tournament. The tournament organizer will now and then try and organize these awards also, but basically the community, it typically goes something like this, that the community is like, "Oh, so they handed the MVP to this guy. Yeah, but who did HLTV choose?" Our MVP award carries a lot of inertia and a lot of credibility, so the community has really bought into that it makes more sense for us to consistently hand out this MVP award across the various tournament organizers instead of them maybe selling the award and handing it out to the fan favorite. We also feature our world ranking.
Again, we just have a ranking, we update it once a week, but the entire community has bought into that the way we do it, and the quality of this ranking has made it the gold standard and the most quoted ranking there is in all of Counter-Strike. When Astralis, for instance, sends out a press release saying they're number one in the world, well, they're saying they're number one in the world because we said they were number one in the world. We also have an entire news crew. We have editors, and we have photographers covering every big Counter-Strike event there is there on-site. Finally, we have our historical database.
Basically, we have every game of Counter-Strike that mattered from a competitive standpoint in our database, and we have this going back all the way from when Counter-Strike GO, which is the current version, was released. What this basically means is that if there is a match that's not in our database, it might as well not have happened, because in 2 days, 2 weeks, or 2 years, no one will know that that match happened if it isn't in our database. All this data is our own. We own this data. We are the primary resource. We don't buy this from anyone. We have a crew of people entering this data, so no one can really touch us on this either. Yeah. What we've been doing is that for the past 20 years, we've just been iterating on this 1 product.
A lot have happened with screen technology, but in a sense, not a lot have happened with HLTV. It's the same core product. We have, of course, been adding features here and there, but basically, it's been one long evolution of the same idea, and we've stayed laser-focused on Counter-Strike. A lot of esports sites in the past will have decided, "Hey, we should feature more games. Let's do three games, four games. Let's grow that way." We decided, no, this is about Counter-Strike. You don't want to go to a football site and read about another sport if you're really into football. We stayed laser-focused on Counter-Strike, and the community really bought into this.
They shared this vision with us, we slowly grew as Counter-Strike grew, and when Counter-Strike exploded and went mainstream five years ago, well, so did we. The past 20 years have allowed us to build up a lot of proprietary features where no one can really touch us. The HLTV Awards is also called the Top 20 Players of the Year. Which is basically us naming the best players of the year every year. Again, the players, they all buy into this. The player who won the number one award, the number one place last year even posted a photo on his Instagram, right, sleeping with his trophy, Messi style, like he did with the World Cup trophy, right? That's the credibility that our awards, they carry.
The MVPs I already mentioned in the world ranking. We also have a fantasy game. Where for other companies featuring a fantasy game is their entire product, for us, it's just kind of a small by-product that we use, that we use to entertain our users, right? Having all the building blocks makes it very easy for us to create a product like a fantasy game, and it's currently engaging more than 50,000 users every month having fun playing fantasy. Our historical database I also already touched on. These are all features that cannot really be replicated by anyone. It's ground we have gained over the past 20 years. Of course, you could also look at HLTV and say, "Okay, you have all these features.
Where do we go from here?" Basically, what we do is that we keep innovating. We keep innovating on the same things. For instance, our top 20 players of the year, it started out as filler content. Way back in 2010, when we got to the off-season, not many matches were going on. What do we do? We still wanted traffic on the site. We decided, "Hey, why don't we just name the best players of last year?" We did a 20-day article series, so one article a day celebrating the best 20 players of the past year. In 2017, we started handing out medals, and it turned out that these players in a team game like Counter-Strike, they really appreciate getting a personal award that they personally are recognized for their effort.
It even got to the point that we had to produce all the way back to 2010 to hand out to the players because all the old winners came and asked us, "Hey, why don't we get a medal?" In 2022, we took this feature even further with a live studio show. We invited a couple of guests. It was kind of tough because of COVID, but we had the studio show, and in 2023, we did our first real award show. We had past legends of the game, the current top players there, just for a day of celebrating Counter-Strike. Belonging the aura of Counter-Strike and the entire community has bought into this idea.
What this has enabled us is to take something that was created as filler content, which has now turned into a highly monetizable product, driving double-digit revenue, double digits of the revenue we did last year. That's just 1 example of how we keep working on what is a kind of mature product. HLTV is unavoidable in Counter-Strike. Everywhere you go, if you consume Counter-Strike content, even if you don't go to HLTV, you'll run into us because you'll see a photo that has a watermark because our photographers are at all events, and our photos are by far the most used by anyone, by players, by teams, everyone. You will run into our news articles being linked on Twitter and LinkedIn, and Twitter and Reddit.
You will have players mentioning winning our awards. You will have all this chatter about HLTV. Even if we don't drive people directly to our site, the brand is constantly being built anyways. At the end, it means that people will start going to the primary source of all this content that they're consuming anyways. It's even gotten to the point that the game developer, Valve, who creates Counter-Strike, they came to us because they wanted to feature pro match data inside the game, and they didn't actually have all this data. They came to us and asked, hey, could we help them with this data? Sure, we could.
Now if you open Counter-Strike, there's even a tab, you go there, it says, "All this data is provided by HLTV." It just further cements the brand we have and the presence we have in the Counter-Strike world. Lastly, only a couple of months ago, Valve even came to us and asked for data on the teams, so they could actually invite teams for the world championship, right? The invites for the world championship in Counter-Strike is driven on HLTV data. I think that kinda just hammers down that we are very much intertwined with all of Counter-Strike. Besides HLTV, we also have Dust2. Petra mentioned it briefly earlier.
What Dust2 is, it's a different brand, and Dust2 is actually the name of the most iconic Counter-Strike map, and we kinda stole it, but Valve aren't too angry. What this is, this is an entire platform for doing local sites. Currently we have 3 sites. We have 1 in Denmark, 1 in Brazil, and 1 for the U.S. Basically when Petra comes and says, "Hey, we need 1 in Colombia too," from a tech perspective, we can roll out a site like this in 1 or 2 days. Basically doing the translations is the toughest part. We have a site ready to go. It'll have live scores, it'll have all the data from HLTV, it'll have our state-of-the-art news system, it'll have photos ready to be integrated.
Basically everything you need to create a fully functioning Counter-Strike site, ready to go in mere days. What these sites afford us is because while HLTV addresses basically everyone who cares about Counter-Strike in the entire world, these sites allow us to address the same user twice actually, because the user will go to HLTV to read not only what happened, but also to see, okay, so Astralis, a Danish team, maybe beat a Swedish team, so they want to go and see how are the Swedes feeling about this loss. They'll go to HLTV for that, but HLTV has to remain objective, right? It cannot say, "Oh my god, Astralis, they won. It's amazing." Dust2, the Danish Dust2, they can cheer for Astralis. They can communicate with the same user in a different way.
This enables us to advertise differently to these users, but it also engages them in a different way. They don't see that they are consuming basically much of the same content twice, but we save the money only creating the content once. Dust2 also features grassroots tournaments. Basically what we do is we run lower tier tournaments. These aren't the top teams in the world, but these are the local, smaller, semi-professional teams in Denmark and Brazil currently. They will go and they will play. This is a way for them to have matches, to be featured in our database. They will actually accumulate points for the world ranking if they play in one of our tournaments.
This just helps build Counter-Strike on the very long, with a very long horizon, time horizon, right? For us, this is a giant advantage because since we address basically everyone who's interested in Counter-Strike, we just need Counter-Strike to grow. Basically, for us to grow, we need Counter-Strike to grow. We cannot outrun the game in that sense. We're doing what we can to help the game grow also. The future for HLTV very much includes our three core pillars. We need to keep innovating. I already showed an example of this, but this is what we do every day. We keep doing this. Combined with our credibility and the consistency that we've been doing this over the past 20 years is really the winning formula for us.
The good thing for us is that even the game developer buys into doing things this way. Just yesterday they announced that Counter-Strike 2 is coming out this summer, and basically what this will do is this rebranding of Counter-Strike is creating a ton of buzz and will surely lift all of Counter-Strike further, and as I just said, when Counter-Strike grows, we grow. This was a lot about Counter-Strike and HLTV. We also have FUTBIN, the newcomer in the BC Esports portfolio. Basically what we've been doing the past the past year is looking into, okay, how can we start using what we know from HLTV on FUTBIN? What we first dug into was the tech side of things.
All of HLTV is developed in-house, so we know it to our fingertips and the entire, pretty much the entire original development team is still with us. We're using the experience we have building a product like HLTV and applying this to FUTBIN. This has allowed us a 95% cost reduction in the tech costs of running FUTBIN. And that is just one example of us leveraging what it is we do well. We haven't even gotten to the product side of things yet. With that, I think I will turn it over to Gavin, who will talk about paid media.
Thanks, Per. Today I'm gonna talk about delayed gratification. For those of you who have kids, you've probably heard of the Stanford University marshmallow experiment, where they test 5-year-old kids, and then they've done this over a period of 50 years. A professor will walk into the room with a 5-year-old child, and he'll put 1 marshmallow on the table right in front of him. The professor will then say, "You've got 15 minutes. I'll come back in, and if you've not eaten that marshmallow, I'll give you another 1." Nice opportunity to double your earnings, right? It's not that simple, is it? You're 5. There's a marshmallow in front of you. You're probably a little bit hungry. You don't know if it's coming back. I think it goes without saying, human nature wants instant gratification, right?
Yeah, there's no big surprises that most people have eaten that marshmallow within under 1 minute, basically. I have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old at home, I know they're squirming in their seats desperately trying not to touch that marshmallow. The point is, the handful of people, the few that can actually go the full distance, the full 15 minutes to double their earnings, it's been proven over this 50-year period that they go on and they're more successful at school, they're also more successful in their careers afterwards. It's a very nice story. What's it got to do with what I'm talking about? Good question. We'll see if I know in a minute. Building a strong competitive moat at Better Collective, it's also very much about delayed gratification. We spend a lot of money on paid advertising.
Last year alone, in fact, we spent EUR 65 million on paid advertising alone. It's quite a lot of money. That's quite a lot of cost of sales. I can see Flemming sweating at the back somewhere. Ultimately, if we have the data that supports, if we hang on a little bit more, we know that we can get that second marshmallow. Not only that, we can three, four, five-fold our potential earnings. At Better Collective in the paid media division, we're gonna take the long-term decision every day of the week, and that's how we're also gonna separate ourselves from our so-called peers in the industry, because we're making these barriers for entry ever higher. My name is Gavin Moore. I'm the VP of Group Acquisition Marketing, and today I'm gonna take you through how paid media increases our addressable audience.
A quick definition of paid media. It's where you pay upfront media costs in exchange for an advantageous position on the internet, basically, right? That can be done in a few ways. You have your pull marketing. This is paid search. It's keyword driven. This is our bread and butter in the paid media division at Better Collective. You also have the push marketing. That is audience driven, and that is basically, yeah, your display advertising, so with the likes of Meta, TikTok for the new ones and so forth. Just to be sure everyone knows what we're talking about, I've invited my mate Jeff to come and take us through what paid search is all about, basically. I'll just put a video on now, and I'll take you through what we do. There's Jeff. He's ready to bet.
Jeff's been hearing... Oh, he's from the U.K. Thanks for reminding me. He's very scalable, so this is just a U.K. example. He's heard from his friends on the TV of football matches, of all these different betting operators, and now he's a little bit confused. Now he's finally ready to make this final decision. Jeff, like many people do, they will go to Google to find an aggregated place where they can get an overview of the market before making their final decision. Off he goes, and then he puts something which we would call a generic search term. This, in this example, is gonna be best betting sites. He wants the overview, and we wanna advertise in front of him for exactly this. This is advertising in the key moments.
Off Jeff goes, and we go, "Why do we like this keyword?" It's high volume. Lots of people are making these searches. Google confirmed that this is outgoing branded searches at the moment in this industry. High value. He's not looking for free bets. He's not looking for no deposit betting, so it's gonna be good to share revenue on. On high intent. Jeff's got his hand in his pocket. His next session is gonna be a transaction. We wanna be there, and we are there. Top of the tree. Ultimately, I've highlighted in green all the places where paid media actually takes up in the ecosystem. No surprises, it's absolutely top of the value chain and takes over 50% click share from these really key searches.
When you do get down to the organic rankings, I think you've heard we're pretty good at SEO as well, right? We're also top of that one. Jeff's clever. He scrolls straight back up. He goes up onto the paid media side. He saw the first ad. He liked it. It gave him all the confirmation he was looking for. Like many of us, he clicks in. Top of the value chain. When he comes into our site, we make sure it loads very nice and fast. We give a great comparison because it's not very trustworthy if one operator says, "Obviously, we're the best," because it's not very credible, right? We add value to Jeff for the point of comparison, and we also add value to our sportsbook operators by sending high numbers of premium NDCs their way.
For the sake of this example, Jeff, he went to bet365. This is where our in-house tracking software starts to pull key data. We will match the keyword with the session ID, which will then go through to our partner's website, and we'll be able to see ultimately on the data side of things a lot of value insights, which is very interesting for us. Did this person become a new depositing player? Yes. Great value signal. How much was his first deposit? Was it in the high cohort or the low cohort? Great value signal. We know which one we want to optimize towards. Ultimately, what it does, it allows us over a long period of time to cohort this data and find the most attractive keywords, which is gonna keep us at the very top of the value chain for our sportsbook partners.
Also tells us where we should be investing our advertising spend, so we can maximize these marshmallows because it's all revenue share. I'm going to take you back to Carl's favorite slide and his snowballs. The synergies don't really stop there because this great data, it's not just something that we can use in paid media alone, even though of course we do use it, so we make sure we apply the right advertising spend in the right places. We also share it with the rest of the company and the rest of the group. Like I said, we're global with our activity. We're not kind of just in the UK or anything like that, and you'll see on the numbers soon that we're global. Not only that, it was no coincidence that The Telegraph was number one.
They know that's a great place to get high value customers at scale. Ultimately, they know that like we put our ad pressure in a certain place, they put their content investments in a certain place, and that's why we are at the top of the SERPs, search engine results pages, sorry, for every single search that matters. How have we been performing? I think when we first started the paid media division, there were some people who started scratching their heads thinking, "Oh, what are you doing that for? It's a drag on the margin." I think 2 weeks later, we sent another release out saying that we actually want to make that drag on the margin even bigger in the short term, and this is why. As you can see, CPA NDCs is this bottom line.
It stayed flat, if not declining slightly, and that's on purpose. It's lovely to have CPA as a mix of the revenue. We've managed to invest in all our revenue share NDCs profitably by keeping a 10% margin, as I promised Flemming. Not surprised he walked in the room at that exact moment. What you'll also see is the revenue NDCs, which is the dark blue line, which is looking like a really nice trend, basically, right? I'm just gonna cast your mind back to Carl's presentation. This is the past 27 months where we've sent huge scale of revenue share NDCs, and we've paid for it already. Our cost of sales has been booked, and the revenue potential earnings that we've seen from this so far is tiny. In the future, it's gonna be building our moat.
On the revenue side of things, you can see CPA revenue, and this is Europe and rest of the world data by the way. I'll go into the US just afterwards. The dark blue bars is CPA revenue, and that follows the trend of the NDCs 'cause it's instant gratification, right? It's here and now. Most paid media companies work on CPA, right? Because it's a cash flow thing. You know, you, if you're paying, I said EUR 65 million, right? You need to see some of that back so you can even be active next month. The fact that we've been able to do this, and you can see the revenue share trajectory, it's following that lovely curve up into the far right, but it's lagging behind, and it's exactly because of what Carl was saying.
We've only realized a very small % of the revenue that we'll see on all of these users that we've sent at huge scale. Look at the net increase of NDCs and the most of them on revenue share. That's difficult to replicate or impossible. I'm gonna talk about scale in a couple of slides. This slide is the U.S., a new market. It's not a bad new market. It's pretty big. In Q4 2020, we had 0 activity. Q4 2021, a little bit more, but not that much. In Q4 2022, we saw 40% of the revenue in the paid media division coming from the United States. You saw Marc's slide earlier on, the gray states and the green states, there's still a lot more to come here.
Not only that, the reason why the revenue is so strong here is because it is an instant gratification market mainly, right? It's CPA. I'm also happy to say that we've also made our first investments in the paid media division in the U.S. into revenue share as well with some of the leading sportsbooks out there, actually seven digits deep into that. We expect a lot more to come from this. Scale again. Let's look at the costs. At the bottom here, this gray bar, that's our fixed costs. That's OpEx, salaries, you name it. It stayed very flat. That's quite impressive considering the top line growth we've seen in paid media and also the bottom line growth, which you can see the EBITDA margin at the top here. We've done it on flat fixed costs.
Then in the blue part here, the bigger part, is our cost of sales. These are variable costs. When the market is good and we have a buy price on new depositing customers at a certain level, and we like it, we'll double down, and we'll spend as much as we can. As long as we hold that 10% margin, of course. If for whatever reason, which it hasn't, but if the market does decide to change or the landscape changes and it becomes less attractive to buy players, we can hold back and make the right long-term decisions for Better Collective because we have this revenue share buffer. We don't need to be there if it doesn't make sense to be there. At the moment, we only see opportunities. I'm gonna cast your mind back to October 2020.
We acquired the Atemi Group, EUR 44 million. Cashflow we've realized to date, EUR 14.3 million. With all these players you've seen sent on revenue share, we of course have an estimated pool of future value from those NDCs, and that is the light blue bar here. We've already paid for them, remember. It's paid for. This is gonna be bottom line. Ultimately, what I'm really proud to say here is that after 27 months only, we've realized a return of investment on that acquisition, and the value creation process of that is only just starting. We're just getting started. Still sending more NDCs than before. The going looks good, and what we see at the moment is opportunities to attack in 2023 and going forwards. Let's have a look at last year.
I said our bread and butter was pull marketing, search ads. It's grown nicely. No complaints. It'll grow more. American states opening up, there's always new opportunities. What we're working on strategically are these push marketing channels, these new ones for us. What you'll also see here is a big scale in NDCs that we're sending in net new channels, and this really excites us because our tracking platform still works just the same. We can still find the value insights, and we can still optimize towards sending great value to our sportsbook partners, but we've just opened a whole new pool to play in of ad platforms. Yeah, we're just scratching the surface at the moment, and we see huge opportunities ahead. This is my last slide. I'll cast your mind back to my first slide, not the marshmallows, but the moat.
What we do is leverage our size, scale, and strategy or the financial framework of maximizing investments into revenue share with strategic partners, obviously the ones where we see the good value, in the markets that make sense for us and the verticals that make sense for us. I'm gonna tell you why this acts as our competitive moat. To do paid media, you need cashflow. You need to be cash rich. Costs a lot of money. If you're spending all that money and you're as a new entrant coming into the market, you're also gonna make mistakes because you need industry experience, you need people who know the operators, you need people who know how to run media buying, and it's gonna cost you a lot of money. Then you've got scale. We're not just in one market. We're global.
We're in many markets, working with over 200 sportsbook partners, and we've delivered them quality, highest quality players for years, and we've grown their budgets because they trust us. It's not the kind of trust that you're able to build in one year, 2 years, so they can't compete with us on scale either. You have the most important point, which is optimizing the yield of each and every NDC that we send. Again, revenue share NDCs was far outpacing CPA NDCs, so our future revenue is snowballing. When you do paid media, talk about buy price, how much can you buy the NDC for, and a sell price. Our so-called peers will have a sell price like this, a small margin, maybe 5%, 10% if they're lucky.
Because we're willing to delay the gratification, and we're sending more players than they are, and they're more valuable, and they're on revenue share. On that note, I'll just thank you very much for your time, and I'll pass over to Jesper who will round up today.
Thanks a lot, Gavin. All right. We are now, what's that? More than three and a half hours in, and you're still around, so that's pleasing to see. I wanna thank all the presenters, and I really hope you both behind the screens and here in the room got the impression that I have, which is something I'm proud of and excited by the brilliant people working in Better Collective. We have incredible talent, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire organization consists of dedicated people that share our values and are passionate about success and what they do. It's a pleasure working with the entire group of people in Better Collective. We are standing on a very, very strong foundation.
We have seen the European formula, the winning formula there, which we are applying across the globe right now. I also showed the slide where you see even in our legacy core markets, there's so much room for growth. Even there we have just begun, and we are now venturing further into the media space. We've set out some ambitious financial targets for 2027. With the vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group, I'm sure we can accomplish that. Thank you.
Thank you. We just did a little dance, me and Jesper, but I will actually invite Jesper and Flemming back up to the stage now because we're now entering our Q&A phase, where luckily we get to interact with you guys now. It's not just someone speaking from up here. Please join me on stage. The way we will go about it is that Amalie has a mic. You only speak when you have the mic, otherwise nobody can hear you online. Other than that, I think we start with some questions here in the room, and then I have some online as well.
I would urge you to maybe keep your questions about our journey, our vision, and then if you have any questions to Q4 or something very, very specific, we're very happy to answer them, but maybe in a different setting. For now, I think if any questions in the room, you can raise your hand, and Amalie will hand over the mic.
Thank you. Oscar Rönnkvist from ABG here. First of all, I just wanna maybe for you, Flemming Pedersen, a question on the targets. You have a 10 percentage point margin span, if you could just expand on what types of different journeys, making you arrive at the top end or lower end of that one?
I think we have a 5-year horizon here, and let me just use Action Network as an example. Now we have acquired a lot of businesses. When we acquired Action Network, it was a 0-profit business. Now it's a different beast a few years after. Clearly the type of businesses we are buying can impact the margin short term. In this case, we acquired an amazing brand in a new market with a bright future. They have just begun. If we are talking more mature markets that can, or mature assets, that can of course bring up the margin immediately. That's how we look at it and also why we have given that span.
Yeah. It's essentially about investments because-
Yeah
as you know, most investments are being expensed in our business. With this spread, we allow ourselves the maneuverability to be aggressive if we feel the need. Obviously, historically looking at our business, it's a high-margin business. We will achieve scale. I think that spread gives us a lot of maneuverability.
Perfect. Thank you. See, I don't know. Oh, no. Thank you. The next one, just on the 20% plus growth, do you have any assumptions for organic growth? Also, what assumptions you have in the growth target in terms of new markets, state launches, and casino contribution?
We have given that, you can say, growth targets including M&A, but financed solely with own cash flow and what we can basically debt finance with on that leverage. No assumptions of new share issues. Thereby, you can say the mix of organic and M&A to me becomes a bit irrelevant. As you know, because you follow us, we always report on organic growth and also in the, in the coming year, we have guided on organic growth. For long term, five years out, I actually think it doesn't really matter. That's how we look at it.
All right. Just the casino contribution and U.S. state launches, any assumptions?
We don't have any detailed assumptions. We work also on casino because it's embedded in the operators', and our customers' product portfolio, so we also have that. It's not a specific theme for us. That's embedded in the growth, but not in details. With state launches, yeah, they come now and then, as we have seen. It's not something again we have modeled in detail when California hopefully will open within this five-year period, cross fingers. Let's see.
All right. Just on M&A targets, is it any specific types of targets that you are looking at? Is it gambling or non-gambling? Just are we looking at profitable, companies solely?
I actually on a slide sort of gave some specifics as to what we really care about, signals of what is a brand that was like the direct traffic, so a high proportion of traffic coming directly to the brand. Secondly, it's time on page so that they engage with it, and then obviously size. Is it a big audience? When we can tick those boxes and it relates in any shape or form to sports, we're interested because that's a kind of brand where we believe we as owners will be able to monetize them better and grow that audience, enabling further investments into the business. There are quite a lot of businesses out there with such characteristics owned by private individuals, even PE and various forms of ownership.
There definitely are some and we have highlighted local sports media as something very concrete. In terms of profitability, yes, I think most of those brands will be profitable, but we believe that we should lift the margin of those over time.
Okay. I just have one last question. You talk about delayed gratification, so I assume you're talking about the rev share contract instead of CPA. Can you just elaborate on the net present value difference? I assume that is higher net present value of a rev share customer than it is on a CPA customer. Do you have any data on that?
Yes. We do have cohort data going many years back. First of all, we do see it as very, very sensitive from a competitive perspective. It also varies quite a lot based on geo, product offering. Gavin mentioned specific generic keywords. Even on a keyword level it will vary. There are so many variables going into this equation, we won't, and we can't give sort of an exact figure. Obviously, why we believe so much in the delayed gratification model is that we have seen, and we believe in the future it will be of much more value than just realizing the CPA immediately.
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Yeah. I think you can hand it the other way. Yeah.
Thanks. Jan Albert from Redeye. Maybe first question on the 20% growth. Does that imply that you kind of succeed with this new vision and then see a lot of new revenue from these new revenue streams? Or how should we view that target?
Yes. It's part of seeing success with adding new revenue verticals, or at least expanding the ones we have because we are doing most of it already. Yes, we wanna see success with that, and that should contribute to the goal. Again, the legacy business is also expected to grow as I showed in the slides, that would be a significant part. My personal hope is that when we look at the share of total revenue, the new revenue lines should grow slightly faster than the other ones, but all should grow in absolute terms.
Right. Right. Maybe more of a detailed question. I mean, you talked a bit about the NDC and the cohorts there. I think you said something like, 5 years in, you have almost 70% of the total profit, and then 10 years out, you almost have all the profits. Of 10 years, is the... Is that the kind of lifetime value of a typical, sports betting customer?
No, lifetime means lifetime. Like we have cohorts where there will be players that are post the 10 years, still active, generating revenue for us. It's more you don't have that many, but they do exist, Christian being one of them as myself included. It's more in terms of when we look at the cohorts, we, you know, we round things off, but there are still players active in our databases that are more than 10 years old.
Right.
In direct relation to the example you saw, that was also one outtake of a cohort database-.
Mm
of several thousands of players. It's one outtake, and I believe it was also in one region, right? Yeah, we haven't given it out, and we are not gonna give out like on a global scale. Yeah.
Right. And also a question on the European market. You seem to have been able to grow pretty good here as you talked about. You also showed specifically UK where the growth was very strong. I mean, can you talk a bit more about this? Did you take market share or how could you achieve this?
We definitely have taken market share because the market growth does not achieve the same level. It relates to both our own and operated brands, also our media partnerships and the paid media. It's really the blend of all three where we have seen success and then, and that has more or less driven that great performance that we have seen in the UK. It has also been a decision we made that we wanted to improve our position in the UK back then. We did the media partnership with Telegraph as one of the first ones. Again, quite obvious because we wanted to have a better position in the UK.
Right. On LatAm, which is kind of a new growth opportunity here, you have seemed to dip your toes here. What do you think will be the key to succeed there? Will it be the right acquisition you find, or will you be able to do that pure organically? What are, yeah, the key to succeed in that market?
We wanna do both. We are established. We have brands live already. And I think we have actually said that many times in after Q reports that LatAm as a region is of big interest to us in terms of M&A. We continue to look there and again, reminding sort of the features of the sports media brands we're looking for. Direct traffic, time on page, big audience. It's more or less that like how we are scouting that market.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. I'm think maybe while Amalie finds the next one in the room, I can ask a question here. Flemming, I think it's one for you also in relation to our new targets. Is it your intention not to issue new shares when making acquisitions during the next five years?
Our new targets assume no share issues, but that doesn't mean that if we find big targets where we feel that the value of doing that means that we need to issue shares. We have shown in the past that that is something that the shareholders are willing to do at the right terms and conditions. What we have given a framework for the next 5 years is without any new share issues, so you have a framework to consider, otherwise, I think it would be very confusing.
Adding to that, you have probably also noticed that we have had share buyback programs ongoing, actually for a couple of years. Because we wanna use the share whenever we bring founders into to the team, so we incentivize them also on behalf of the group. We do use the share, but in terms of dilution with that financial target, no dilution.
Yeah.
I don't see any raised hands. I will continue online. Again, I think it's maybe a Flemming question here, the adult in the room. That was me, not the question. How much do you focus on return on invested capital, medium to long term? The question is quite long, but it also relates to this in terms of the acquiring Action Network. We saw your mother of all slides-
Mm-hmm
in terms of earnings per share and also Atemi.
I actually think Gavin had it on slide 123, if I recall correctly. That we actually work actively with ROI. What is difficult from the outside, it's not something we report on. Yeah, there you go. It was 123. Yes. It is something we don't report on externally because Gavin's marshmallows are not reported externally. You cannot see the database of players, the value of the players in our accounts because it's future value. They are sitting off account, off balance out there. We have some of our dear analysts trying to estimate the value of all our future revenue streams coming in. If it's difficult to see from the outside what the ROI, in this case, the Atemi Group is.
What Gavin provided here was a return on investment positive after 27 months. It is something we work with in all our investments internally and try to assess also the marshmallows. That's, I think, the best way we can answer. Just looking from outside in, it's a difficult metric to assess.
Good.
Was that good enough?
I think it was good. I continue online. What are the main operational risks you see in terms of your long-term financial targets? A follow-up on that is, do you see any risk in a trend towards sportsbooks not allowing to restrict specific players from playing at a sportsbook if they are winning too much?
Operational risk and sort of overall risk to the new financial targets and our business as a whole. I think, at IPO, the question we always got related to also the data protection law coming into effect at the time. What we are seeing now is that there will be changes to cookies and what is allowed in terms of cookies. It essentially means that the importance and value of first-party data, which Patrick mentioned a bit in his presentation, will go up. For our perspective, we're very much aware about that. Again, why we wanna own these big loyal audiences, because we can then learn about them, and we have first-party data.
It also relates to how we track the traffic in the legacy part of our business with the affiliation. There we use cookies today. We prepare for that. In terms of mentioning risk and what we are focused on and know we have to manage and deal with, that's sort of a change in the market coming in the future, which we are preparing for, which will sort of pose a risk if not managed well by us. The other part was related to sportsbooks not allowed to limit winning customers. That's right. Yeah.
In Spain we've seen.
Yeah. Yeah. We did see that in Spain, where we specifically for that market, saw very low sports betting margin because some large betting syndicates were utilizing that the sportsbooks couldn't limit winning players. It's quite important to distinguish in the regulated market between the casual players, which these bet365, Unibets, the Ladbrokes, et cetera, they cater to that audience. Fundamentally, over time, these players are not winning players. They do limit if a professional starts betting with them. It's something where for the sportsbook market, fundamentally, it's about entertainment and ultimately, from a regulatory perspective, if you were to sort of disallow that functionality, it would be hard for the sportsbooks to operate.
That's why you have betting exchanges where it's more a peer-to-peer effect between these players. Ultimately, what we saw in Spain is that the market simply returned to a normal cadence where the bookmakers are allowed to limit if a player is a winning player.
Yeah, we continue online. We had a question in terms of the revenue split, you already answered it a bit in terms of revenue stream, but there's also a question from in terms of geo. We've obviously seen the U.S. expanding quickly and becoming a big part of our revenue last year. For 2027, if we can give any indication on what we would expect in terms of geo split. Yes. We...
Basically, you can look at the growth rates we have seen presented today. LATAM is really a high growth region. We expect that to continue. The same for North America. We are not putting out percentages to this, but that's sort of just sharing my gut feeling is that I'd expect these region to grow more compared to Europe. But it's not sort of something we have sliced up in those financial targets.
Yes. I think we have 1 question all the way down the line. While you get the mic, I will just ask another question here. Is there any difference from U.S. sport fans to European sport fans, and what are you learning since you entered the market there, and are they more difficult to convert?
Let me start by giving that a shot, and then I think we should actually hear from some from the U.S. team, so either Patrick or Mark could potentially join for that one. What we've seen is, and it's actually pretty obvious when you look at the CPA levels, so the one-time payments paid for delivering a new customer to a sportsbook, is that they are more or less double in the U.S. compared to Europe. And even though the U.S. on average has a higher GDP than the European average per capita, it's not the full explanation. My personal view of this, and then let's hear from them afterwards, is that the integration of sports in the American society, it's just much bigger than what we see in Europe.
You probably notice it if you go to the States, go into a restaurant, there will be televisions everywhere. It's simply integrated in all parts of your everyday life that you view sports, you engage with sports, and that is what I believe is reflected in those values of the sports fans.
We have Marc Pedersen, our CEO of our North American operations back to the stage.
Thanks. One thing that's pretty clear from my perspective is that U.S. is still a very novice market. It's only been regulated for five years. One of the trends we expect the U.S. to adopt from Europe is the in-game activity. In Europe, it's between 60% and 70% of the wagers that happens during a game, so after the ball has been kicked off. In U.S., it's closer to 30% at the moment. There's a big difference in terms of the live engagement. Many of you might know, but in live, the margins on the books are higher as well, so they're more profitable during live. I expect that trend to be adopted in the U.S. It's not up for all sports in the U.S. Basketball is a very fast-moving sport. You don't have many windows to place your wagers.
American football is much better at it. Baseball is much better at it. It depends a little bit on the sports. Jesper said it earlier, the engagement with sport in general is much higher in the U.S. You don't just follow your local soccer team. You follow your local baseball team. You follow your local hockey team. You follow your college team. They are way more ingrained in individual teams and individual players than we are here. There's a big difference, I think the live element will come more on par with Europe over time.
Thank you, Mark. We have a question from the audience.
Yes. Morten Rask Nymark from Industriens Pension. First of all, to the whole team, thank you very much for a fantastic presentation and a good capital markets date. It's fantastic in its detail.
Thank you.
Two questions. One, maybe mostly for you, Jesper. You presented a lot of opportunities, a lot of new markets and a lot of new potential, new capabilities within the toolbox, where you can grow. Maybe if you could talk a bit about the strategic priorities, because it can maybe be depending on the people and the money, and there can be some limits on what you can do. What do you think you should prioritize? What do you push into the organization? Maybe for Flemming and Jesper.
Flemming, maybe you can elaborate a bit on the criteria when you do M&A, because what we have for us as a long-term investor, we have seen many companies that will grow themselves to death more or less, but making a lot of acquisitions that do not have the right value creation behind it. What may be more, if you could give us more financial guidance on the criteria you have for doing investments on the financial side?
I'll go first. The, the vision presented of becoming the leading digital sports media group is actually something we work very actively internally. It's drilled down to strategic objectives for the year. Just to mention some, we have like then a 12-month focus. One of those strategic objectives for this year is LATAM. That's like we have set aside investment to build up the offices there, give us the capabilities to win that market. Alluding to the ambition with these big audiences being a digital sports media group, we also invest in the technology behind the ad tech platform, simply enabling us to serve more relevant ads to the audience.
Over time, it's really our ambition to understand our users better and better in order to segment and show even more relevant ads. Those are two of our strategic objectives for this year. Another one is consolidation of our American position, the fourth is related to stronger group, that we wanna make sure we harvest the synergies across the group of almost 1,000 employees, coming some from acquisitions. We make sure we sort of get the best practices shared internally. Those four initiatives are our strategic objectives for this year.
Back to the tight ship.
Yeah.
That was why I started with that slide, because we are painfully aware that you can just do a lot of acquisitions, and they don't really turn out to be nothing at the end, or you can do that for some time. You can say, first off, I think we are in the same boat. We are deeply vested, some of us more than others, but in the company. Capital allocation, disciplined approach is really something that we work on. Every day Christian has 10 new ideas, and we try to bring it down to 0.5, perhaps. When it comes to M&A, we have a cycle where we have an M&A board. We have a pipeline that we work on continuously.
Management engaged every two weeks, so basically prioritizing what to go for. That will be a mix of, you can say, how is the current business going? Are the targets, how much capital will they bring in? Can we actually leverage our debt on that? Most importantly is the ROI that we look at when we do a decision on buying an asset that might not be profitable. Do we believe in the long-term business case and the net present value that we look at? Every case is prioritized that way. I hope that my tight ship slide sort of was at least the first five-year proof of that. That's how we go about it.
Yeah. Back to Hjalmar.
Thanks. Yeah, question on your esports and monetization there. You do not report it separately, but I guess you're much more profitable than a typical esports company because lots of company might not be good at monetization. Can you talk about more monetization in your esports business, how it is now, and what opportunities do you see here? Also, do you use paid media in a sense for HLTV or FUTBIN?
To start with the latter, it's no, not paid media right now, but it's again, it's a toolbox we have, and over time, likely there will be opportunities arising and then we know how to go about with it. For the monetization, we have acquired, those very big audiences, and the business were profitable when we acquired them. Again, we are just applying gradually more of our existing business models to the business and also having a focus on growing the audience. It's more incremental in like, you know, a radical shift of how we monetize these businesses. We do care about like how is the financial performance when we buy it.
There are a lot of esports businesses out there and as you rightfully say, not all of them are profitable and they may not fit into what we do necessarily if we don't see sort of a solid and on its own well-performing business.
Thanks.
Thank you. I have one more question online, and then, if there are no more in here, then I guess we can close it down after that. It's been a long day for all of us. I think it's a question that relates a bit to what Petra already talked about in terms of LATAM, but it's a question around how we are utilizing our brands globally, because I think we've been speaking a lot about Christian also spoke about how we have local brands everywhere in Europe, and now we've acquired some pretty big brands in the US as well. I think, yeah, maybe if we start there.
Yeah. how we utilize the brands across markets and what's the potential-
If we do it.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think the Dust2 example is a pretty good one because when we launched that in the Brazilian market, within, as I recall, 48 hours, the Twitter handle of that brand in Brazil had 23,000 followers. If you're not sort of too familiar with Twitter, that's a lot in such a short period of time. A testament to riding on the back of HLTV is extremely helpful for a local brand. We do see that there will be other large markets where launching Dust2 will make a lot of sense for us. If you take Action Network product quality and content quality there, it's something we are definitely also considering for a Spanish-speaking market, that it would be relevant there.
It's more about, like, when to launch that and how to go about it because we also wanna make sure we localize in a right manner. We have several brands that will be relevant in other markets when we localize them. It's not, you can say, sort of a main part of the strategy, but it's opportunistically driven, that when we see a nice fit, we will go and do it.
Oh, there was a last chance in the room.
concerning the U.S. market, it's my impression that, most states only allow, up to ten betting firms in the state. Correct me if I'm wrong, but, how do you see it from your perspective? Is it at a advantage or a disadvantage?
Yeah
for you?
In general, we prefer competition, so we would like to have many market participants. It will vary state by state, so some states have more than 10 and others, less than 10. Coming back to Carl's point, what we care about is having strong and established relationships with the biggest sportsbooks. Fortunately, we're in a position where we have such a big audience, and our products, they cater so well to this industry, so we're more or less a must-have, and we collaborate closely with them. I think it's honestly a bigger issue if you're a smaller player in this market because then it will be hard to get the right partnerships with all of these players.
Coming back to why size and scale really matters and, why M&A has served us so well because it has brought us to that position where we're at eyesight with a lot of the business partners we have. Fundamentally, we like competition. We would like many brands out there, sportsbooks that we can compare and work with.
Perfect. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us here again. Before you all get up, we are inviting you for a small networking session outside. I hope Gavin has fixed some marshmallows because we're all craving them at this point in time. Thank you very much for joining us and spending your afternoon with us here. We hope you learned something new and maybe to some extent got a bit excited about our new vision of becoming the leading digital sports media group. Thank you.
Thanks.