We all know 2020 was a year for the history books. DraftKings overcame some obstacles and made it a monumental year nonetheless. Here's what happened. We announced our plan to go public. It is going to be so big, it is unbelievable.
Giving the U.S. sports fan a U.S. Sportsbook they can trust in, and have partnered with all the major leagues to give players a way to get closer to the action. There's never been a year quite like 2020. At DraftKings, we did our best to lift the spirits and engagement of our community with exceptional content and premium sponsorships. We also strengthened major brand partnerships with mega championship events and team partnerships like the Chicago Cubs, where we plan to open a retail Sportsbook right in the heart of Wrigley. We've broadened our roster.
Hey, guys. Bryson DeChambeau here. I wanted to personally reach out and introduce myself. We've strengthened our board and stepped up to support the nation during unprecedented times. We are going to contribute 100% of the revenues that we make from the first day back of both NBA and WNBA games to charities and other initiatives that support combating racism and promoting racial justice and social justice in the United States.
We're on a mission to create the world's favorite games and betting experiences because we know, in America. Royalty is not inherited, it's earned. Let's make it rain.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for DraftKings' 2021 Virtual Investor Day. Today, we'll talk about a number of topics, including our latest TAM outlook, market share, brand and marketing, product and technology, unit economics, and long-term EBITDA. I'll begin the presentation, then we'll hear from my co-founders. Matt Kalish is our President of North America, and Paul Liberman is our President of Global Technology and Product. We'll also hear from our CFO, Jason Park. We encourage you to submit your questions during today's event for the Q&A session. Before we begin, I'd like to refer all of you to our Safe Harbor statement and remind you that statements we make during this presentation that are not statements of historical fact constitute forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. We assume no responsibility for updating forward-looking statements.
With that, let's begin. We will be covering five topics today. First, we're going to talk about TAM. Our 2020 actual results suggest that at 100% legalization, the OSB and iGaming market could be $67 billion+ in North America. Of course, we are not assuming that we will see 100% legalization, so we're gonna update you more on what we're thinking there later in the presentation. Legalization trends, however, do continue to be very positive. Secondly, we're going to talk about market share. Our market share for OSB and iGaming is run rating at 30% and 19% respectively, as evidenced by Q4 2020. DraftKings is also online in more states than any other operator. Third, we're gonna be covering LTV to CAC.
We have updates on our customer retention as well as our revenue retention, and we are continuing to learn and improve our playbook, and we will also be updating you on payback periods that we're seeing early in the market. Fourth, we are going to be talking about our long-term EBITDA outlook, which we now are thinking is going to be $1.7 billion, as evidenced by some of the recent updates to TAM. Fifth, we're gonna talk about how we are well-capitalized for growth and are in a good position as new legalization occurs in states. Improving upon last year, we've now included two methods for estimating the TAM for online sports betting.
One is the population method, which is the same way that we estimated it last year. We've also now included a GDP method, which is using the relative GDPs of these different markets as compared to the other markets in the U.S. that we're forecasting. Using these methodologies, we arrive at a range of $22 billion-$36 billion. For the rest of the presentation, we have assumed the lowest of these numbers, $22 billion, for all of our future calculations. One of the things we've been asked over the past year or two is whether New Jersey is a good proxy for the rest of the U.S. As it turns out, the answer is yes.
In fact, if you look at the other states and you normalize for seasonality and for also timeline of launch by only looking at the first consecutive September to December, New Jersey is quite in line with how they're performing. In fact, New Jersey is a little bit lower than what the other states are doing. Notably, this includes some states such as Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, where DraftKings is not present, and we believe those places could actually be doing better were DraftKings to be operational there. Also, Pennsylvania has a higher tax rate than most other states, and so we haven't invested as heavily in Pennsylvania, and we would imagine the same may be true for certain other operators, which could be leading to a little bit lower performance in Pennsylvania. The iGaming market is where we believe we have really been underestimating TAM.
In fact, in just New Jersey alone, iGaming was almost $1 billion last year. Of course, partly this is due to the fact that iGaming grew faster without sports being played in most of Q2, as well as in the end of Q1. That said, we've assumed a very modest 5% growth rate for the next three years, which is clearly much lower than what we've been seeing and accounts for the fact that some of the growth that we would have seen may have been pulled forward in 2020. We've also only assumed that 5% CAGR through 2023, and in doing so and then using New Jersey as a proxy for the rest of the U.S., you get to somewhere between a $40 billion-$43 billion TAM using the population method and the GDP method that we described earlier.
For the purposes of the rest of the presentation, we have assumed the more conservative of these two numbers, $40 billion. On to legalization trends. We've seen really good progress in only the 2.5 years or so since the Supreme Court struck down PASPA. We are up to about 27% of the U.S. population having legal online Sportsbook. DraftKings is present in states that have 25% of the U.S. population, and of the remaining 2%, Nevada represents the largest opportunity. We also have seen iGaming legalized in states that represent 11% of the U.S. population. DraftKings is present in states with 10% of the population, with again, Nevada representing the largest open opportunity. Canada has been an exciting new development over the past year as well.
This was not really something we were focused on in last year's presentation, but due to some very favorable legislation trends, we now believe Canada could represent a very meaningful opportunity for DraftKings. The most progress has been made in Ontario, where the budget is legalized and now is on to regulatory approval, which in Canada is most of where the rest of it's defined. Things like tax rate and other sorts of things are actually defined through the regulatory body. Ontario, of course, is almost half the population in Canada and is also a very sizable daily fantasy sports market for DraftKings. Were Ontario to be a U.S. state, it would be a top 10 state for us. Canada, we estimate using the same two population and GDP methods to be anywhere from a $5 billion-$8 billion potential market.
For the purpose of the presentation, we have used the lower of these two numbers, $5 billion, in our market estimates going forward. Now, on to the punchline. We believe, as we said, that a good and conservative, perhaps, estimate for full legalization TAM in sports betting is $22 billion and iGaming is $40 billion and for Canada is $5 billion. We are not assuming full legalization, and we have kept these numbers the same as last year at 65% of the U.S. population for sports betting online and 30% of the U.S. population for iGaming. In Canada, we've assumed 64% of the population, with Ontario representing the largest piece. We have also assumed that there may be a few other provinces that act as well.
On market share, we kept our sports betting market share at the same place as last year in the 20%-30% range. In iGaming, we've tightened the range a little bit. It was 10%-20% last year. We've now made it 15%-20%. The reason being that we are not below 15% in any market that we're in, and we've actually been growing our iGaming share very steadily, and most states are actually over 20% at this point. We felt like 15%-20% was a realistic range. In Canada, we assume 10%-20%. The reason for this is there have been gray market operators for quite some time in Canada, so DraftKings will not have the early mover advantage that we've had in other states.
However, we have assumed that we're at 10%-20% because even in New Jersey, where we entered the iGaming market five years plus into it, we've still achieved 15% share and have been growing that share. We think 10%-20% is a realistic assumption for Canada. When you total all of that up, we are looking at $5 billion-$7.3 billion as the gross revenue opportunity. As a reminder, our Q4 market share is at the top end of these U.S. ranges, with 30% in OSB and 19% in iGaming, so we feel very good about these estimates. Additionally, this does not include 35% of the U.S. for online sports betting, 70% for iGaming, 36% of the population of Canada, and it includes no further international expansion.
Next, we'll talk about market share. To start, we want to describe where we're present and how the rest of the market looks. DraftKings, as a reminder, is in more states online than any other operator for sports betting at 12. If you look at other operators, only five are even in eight states, and the vast majority of them are at two or one state. There is a long tail of 21 operators that are only in one state. We believe, as we've noted in the past, that being present for a larger portion of the population is a huge advantage in terms of scale, but also in terms of marketing. As we'll talk about later, marketing becomes much more efficient as you achieve more and more population presence across the states.
The next thing we wanna talk about is why we're different and why we believe our market share is very sustainable, and perhaps we can grow it even over time. First is our trusted brand. That is extremely important, not just for any company, but particularly in our space where customers are trusting us with their data, trusting us to hold their money, trusting that we're settling things in a fair way. Really important. Second is our daily fantasy user base. That keeps growing and is now up to about 5 million paid users. We've been at this for nine years, and as more states take time to open up, we will continue to grow our daily fantasy user base, as well as grow it in states that already have legal online sports betting.
Third is our marketing machine. We are a very technology and data-driven company, and the way we approach marketing is no different. We look at specific LTVs by channel, by state, and a number of other metrics to optimize. We also are very tech-driven and data-driven in how we manage the marketing with a lot of the bidding that we do on platforms like Google and Facebook managed by machines. Fourth, our product innovation and user centricity. As we've noted in the past, we consider ourselves first and foremost a product company. Our technology powers everything we do and allows us to bring products to market faster, and our innovative culture and user-centric culture allows us to really understand what the customer wants and needs in a way that we believe is greater than others.
Time is our friend on this one, as these products are very complicated and they're still very much in the nascent infancy stage. The more time we have, the more we believe we'll be able to put distance between ourselves and the competition on the product front. Fifth is the vertical integration that we have with SBTech after the business combination last year. This is important on two dimensions. One, it gives us full control of our technology and trading stack, which is an important part of being able to innovate and move at the pace we want to on product. Second, it is a huge cost saving, as outside of state taxes, the largest piece of cost of goods sold for us is the revenue share that we pay currently to our third-party provider.
Sixth is the single wallet that we have across the platform. This is important not just for user convenience in terms of being able to have their dollars in one place and not have to deposit in separate places. It's also really important because it's actually an account-level integration that allows us to link things like the data between every single product that people are on, which allows for our data science engines to be more effective. It also allows for future innovation on things like having a loyalty program that spans across products. Also, social features that span across products. Seventh is geographic flexibility and velocity. As we've noted, we're in more states than any other online operator, and part of the reason why is the infrastructure that we built in our daily fantasy days that has allowed us to toggle things very easily and be ready to go up and running in new states as they open up sports betting.
We will continue to focus on being an early mover and try to be close to or at first to market in as many places as possible, as we believe this is important for long-term market share. Eight is our scalable regulatory platform. Regulatory is a very important aspect of our business, and being a gold standard in things like responsible gaming and other sorts of regulatory requirements is very important to us, not just because they're required, but also because it's the right thing to do in order to make this industry operate and be perceived and be the way that it should be. We believe that this is something that we'll continue to be able to not only move quickly on, but do it in the right way, and it's very core to our culture.
Our mission statement includes the word responsible in it, and we take this very seriously. Ninth is our data science engine. This is something that we think is going to continue to also be an increased advantage for us over time, not just because we'll continue to improve the models and the models will continue to improve themselves, but also because more data makes them better. This is an area that we use to power all parts of the DraftKings experience, from our product to our marketing to our customer support, and we believe that this is something that will also be a huge advantage for us over the long term.
On this slide, we talk about what our actual market share was in Q4 of 2020. As a reminder, it was 30% in online sports betting and 19% in iGaming. As another reminder, this is at the top end of what we have assumed for our long-term market share projection ranges.
Next, I'm gonna turn it over to my Co-Founder, Matt Kalish, and he is going to talk about our marketing and brand.
Thank you, Jason. DraftKings is headed into 2021 with a tremendous amount of momentum, and that's really led by the United States' number one brand across all of our key products. DraftKings is number one in unaided awareness and is the most preferred app across our fantasy sports platform, our sports betting platform, and one thing we're really excited about is all the momentum that we've built up in iGaming over the last year. DraftKings build a lot of the content in our iGaming platform that engages our users, and that differentiation we think is really helping us quite a bit. For example, in Michigan, we recently launched and saw over 75% of our revenue coming in on DraftKings custom games that we built that can only be found on DraftKings.
We're really excited about all the momentum and how top of mind DraftKings is in this new, really exciting industry in the U.S. A lot of the progress we've been able to make on the brand side and in engaging and converting users come down to our key relationships, which we believe are unparalleled in the industry. We have a key relationship with the NFL, all of the major sports leagues such as Major League Baseball and the NBA, the PGA Tour. We recently announced an agreement with the UFC to be their sports betting partner. And then in terms of what's next, some new deals that we've done with Drone Racing League, with Major League Eating, with the American Cornhole League really show what's next in sports in terms of engaging our audience. All of these deals are really exciting.
In terms of localizing our team strategy, what we've seen is that DraftKings has been very successful getting team deals in place in all of our key markets, whether that's deals like the Eagles and 76ers in Pennsylvania, heavying up in New York and New Jersey, for example, with the New York Giants deal, which is the first of its kind to include iGaming, sports betting, and fantasy all in one deal, and our landmark agreement with the Chicago Cubs, which includes a retail sportsbook in the heart of Wrigleyville.
Finally, on the media side, we have a huge array of great media distribution deals, things like Turner Sports, which includes The Match Two, The Match Three, Major League Baseball, deals with ESPN, Fox Media, DISH Network, which was recently announced, all really exciting for us in terms of reaching our audience at the highest scale of anyone. DraftKings operates a high-scale performance marketing engine, and this capability is really driven by our leading technology platform, our analytics capabilities, and our data science capabilities. DraftKings is able to optimize everything from our media mix to automated bidding on digital platforms to personalization on our product suite. All of that is done through our leading capabilities on data science.
We are able to personalize the experience on, you know, promotions, on the content that people see in the products in play, and all the way down through the CRM treatments that they receive through email, push, and retargeting. All of that is really driven through a proprietary technology that we've built using trillions of data points across 10 million+ customers over almost a decade, and it's something that really differentiates DraftKings and our ability to get performance marketing at scale. Finally, you know, one area that's really come into prominence over the last year has been in-game media. With sports betting coming into the forefront of the mind of the American consumer, there's been more and more interest from broadcasters to integrate that into the live sports experience.
You will see DraftKings everywhere from through our deal with Turner in the MLB playoffs or The Match Two or The Match Three, sports betting integrations being built into the pregame or during the games themselves broadcast. Agreements with Triller to cover the Mike Tyson-Roy Jones fight were extremely successful with sports betting integrations, as well as in NFL doing Big Play Payday, which is if there's a large, you know, fourth quarter touchdown during an NFL game. The viewers can win something on DraftKings. All of these sort of in-game integrations have really helped us get to a higher scale of performance marketing, engage more and more users, and enhance the content that we're amplifying through the DraftKings product offerings.
With that, I'm gonna hand it off to Paul Liberman, who is our Global Head of Product and Technology, to speak to our product roadmap and our technology platform.
Thank you, Matt. I'm gonna take a moment to review where we're at today, first in terms of product and technology, and then we'll discuss a little bit about what we're doing in the future. 2020 was an exciting year for DraftKings. The product and technology teams adapted well to the COVID-19 pandemic and delivered some great new product innovations. Let's begin with daily fantasy sports. Over the past year, we launched 19 new sports and game types, including our best ball game and snake drafts. Both have received great adoption with over 150,000 customers playing our product within the first week. Our DFS product continues to grow, including in states where sportsbook has been legalized. In 2020, our sportsbook product continued to improve and expand. We launched in four new states in 2020 and two additional ones in 2021.
In all those jurisdictions, we continue to be the top-rated sportsbook app. We have added many features such as live streaming video and pop culture pools contests. We integrated our data science platform and improved our experience to be a lot faster, smoother, and more stable. We're just at the beginning of our sportsbook innovation and look forward to migrating over to our own technology platform in Q3 of this year. For our iGaming product, since our last Analyst Day, we were the first to market in three jurisdictions with both a standalone product and our sportsbook-embedded iGaming product. We launched over 20 new games and will continue to invest heavily in our homegrown games. As of today, over half our wagers are placed on the homegrown games that we've created.
We continue to have a robust product roadmap to launch many more of our own games and many much more of our own content. Finally, for all of these products, they are all built on our proprietary platform that enables us to have one account, one wallet, and a seamless experience across all our products and jurisdictions. This enables us to launch early in markets and have a stable, safe, and consistent experience. Let me dive into how we think about our roadmap and the investments we're gonna make in the DraftKings product strategy. Here are what we call the four Cs of the DraftKings consumer product strategy.
Number one is control. We are a product and technology company at heart, as both Jason and Matt mentioned earlier. DraftKings will really work to control its own destiny across every consumer product that we operate by owning and operating our core technology platform. We continue to invest in our teams, both the consumer-facing teams and our platform teams, with a focus on being a technology leader and an innovator in the North American market. Second, we believe that content is extremely important. It is essentially why people love to come play and interact with our products. We are gonna aim to offer the broadest possible suite of content across all our real money gaming platforms. This is in daily fantasy, sports betting, and iGaming.
Third is connectivity. Within our product, it is really important to be able to leverage our seamless platform, seamless experience, and the data to make it easy for customers to jump between daily fantasy, sports betting, and iGaming. I'll illustrate a little bit more on the connectivity in a later slide. We will work to create an integrated ecosystem of consumer experiences that will all be powered by our proprietary data and marketing technology. Finally, we have to have the best customer experience. As I mentioned earlier, we have the top-rated apps, we always aim to create fun, exciting, and personalized experience by making the products that anticipate and respond to our customers' behavior. Ultimately, we believe if we're not innovating, someone else will get ahead of us. This is why data science and AI are so core to the foundation to the way we operate now and going forward.
Internally, we're never satisfied with our product and always strive to make it better. We talk a lot about our connectivity and data platform experience, but I wanted to take a moment just to briefly talk about what this looks like and how does this actually get implemented in the DraftKings ecosystem. Here's an example. This example doesn't show all the data that we collect, but this is some of what the stuff that we look at as we show our recommended contests, conversions, marketing platforms, et cetera. As we see, there's a user. We track things like preferred leagues that they play on, the preferred types of teams, what players they like to bet on. Do they like tournaments? Do they like single games? What is their favorite iGaming game? Do they like table games or slots?
All this information is consumed by our data science platform and our data environment and is fed to all of our collective products, both the ones that you see, which is Daily Fantasy, Sportsbook, and iGaming, as well as the ones you don't see, which is a marketing technology platform that Matt talked about earlier. The way that this gets implemented is that for DFS, Sportsbook, and iGaming, you see that everyone has the same balance that I have in my account. That money is used. DraftKings takes the complexity and makes it really easy to play across any product you'd like. If you're in Daily Fantasy Sports, this player, for example, likes UFC. We'll recommend contests around UFC.
Since they have $20 in their account, we will show the $3 contest because we know that may be the one that they would like to enter. Additionally, because this person is in New Jersey, we will identify that they also have sportsbook and iGaming available in their state. We will engage them with an offer that says, "McGregor first-round knockout," because we know that this person, Paul in this case, likes the UFC and is more likely to bet on that and other particular products. For casino conversion, they like NFL. We have a Football Blackjack game that we'll offer to see if we can engage them in that product.
If they were in our Sportsbook product, we would show them the recommended bets, like UFC, or we would show them things like a DFS conversion offer of the $100,000 UFC contest that we talked about earlier. Right inside our Sportsbook app, they can play Football Blackjack. They don't need to leave and download a new app to play. Similarly, in iGaming, we would have the same links. Finally, our marketing platform understands all this data, both internal and with our CRM tools. We'll be able to present offers, maybe like a deposit bonus because this person has a lower balance, or a McGregor win bonus on Facebook because we know that this person likes UFC. All of this is highly automated and happens every single day across millions of different permutations and segments.
It's this platform that we think makes for a seamless user experience that will ultimately be very important in differentiating us and winning in this industry. One of the areas that we've had substantial success in also is going back to the four Cs, is creating our own content, as well as creating a great consumer experience, is integrating our gaming product into our sportsbook platform, as well as a new standalone app that we created. We have developed over 26 homegrown games since the last Analyst Day that customers can engage. These games have the best-in-class graphics, a fast, seamless experience, and are easy to use and fun to play. Here are three examples of games that we've been able to innovate on.
Number one is Slider Blackjack. Slider Blackjack is a game that's only in our embedded sportsbook product, which allows you to bet on sports while at the same time playing a blackjack hand. Imagine watching an NFL game and there's a commercial. You can slide up a blackjack hand, play a few hands, slide it back down, and engage with your sportsbook experience. We have seen that Slider Blackjack increases engagement substantially within our sportsbook product. Another example is March Mania Roulette. Given our strong base of sports customers, we have created new and innovative offerings that engage customers in the games that they love, but make it more themed around sports. We know that our customers love new and exciting games over the different sporting seasons. We've been able to launch new content that will engage them and make for a fun experience.
Finally, launching new games like Baccarat. We were the first to launch a Baccarat version with side bets that make the game more exciting. This is a version that is loved in the casinos, but not available online before we launched it. We believe that further expansion of our original gaming content will be monumental to the success of our iGaming product. While we also continue to integrate new games from innovative creators, we will focus on developing games that will either differentiate our product or replace games that consume a lot of our revenue or have substantial cost. Those are really the two vectors that we will use to prioritize our content over the coming year. We're excited for the future growth of this product. Lastly, a quick update on the migration to our own platform. We have been working over the past year and have begun the process of migrating to our own platform.
We are currently in beta mode. Over the coming months, we will move over to our platform and expect to be complete with this by the end of Q3. As a reminder, when we move over to our own platform, we believe we will have full control over the entire experience in sports betting. This means we will own our own technology, trading tools, and experience and be completely vertically integrated in the industry. As a technology company, we're excited to have full control of our product and the opportunities for innovation that this will unlock. However, we are mindful that this is going to take some time. We're in the first inning with our DraftKings Sportsbook product. It'll be a multi-year journey for us to launch all of the amazing features we plan on building.
Sports betting is a pretty complicated product, and right now we're developing what we believe to be the strongest foundation for our future. Going forward, I expect our pace of innovation to only accelerate as we complete this migration.
With that, I'd like to hand it over to our CFO, Jason Park.
Thank you so much for that, Paul, and good morning, everyone. For this next section, we are excited to share an update on our state playbook and what we are seeing on the core elements of LTV and CAC. Overall, we have more conviction than ever on our state playbook. This summary page outlines our view of the five core elements of LTV and CAC. First, on promotions, we will talk about how our promotional investment will decline within a unit as we shift out of new customer acquisition mode and into existing customer retention mode. Second, we now have line of sight into 58% gross margins in typical OSB and iGaming states, up from 50% last year.
This improvement is not only due to the upcoming migration to our own bet engine, but also because of initiatives we have in place across other elements of our COGS structure. Third, we are excited to provide new visibility into our customer and revenue retention. Fourth, on CAC, we will update you on the continued success we are having in cross-selling our existing DFS players into OSB. Finally, we want to reiterate how we see national marketing efficiencies accruing to scale operators like ourselves. In conclusion, we will show you the payback period for some of our early cohorts and why we are on track to being contribution profit positive within two-three years in any given unit. This page is a purely illustrative page to give you a sense on why promotional investment will naturally decline within a state over time.
On the left-hand side, you can see an illustrative depiction of the higher promotional investment for a new customer versus an existing customer. On the right-hand side, you can see that as a state mixes out of new customers and into existing customers, the overall promotional investment decreases. Next, I want to update you on gross margin rate. Last year, we talked about our outlook for New Jersey in five years, and this year we are using more data. As you can see, we now estimate that a typical OSB and iGaming state will have an approximately 58% gross margin rate after five years. On taxes, when we take the straight average of our estimated taxes as a percentage of net revenue in five years, we are at 24%. Notably, this calculation includes Pennsylvania, which is north of 40% for both OSB and iGaming.
On platform, the big thing is that we are removing the cost of our current third-party bet engine provider based on the confidence in our migration plan, which will be complete by the end of Q3 2021. The remaining portion of our platform costs include AWS and a handful of other third-party suppliers. On payment processing, we are seeing early success in not only renegotiating better terms with our payment providers, but also encouraging our players to use lower-cost payment methods that are also more convenient for them. On revenue share, as we continue to solidify our leadership position, we find ourselves getting better and better deals on market access as states open up. For the first time, we want to provide insight into real data on customer and revenue retention.
First off, a bit on the methodology. Since Q3 2018, we have had 40 state quarter cohorts. Indiana in Q4 2019 is a state quarter cohort, for example, or Colorado in Q3 2020. For 10 of these 40 state quarter cohorts, we have four full quarters of data after the acquisition quarter. For two of these 10, we have eight full quarters of data after the acquisition quarter. For these 10 state quarter cohorts on the left-hand side, you can see that 82% of our players continue to engage with us over their first four quarters. For the two state quarter cohorts where we have eight quarters of data, 87% continue to engage with us over their second four quarters. For revenue retention, we can only analyze the two state quarter cohorts, and you can see that these cohorts experienced 108% revenue retention in their second 12 months relative to their first 12 months. Outstanding results.
Notably, these results include no adjustment for the COVID-impacted periods in 2020. It is reasonable to believe that results could be better on a go-forward basis. In conclusion, we are extremely proud of these results and think the results are a testament not only to the natural stickiness of this product category, but also of our unique data-driven and differentiated customer engagement and retention capabilities.
With that, now Jason is going to speak a bit about what we're seeing in DFS cross-sell, as well as the advantages of national marketing scale.
As we noted earlier, our daily fantasy user base is a big advantage for DraftKings as customers look to engage in online sports betting in new states. It's not just a great source of new customers. We also have a tremendous amount of data on favorite sports, favorite players, and other preferences of the customer. We know when people like to engage with our products, whether they respond to certain types of push notifications, we have saved payment methods for many of our customers, and more. In most states, we are converting in the +60% range. Pennsylvania, we are a little bit lower. The reason we are lower in Pennsylvania is we haven't invested as much in that state due to the higher tax regime. We believe there's upside to these numbers.
The reason that we believe that is that there are still some issues with the industry that are causing the numbers to be lower, such as many payment methods not working and customers that want to engage on these products actually not being able to get through. We think that that'll be something that improves over time as more and more issuing banks consider the right way at the right limits to allow customers to engage with online sports betting. Additionally, there is more friction in getting somebody to engage with online sports betting versus daily fantasy sports, as they're required to input more information, such as their last four digits of their social, and sometimes they're required to do document uploads and things like that as well.
Hopefully, those are things that we'll be able to improve with better UX over time as well, and we think there's upside to these numbers, but already we're converting at a very nice rate. Earlier, we noted that we think that marketing efficiency will improve as more states launch sports betting. There are a number of reasons for this. First, there are certain channels, such as buying on television, where the cost per impression is actually about 3x higher to buy locally versus nationally. Secondly, there are currently things we are doing, such as our integrations into programming like The Match, which are national, since there's no local feed of those broadcasts. As more and more customers become eligible to sign up for sports betting, those same integrations will improve in performance over time.
Thirdly, even digital channels where we are always going to target specific states, such as Facebook and Google, at higher scale, you get better cost per clicks and better cost per impressions as you are competing against a better universe on the bidding front. Lastly, we also believe that there will be regional benefits, too. An example of that is when New Jersey opened up, we were buying in the South New Jersey DMA for television. That also spans Philadelphia. Once Philadelphia, the whole state of Pennsylvania, had customers that were eligible to sign up for sports betting, those same television ads performed better, as we did not need to increase, although sometimes we will increase because with better efficiency, we can spend deeper.
Thank you, Jason. We have said in the past that we expect our cohorts to pay back in two to three years. We are well on our way to achieving that. When you look at the 10 state quarter cohorts, you can see that after just four quarters, they have generated gross margin dollars equal to 70% of their acquisition costs. When you look at the two state quarter cohorts, you can see that they have generated gross margin dollars equal to 254% of their acquisition cost. As a result, when you stack these quarterly and annual cohorts on top of each other, the result is that a unit will turn contribution profit positive in year two or three after launch.
You can see here that we generated $8 million of contribution profit in New Jersey in 2020, despite the impact of COVID. We had a very unique customer acquisition environment in the back half of 2020, which allowed us to invest heavier into customer acquisition. These investments impacted our contribution profit in 2020. However, as you can see from our projected 2021 numbers, we expect to realize substantial benefit for this investment. Finally, we expect our state playbook to pay large dividends in 2021, with approximately $65 million of contribution profit this year.
With that, I'd like to turn it back to Jason Robins to discuss our updated view of EBITDA at maturity.
As a reminder, we have increased our TAM estimate for both online sports betting and iGaming, as well as included Canada in our long-term projections. We did not change our assumption around legalization in the U.S. for either online sports betting or iGaming. We did not change our market share assumption on online sports betting. We did tighten our range for iGaming. All of that comes together to a forecast of $1.7 billion as a very achievable and perhaps conservative long-term EBITDA target. This also, as I remind you, does not include 70% of the U.S. for iGaming, 35% of the U.S. for online sports betting, 36% of Canada for its online sports betting and iGaming, nor does it include any other international expansion or any expansion into new products.
The final page in our presentation today is just a reminder that we have roughly 428 million shares outstanding today on a fully diluted basis, and that we estimate that by the end of the year, we would have approximately 432 million shares outstanding on a fully diluted basis. With that, we'll take a short 15-minute break and come back for open questions and answers.
[Break]
Thank you for joining, everyone. We appreciate it. I'm going to turn it over to Joe now to start the Q&A session.
Thanks, Jason. We'll begin with a handful of questions on TAM. The first question is, could you give a timeframe on when you expect to reach 65% and 30% of the OSB and iGaming populations in the U.S. being legalized?
We haven't, at this time, shared a timeline on that. It's very tricky because, you know, essentially we'd be predicting a pace at which state legislatures and governments move, and that's not something that we feel that we can, we can do. It's not within our control. We feel confident that that's an achievable target. We think there might even be some upside to that. However, we don't really feel confident in being able to give a projection of exactly what the timing will be.
Our next question is 2020 really a fair year to base your iGaming TAM off of, given the stay-at-home nature of COVID?
I think that's a great question. We actually accounted for that in how we were thinking about it. What we did to get to the iGaming TAM is we took the 2020 number and then we assumed a 5% CAGR from 2021 through 2023, which is, you know, clearly much lower than it's been going at. We didn't assume any growth at all after 2023. We kind of counterbalanced what was probably some pull forward of growth in 2020 with a much more conservative than otherwise would have been assumption of only three years of growth at 5% after that.
Great. The next question is, why do you think the U.S. OSB market could be as big as the U.K. and/or Australia at maturity?
We think that the OSB market in the U.S. could be larger. I assume that's a, you know, a question asked on a population basis. You know, really there's a number of data points we looked at. We looked at U.K., Australia. We also looked at where New Jersey was run rating. We looked at adjusting by population as well as adjusting by relative GDP size. That gave us six different outputs, and we actually took the most, the lowest of those six outputs, at $22 billion. You know, hopefully there's some upside there. We felt like $22 billion was safe given six different methodologies, and that was the lowest number that was produced by all six.
For your OSB TAM, what are you assuming for in-game betting?
We're not actually separately breaking out in-game betting in the OSB TAM. We're using the market level approach, which, you know, a great point there is that New Jersey still is very much at the infancy stages in terms of OSB in-game betting. If you look at the U.K., it's roughly 75% of online and mobile revenue made up by in-game betting. We're much lower than that in the U.S. New Jersey, being the proxy that we use, could actually have some upside with the adoption of in-game betting, and we didn't actually factor that in separately.
How much is New Hampshire benefiting from online sports betting not being legal in Massachusetts?
That's a great question. We do think that in various parts of the country where there's large neighboring states, that could be a benefit. It's really impossible to tell exactly how much. Certainly we look at proxies, like how many people who have addresses in Massachusetts, how many people that are playing daily fantasy in Massachusetts that are driving over the border to make bets. We have good geolocation data. It's really hard to know exactly where it would net out. You know, I think that there is certainly some benefit there, that's for sure.
At maturity, do you have a view on how many users you would have underlying your TAM assumptions for OSB and iGaming?
We haven't forecasted number of users and shared that publicly. Actually, I shouldn't say that. We have an internal forecast we have not disclosed publicly a user count there. We've used top-down metrics around what we think the participation in the market will be, which sorta implies the number of users in the market. We haven't actually said what we think DraftKings' user count will be.
Do you have any comment on what's happening in New York at this time?
Well, New York, it's very exciting and encouraging to see that there's some momentum behind legalizing online sportsbook. Certainly we've hoped in the last few years that we would see that happen and, you know, it seems like the momentum has increased this year, which is great. Obviously, with any legislative process, especially in a big state like New York, there are gonna be lots of different conversations and debates about the best way to do it. You know, much like I said earlier, that's not really within our control. We're excited to be, you know, hopefully able to participate regardless how New York decides to do it. We believe that DraftKings will be an important part of helping New York reach its goal for generating tax revenue.
We're excited to engage with legislative and executive branch leaders at the right times when they ask us to, and we're here to help with that, and certainly hope that New York will be a market that progresses this year.
Can you provide an update on Maryland and Louisiana? You mentioned these states on your Q3 call, but not on your Q4 call.
Maryland and Louisiana both passed ballot initiatives in the fall that, really, you know, create a legislative path it must follow, and of course, that's followed by regulations, licensing, and everything else. Right now that's all in process. The legislative process is underway, and we hope that that'll result in, you know, some legislation being passed in both states this year. We're excited at those two states as an opportunity for DraftKings and, hopeful that that will happen this year.
Looking at your OSB market projection, is 20% the right growth rate to extrapolate the New Jersey market at over the next three years to arrive at your TAM estimate, given the growth in the state over the past year?
Well, it's certainly lower than it's been growing. Jason Park, do you wanna maybe comment on why we chose 20%?
I mean, when we looked back at the historical growth rates of iGaming, that was an important data point as we thought about what's the right percentage to use for further extrapolation. Again, we felt like that was a prudent number from which to grow from. Going back to the earlier point on the COVID impact in 2020, normalizing for that, we just felt 20% was very prudent.
All right. Moving on to questions on market share and product. Can you comment on the convergence of media and sports betting? Is that a threat or an opportunity for DraftKings?
I think that's a very exciting opportunity for DraftKings. As you've seen certainly over the last year, we've established a number of partnerships with media companies, and we think that that could be a great route for us. Those relationships are a really important part of how we see the integration happening. We've also recently established a relationship with DISH, and that's something that I think could pave the way for an exciting new way for these two things to converge. We've also, you know, have a small investment that we've made that we're considering, you know, whether or not to ramp up in our own content creation and, you know, that's something that I think will be very complementary to some of the key relationships that we've established.
How do you plan to differentiate your products over time to stand out from your competition?
Well, this is what I think we do best. We're at our heart, a product and technology company. We're also very customer-centric, so I think we have a good idea of the short-term roadmap. We're going to be migrating over to our proprietary technology and trading stack in the fall. I think from there, you know, there's probably a focus pretty heavily on in-game betting. I think on the iGaming side, we're gonna continue to focus on launching our own games. That's been a very successful strategy for us. It's allowed us to become the number one brand in iGaming in America.
That's really come, you know, to, I think, fruition in some of these new states, particularly Michigan, where we saw over 75% of the revenue, excuse me, of the handle generated in Michigan come on our own iGaming content. You know, from there I think we're really gonna focus on listening to the customer. As I said, we're a very customer-centric company, so, both between kinda looking at the data and understanding how customers engage as well as having strong feedback loops with our customers through things like market research, focus groups, feedback from our player reps, our customer service and experience teams. That all informs where we wanna take the product. You know, sometimes you don't find out until the next phase of evolution happens where it makes sense to go from there.
We certainly have a good short-term product roadmap, meaning for the next year or two, but I'm excited to listen to our customers and really understand where they would like to see us innovate and, you know, that'll really inform the go-forward roadmap beyond that.
Given your strong market share in OSB and iGaming in Q4 of 2020, what would be the reason or reasons that share could decline toward the midpoints of your long-term targets?
I don't know that it will. I think we just wanted to be, you know, prudent in that and not assume that everything would go 100%, you know, according to plan. I think there's reasons why we might be able to increase share, particularly, the investment that we plan on making in product and, you know, that's really gonna start with this migration and then ultimately we think we have years and years ahead that we'll be able to continue to innovate and put distance between our product and competitor products. I think there's reasons to believe there's upside, but also there's, you know, reasons to believe that there might be increased competition and things like that too.
We just felt it was prudent to say that we're not counting on everything going 100% according to plan, and even if it doesn't, even if we did decline a little bit, we think that this is still a very attractive opportunity. It doesn't mean we think that's what's going to happen. We just wanted to show that as like, hey, even if we go down a bit in market share, we think that we're actually gonna still have a really attractive business at maturity.
Is being first to market a sustainable competitive advantage or a way you differentiate against competitors?
It's certainly helpful. I think New Jersey iGaming is a great example of that. While we steadily gain share in New Jersey iGaming, it's our lowest share market right now relative to, you know, Pennsylvania, Michigan and West Virginia. I attribute that to the fact that we joined that market over five years after iGaming had already been established in New Jersey. Do I think we'll be able to continue gaining share there? I think so. We've done that, and I think we'll continue to do that. Obviously it's tougher when you're starting, you know, several years behind the competition. We continue to believe that there is an early mover advantage here. These are inherently sticky products. Obviously, you have to give a great experience to the customer. You have to keep innovating.
If you do that and they really enjoy what they're doing, there's not a whole lot of reason to think they're going to leave. I think getting, you know, the customers engaged with your products early and then being able to continue to innovate and take that customer-centric approach is something we believe will provide an advantage for us over time.
Why do you think your brand caught on quickly in iGaming? It looks like share has gone up a little bit over the course of 2020.
That's something we're really excited about. We didn't even launch an iGaming product until a little over two years ago, we're still relatively new here. You know, really it's been, ironically a place we've been able to invest more as we migrate our online sports betting platform. We've actually been able to invest and innovate more on the iGaming side since a lot of the homegrown content we've developed has happened over the last 18 months or so. I think really to answer the question, it starts with product. Providing a better product to customers, you know, really gets people talking and creates buzz.
I think also the fact that we've done such a successful job cross-selling our sports betting and DFS customers. We also launched a standalone app which we've begun to acquire new customers onto. I think, you know, all those things together have really helped us generate a lot of brand momentum and a lot of market share momentum in the iGaming market.
Can you talk about your DFS business? How is it performing? Are there any additional product innovations you are considering over the next year?
DFS had a really good year this past year in 2020, particularly in the back half of the year. Super Bowl was also a huge year-over-year growth event for us on the DFS side. I think where we see innovation continuing to happen is in, you know, launching new sports, adding more social features. Our Leagues product, which allows people to create private Leagues with their friends, has really been successful, continuing to focus on growing that. Also just continuing to innovate on the types of, you know, marketing that we do. For example, you know, our Pools product has really been a helpful product for acquiring customers onto DFS nationally, and it's a sort of different version.
You know, it's free to play usually, but it's a different version of what ultimately people see as, you know, betting and DFS. I think that's something that's an example of where we've been able to mesh products together and cross-sell very effectively on a national basis.
Can you make any additional comments on your announcement with DISH last week? Is this something that can be replicated with other providers?
That's the hope. We're really excited about this. It's something that, you know, we think sort of, you know, if it goes well, could be groundbreaking. It'll feel to the user like they're able to place a bet directly from their TV. Now, in reality it'll be, you know, a communication between the streaming device and the iPhone or other, you know, whatever other Android, you know, whatever other smartphone that they have the DraftKings app on. It's not actually going through the TV, but it'll feel that way to the user. You know, we don't know how different users will like to or will prefer to engage with us.
You know, some will actually just say, "Hey, I got a phone. Why do I need to do that?" Others will say, "Well, if I can watch the streaming and make bets in the same place, that feels a whole lot more convenient." What we really wanna do is be there for any user in any way that they wanna engage, and give people the most options, the most convenience, the most engaging products. I think it's also an example, as was mentioned earlier, of where media and gaming can start to converge as well, being able to, in this case, watch the same thing, watch, excuse me, and bet, or at least feel like you're watching and betting on the same device.
As far as what it could do in with other relationships, I think that there will be others that, once they see this in action, are going to be interested, and we're certainly open to pursuing those discussions.
How do you think market structure will evolve over the next few years? Will the market become more concentrated or more fragmented?
I think you're seeing right now in the last state or two to launch more concentration. Michigan is a great example where, you know, Michigan was the most competitive launch of any state so far. They actually made sure they launched all nine providers on the same date. You know, that's different than what some other states have done where, you know, when DraftKings or other companies were ready, they just let you out the door. In this case, we were ready a little earlier, and they said, "No, we actually wanna launch everybody at the same time." So, you know, that's an example of what I think some states will do. Others will prefer to just get people out as they come.
Where it netted out is Michigan was the most competitive launch of any state yet with nine different providers going at the same time, yet market share was more concentrated at the top, and more, you know, the long tail was much less market share than virtually any other state, where, you know, outside of the top four, there are only a couple points, maybe a few points of market share made up amongst the other five that launched. I think you're going to see more consolidation at the top, and I think that, you know, what will happen is, you're gonna see also that as we move from local to national marketing, as we have more of a national presence, there will be also an advantage to having more and more states.
DraftKings currently is present in more states online than any other provider, so that should also help with that top-end consolidation.
I'm interested in your thoughts on the following products. First, with esports, you mentioned it earlier in the year, but we haven't heard much about it. What are your thoughts on the poker markets and/or the horse racing markets?
Well, esports was a huge grower during the pandemic when there were no traditional sports being played. We saw esports. We'd kind of been waiting for that moment. Everybody, you know, every year was like, "Is this the year that esports really takes off?" It happened. What's been cool to see is that while other substitute products have kind of lost some momentum, esports has really kept it. We're still running very large esports pools, much larger than we were running before the pandemic, and that's with all traditional sports having come back. That's been really great to see. Right now it's been a little bit more of a focus on the DFS side because, you know, a lot of states still are not allowing betting on esports.
That's something that we hope evolves over time, and we're excited to continue to innovate in the esports place. As far as poker and horse racing, those are two products we've looked at, and we're just balancing those things, you know, across our product roadmap, with other things that we could be doing. Obviously our goal is to ultimately have every type of product that the customer wants and to be able to engage people on all key events and at all times. I think that those are certain things that we will take a look at.
Next group of questions, Jason, is on SBTech. Can you comment on how the internal beta testing is going for the migration?
You know, right now we feel we're really well on track. Everything's kinda on schedule. Obviously, you know, there's a bunch of internal steps that we haven't publicly commented on, so I'm not gonna talk about that. I think what we will see is that we will be on track for that end of Q3 migration date, and we're excited to hit that, and we're also excited for all the innovation that will occur after that. Remember, that's really not the end. That's the beginning. Once we have our own proprietary technology and trading stack, that sets the stage for many, many years of future innovation that we're very excited about.
Will we be able to know once you've migrated over in certain states?
Well, we'll talk about it. I think you'll see us discuss it at some point. As far as will you be able to know, I think the goal is actually to make it pretty, you know, hard to tell. I think Stage 1 is to make it completely seamless to customers. Maybe you'll see a couple of new things, but really, you know, the less disruptive approach, the better. If customers don't even notice, and it's not as visible from the outside, it just looks like we're continuing to innovate on product in the way we normally would, I think that's really the goal. I think it'll probably be harder to tell than not, but we'll at some point be talking about it.
Can you comment on the recent news that the Oregon Scoreboard app is moving to the DraftKings platform?
Well, we've certainly read those rumors. you know, we're not going to comment on that at this time. We've had a great relationship with Oregon. We look forward to growing that relationship, and if and when there is something more to announce, then we'll be excited to talk about it. Right now, we have nothing to comment on there.
What are your plans for overseas expansion? Is there anything we should be thinking about in that realm?
Well, we definitely have ambitions to be a global company. That's something that we think is a really important part of our future. Right now, our primary focus is on the U.S., but at some point, we will look to expand overseas. When we do, we think we'll bring the same innovation, the same customer-centric approach that we do in the U.S. That's something that we think is absolutely a part of our future and when we have more to say on that, we'll certainly be talking about it.
Moving on to unit economics for the next group of questions. IDFA will likely have an impact on your CAC. Can you talk about what the impact may or may not be on DraftKings as well as other competitors?
Well, what's interesting, I think, is that even though, yes, we'll have some impact on DraftKings, some adverse impact on our ability to target, we have such a wide variety of channels, and we don't really rely on any one in particular. Actually, you know, what I hope happens, and I think there's good reason to believe it will, is that while there may be some adverse impact on targeting, that will be offset and maybe even more than offset by the fact that other types of categories, such as mobile games, social casinos, that rely almost entirely on this type of marketing for their customer acquisition, they're going to have to drop a lot of their spend dramatically. It's not going to work as well anymore, that may lead to softening pricing in the market, which could be a big opportunity for DraftKings.
Hard to say where it'll net out, but I think you could see a scenario where it actually becomes a net positive for us.
How do you think your customer retention compares to peers? Will the switch over to SBTech impact this?
You know, we don't really know exactly where we compare to all peers. I know some have put out data on it, and those that have, we think we stack up quite favorably against. I do think that it'll only improve over time, both at the migration point, but really, you know, with the future years of innovation. The better the product is, the better the retention will be. The better the customer experience is, the better the retention will be. So we're really focused on listening to the customers, having the best product in market, and having the greatest customer experience. I think if we continue to innovate well and do those things, our customer retention metrics should improve over time.
What are the CAC and LTV trends for newer cohort players in existing states relative to some of the early adopters?
Well, from a CAC perspective, we've actually seen, you know, CAC go down. That may be because of industry momentum. It may be because of some of the things that we figured out and optimized on. Probably some of it, as we've said, you know, on other calls, like our earnings calls, come from the fact that there was a real, you know, benefit of the stay-at-home nature of the pandemic, and we're not counting on that continuing forever. That's why we're investing aggressively now. You know, as we've said internally and externally, we fish when the fish are biting. Right now, we're seeing incredible performance, much better than expected on the CAC side at higher levels of spend.
On the LTV side, certainly, and we saw this in DFS, when you kinda get through the first few years, you do see some, you know, dropping in LTV. The initial golden cohort, as they call it, is usually the best cohort. What we saw in DFS, and we have no reason to believe it'll be different here, is it pretty quickly asymptotes. I think that, you know, there's, like, that initial wave of customers that can't wait to get on, and then everybody else is pretty similar. The other thing that could be interesting here is we've seen a lot of data through the research that we've done that we actually haven't converted a ton of people over from the illegal market yet, and those are arguably the most valuable players.
You could actually see, once the illegal market players start to migrate or start to convert on DraftKings, you actually might see a lift in LTV. You know, I don't know when that will happen, I think eventually it will.
In your presentation today, you stated that your revenue retention is 108%. Can you talk a bit more about the ramp in spend from customers? Are customers starting with their favorite sport and then branching out to others or into iGaming, for example?
That's really, you know, not driven by iGaming per se or it's more the former, as well as adoption of new types of bets. Obviously, over time, we're also getting more and more conversion onto the iGaming products, so it's not, you know, a non-factor. This is consistent with what we saw for years in Daily Fantasy Sports. As players get more comfortable with the platform, as they get more engaged, they try new sports, they try new types of games. Also, you know, our techniques, both in terms of, you know, the products that we roll out as well as, you know, the things that we do to engage customers are constantly getting optimized and improving over time as well.
It's been a very consistent trend, I know we only showed sort of recent sports betting, you know, and iGaming data, but it's actually been a very consistent trend since, you know, pretty much the beginning of the company's history on the daily fantasy sports side as well.
Are your other states tracking similarly to New Jersey?
Right now, you know, let me actually flash to that slide. Right now, we would say yes, this slide, I think, is You know, it's hard because states launch at different times of year, so we tried the best we could to do, you know, the closest thing possible to an apples to apples comparison. This is taking the first consecutive September to December, which is, of course, you know, peak season of a state after it launched. What you see here is that the median state actually is, you know, or average, I'm not sure if this is average or median. Do you know, Jason, is this average or median?
Straight average.
This is average. The average state outside of New Jersey is actually a little bit higher from a gross revenue per adult standpoint. Obviously, it varies. That said, some of these, you know, such as D.C. and Rhode Island, are states we aren't even in. Iowa for the first September to December did not have mobile registration, we think Iowa will go up as well and has gone up even in the short period of time since January 1st when mobile registration's been available. You know, we really do believe that New Jersey is potentially even a conservative proxy, but certainly a fair proxy to use as you look at what other states could do.
Do you still have conviction in your promotional rate at maturity being in the low 20% range?
We do. You know, one of the things that, and this is not specific, this does not show specific numbers, we just want to be sensitive that showing our exact promotional spend rates is a very competitively sensitive thing. You know, this is kind of an illustrative example. The way it works is existing users have a much lower rate of revenue being invested in promotions than new users. The most aggressive offers are the new user offers. As a result, you know, in these early customer acquisition days, you're seeing a high blended rate of promotion on as a percentage of revenue, and that will naturally decline as we mature and the existing customer base becomes a larger percentage . You may have fluctuations as big states, you know, potentially like New York or a California launch.
That's obviously going to be a big influx of new customers. This will be the, you know, the steady state trend as things kind of, you know, get to more of a normalized place. Everything we've kind of looked at analytically in terms of just these natural tailwinds and everything else we're doing to optimize, suggest that we, a low 20% rate of promotion at maturity is very achievable, and perhaps it could even be a little bit lower, but we think it's certainly very achievable.
Great. Aren't you already doing national advertising? Does this page exaggerate the potential efficiencies?
Well, I think that reason is precisely one of the reasons that we do think there's efficiencies. When we, I'm just gonna flip to that slide. We are doing national advertising, namely the integrations that we have in things like The Match or UFC. Those are national advertising right now because there's no local feed of those events. It's all national. That's actually one of the key reasons why we will see efficiencies because right now, a very low percentage, only 25% of customers seeing those integrations, are able to go sign up for the Sportsbook and play. As we get more and more states, those same integrations will perform better because there'll be a larger base of eligible customers able to use these products.
That's one of the reasons we noted why we actually do believe in this. You know, the fact that we're doing national advertising now and only reaching a quarter of the population is a big opportunity.
On the gross margin bridge in your presentation, why did taxes go up compared to your prior Investor Day?
Jason, do you wanna speak to that?
Last year, when we really showed this chart only for New Jersey, we were using the New Jersey data. Now that we're live in so many more states, we felt like a better representation to our investor community was talk with real data. That 24% now represents the straight average of the states that we are in, and as I mentioned earlier, notably, that includes Pennsylvania, which is north of 40%.
Yeah, Pennsylvania is an outlier, relative to what we've seen other states. If you take that out, it would actually come down, but Jason's right that this includes all that, and for that reason, it's gone up a little bit.
Is there any contribution or mix shift to iGaming that's contributing to the increase in gross margin on the gross margin bridge page?
Well, that's always part of the equation, but it's not really the main driver here. The state that we actually have the highest iGaming as percentage of total revenue is Michigan, albeit that's early. That's the highest right now, in terms of, you know, the ratio of iGaming to online sports betting. Michigan has a lower tax rate than this. I think it's a mix of a number of different things. The primary driver is simply the inclusion of new states that weren't in here last year.
I would add quickly, you know, when you look at these four gray bars that are the four buckets of COGS, three of the four are very similar across OSB and iGaming. It's only the platform part. On the platform part for OSB, we're obviously going to be bringing in that bet engine, cost of goods sold, we're bringing that in-house. That goes away. On the iGaming side, as we've mentioned, we're moving more and more of our revenue to those DraftKings homegrown games, which improve your platform COGS on that side. In terms of levers to improve, very similar for both OSB and iGaming.
Can you provide any more color on your CAC? What are you seeing, at least from a trend perspective? Is it increasing or decreasing in new and existing, and/or existing states?
Well, what we're seeing, at least in, you know, again, with the caveat that last year is a tough year to use for any sort of future comparisons, last year we saw CAC go down. In fact, we ramped our spend more and more. CAC still went down, despite the fact that usually it goes the other way. When you spend more, CAC goes up. We've been seeing such strong performance, particularly in the back half of the year, where we made our biggest investments in 2020. That's really continued into Q1. We've continued to see incredibly strong performance. CAC's actually gone down. We think we're being prudent in assuming in the back half of 2021 that those trends may reverse.
Hard to say that you believe that that was driven by some of the stay-at-home nature of the pandemic and, you know, not say when things start to open up again that it won't go the other way. Hard to say where that nets out, but we think we've been quite cautious in assuming that it goes the other direction in the back half of the year.
On one of your slides, you said you retain 82% of your customers in year one and 87% in year two. Can you elaborate on your methodology?
Jason, can you answer that one?
Sure. you know, we're proud to have been able to pull this together. We've got 40 of these state quarter cohorts. We have 10 that actually have year-over-year data, and two of the 10 have two years of data, so eight quarters subsequent to the acquisition quarter. That 82% is a measure of how many of the players that we acquired in the acquisition quarter continued to engage with us over the subsequent four quarters, and the 87% measures what percentage of the 82% stayed with us for the second batch of four quarters.
The next group of questions is on enterprise profitability. It looks like your long-term adjusted EBITDA margin percentage is about flat compared to your last update from early last year. Why is it not higher?
Well, what we did here, and, you know, again, we're trying to kind of exercise caution and not overpromise anything, is we assumed that with a larger TAM, we would be making deeper investment into product. Most of the increased cost here is increased product and engineering investment. That certainly, we think may happen, maybe not. Also, we think that that investment would make sense in a scenario like this because this still assumes, you know, 70% of the U.S. does not have iGaming, 35% do not have sports betting online.
Also, it doesn't add any consideration of international expansion beyond Canada. You know, I think at this stage of the business with those upsides still out there, we assume we would still be investing pretty heavily in growing our product in tech, and you know, that doesn't mean that future revenue won't come in at a higher margin rate. We just didn't wanna make that assumption in this case.
What is behind the significant increase in your long-term SG&A expenses?
Well, it's, you know, it's exactly what I just said. I think we're, in this case, we're assuming that we will continue to invest deeply in product and technology as we ramp into that higher TAM. That's a very controllable cost for us. We can choose to do it or not. It's not a variable cost by any means. We, you know, none of the product in tech and SG&A is variable, of course. Our thought is that if we see a larger TAM opportunity, if we see increased momentum on potentially getting more states allowing online sports betting, iGaming, if we see an opportunity to expand internationally, that those investments will make a whole lot of sense.
If we don't, then we may pare them back a little bit, but, our assumption in this case is that it'll be the former, not the latter that happens.
It looks like you increased your long-term forecast for your DFS business. What's behind that increase?
Part of it is we saw incredible growth this year. I don't think we increased it by much. Jason, do you remember what it was last year?
[audio distortion] Yeah, I think we've taken it up by roughly $100 million.
Yeah. We saw incredible growth in DFS this year. We did not, just like with our other, you know, assumptions of the overall market, assume that the back half of this year would continue at that rate. Given how many new customers we were able to acquire on DFS, that made sense to us. The other thing is, in the initial days of New Jersey, we saw meaningful cannibalization. We've actually seen that subside. A lot of customers have come back and started playing more DFS even if they do continue to use Sportsbook. That's something else that's been a bit of a change since last year.
Yeah, I would just reiterate that point. A year ago, when we were looking at the cannibalization of DFS when OSB launched, DFS was still growthful. Now that we have more data, we really have further conviction that DFS has a unique value proposition. Certainly a similar customer segment, it really stands on its own. You combine that with our continued investment in that product, we feel better about the outlook.
It looks like you took down your forecast for the SBTech business compared to last year. Can you provide any comment on that?
This is always an evolving thing, and what we've seen is, you know, with a much larger than what we previously thought TAM opportunity on the B2C side, we just believe that the, you know, place that we will likely be directing investment is more on the B2C side. It doesn't mean that we don't think we'll have a nice B2B business. This is still growth over where we are right now. We just think, you know, from a relative investment standpoint, it's hard to say we think the TAM's bigger here and we're gonna invest more and not have it come at somewhat of the expense of B2B. That's really the rationale behind it.
We didn't wanna count on being able to have hyper-growth, on the B2C side and have really strong growth on the B2B side, and we thought it made sense to be a bit more cautious about what we should expect from B2B.
Is there any additional color that you can provide on the buckets of SG&A in your long-term projections? In other words, what would be the relative growth rates, for example, of SG&A versus product and technology and G&A?
I'll let JP comment a little bit more on this, but product and technology is the biggest area of investment on SG&A. You know, that's a place we feel like we will win and continue to have, you know, our strongest advantage in long term. Obviously, there's other things. You know, you see, you know, healthy marketing spend. We took that up a little bit as well. You know, really, where we think the heart and soul of ultimately retaining and growing our customer base and growing revenues will be from the product and technology investments. Jason, do you wanna add anything to that?
Yeah. I would just add, you know, something that you mentioned, which is, this is not variable cost. We have a very good pulse, finger on the pulse of what's variable. This is really just driven by choices that we can make and spend primarily in product and tech.
Could the synergies in your long-term EBITDA bridge be larger than $200 million?
What we've assumed here is it's kind of a straight calculation off of the size of the online sports betting revenue projection as well as what we believe the margins that we will be. I probably misspoke on a previous call when I said most of that goes to the bottom line. Or, sorry, all of that goes to the bottom line. Most of it does, but there is some cost of operating our own proprietary technology and trading platform. This is actually the net of that. This is, you know, both the savings on the revenue share side minus the cost of actually operating it ourselves. Could it be larger? I mean, there's always a chance that you can do things with more efficiency.
There's also always a chance that the OSB number is actually larger, which would, of course, drive up the synergy size. I think given this level of OSB market size, though, and given, you know, the assumptions we made around where our piece of the revenue pie will be, I don't think there's a ton of upside there.
How should we think about your EBITDA losses potentially in 2021 versus 2020? What about the seasonality of EBITDA this year on a quarterly basis?
You know, as we said in the past, we're a very data-driven company and, you know, most of the investment that we're making in marketing is driven by what the data is telling us. As I noted this year, or this past year I should say, we saw incredibly, you know, efficient performance. Our CAC was lower than what we expected, so we just kept investing deeper, and that got better in the back half of the year as more sports returned, more traditional sports, I should say, returned from the COVID-19 hiatus. That's really what caused it.
As far as how it will look in future years, I think generally you'll always see Q3 and Q4 be a bigger area of EBITDA loss for us, at least in this growth phase as we spend more in marketing. You know, obviously Q3 even more substantial than Q4 on most years. With the caveat that we'll always direct spend based on what the data's saying, and therefore there's always some natural variance just based on how things are performing. I think the general trend will be Q3 is going to be, you know, in these growth years where we are operating at a loss, Q3 will be the greater losses, Q4 next, and Q1 probably following that. Did I get that right, Jason?
Yeah. I think that's exactly right. I would just reiterate that the complexion of the different states where we are live and the different maturity of those states is really the underlying driver of our adjusted EBITDA by quarter. As we show the unit profitability over time, the more states that you have pushing into that second, third, or fourth year offset by whatever legalization scenario unfolds over the coming years, the balance of those two is driving the EBITDA for the entire enterprise.
That's a great point. You know, to sort of give an example, if all of a sudden California went live in Q1, that would, you know, cause us to ramp up investment and that would have, you know, nothing to do with sort of what steady state trends are. That would just be a huge state launched in a particular time of year, we see, you know, great opportunity to invest in acquiring customers. Also, there are things even within states. For example, this year, Illinois issued an executive order that suspended the in-person registration requirement. That kept getting extended, and we just kept seeing better and better performance in Illinois. I believe Illinois is actually our largest online sports betting state now.
You know, that also caused us to keep investing. We had assumed initially that it would not get extended because we didn't wanna count on something that wasn't within our control to make our top line numbers. You know, once it got extended and we saw, you know, such tremendous performance on the customer acquisition side in Illinois, we just continued to invest there.
We've gotten a few more questions in during the Q&A session, Jason. Of the large states from an OSB perspective, are you assuming that the 65% legalization estimate for OSB includes California, Texas, Florida, and/or New York?
We haven't specified particular states. We've just said 65%. I think, you know, to get to 65%, you probably have to assume some subset of larger states doesn't, you know, does get included. It'll be pretty hard without, you know, any of the top, you know, four or five states I think. California's the biggest by population, then Texas, then Florida, then New York. I believe Illinois is fifth, but it might be Pennsylvania. Either way, we have the fifth and sixth already. The top four do constitute quite a bit. I think it's like roughly 30% of population, or somewhere thereabouts, maybe. Yeah. It's about right. You know, could you get to 65% without them? Yes.
You know, is it likely that you're gonna need, you know, at least one or two of them? Probably more likely only one or two of them, but we haven't, really, you know, predicted which ones.
What impact do you expect from Android users being able to download your Sports book and iGaming apps directly from the Google Play Store?
Well, that should be a huge positive for us. We've done our best through sideloading to try to get people to download the app, but it's not a great customer experience by any means. You know, it's clunky. There's weird messages that you get when that happens. It also doesn't allow us to advertise in the Google Play Store, being that we don't have an app there. For all those reasons, we think that should have a very positive impact on driving both customer acquisition as well as adoption of our app by existing Android users.
What do the demographics look like on your standalone casino app? Is the user base shifting to a more casino-first customer?
No, not really. I mean, a little bit, yes, but we still continue to get the vast majority of our iGaming customers through cross-sell from Sportsbook. I actually think that's an opportunity. We're very much, as I've said, data-driven, we're testing our way into the iGaming side. I think we've learned a lot over the last few months, but, you know, it's still a very new product. We only launched about eight months ago, maybe nine months ago. We're still learning a lot. You know, really the focus during that heavy, you know, sports, return to sports time of year in the back half of last year coming through Q1 has been on acquiring onto sports and crossing over into iGaming in states that allow it.
I see that as a big opportunity, and we're exploring different ways that we can expand our reach within some of the demos that we're not penetrating as well as we should be right now.
Do you have a sense for how many apps your players use and/or what the wallet share would be for your typical customer?
From what we've seen, they're not using a ton of apps. They do, and this is something I've seen, people on average have X number of apps on their phone in the U.K. That probably will be the case over the long term here. I think one thing that will be quite different is, you won't necessarily have as many players in the market as you do in a country like the U.K. Even though in the U.K. people have, I think it's 2.9 apps on their phone, they still concentrate the majority of their play with one app. Really, it's a little bit different to say you have multiple apps on your phone than you're actually actively using multiple apps.
From everything we've seen, we believe wallet share will be concentrated to a preferred brand, particularly on the sports side. You know, I think on the iGaming side, it might be a little bit more fragmented. You know, hard to say. It's obviously still very early days, and we're studying this and watching it and, you know, learning more by the day.
How do you think about M&A? With SBTech, do you have a full product suite, or are there areas you may look to do some bolt-ons?
You know, I think bolt-on is a good way of describing one of the categories we're looking at. You know, international expansion is another area that might be of interest. Media is another area that might be of interest. Those are all categories that we're looking at. Capabilities, you know, for some small tuck-ins are also things we're looking at. Right now we feel like there's nothing we need. The one thing we really felt we needed was our own proprietary sports betting platform. You know, that we got with the business combination with SBTech last year and Diamond Eagle. We feel like in the need category, we're all set. A lot of what remains is kind of, you know, what's interesting out there that might be an opportunity.
There's a lot of build versus buy analysis. It's more opportunistic than anything else. If we see good opportunities emerge, we're gonna go after them. We're also gonna stay very disciplined and only do deals if they're the right ones because we really don't feel like we need anything at this point.
It looks like SBTech's revenue fell in 2020. Is it fair to say that SBTech's primary focus will be on powering DraftKings in the future or external clients?
Well, I certainly think it's fair to say that, you know, the reason we bought them was to power DraftKings and to allow us to innovate on our own product. That's something that I don't think we've been shy about sharing. That said, I think as we do innovate on our own product, it'll be attractive for the right, you know, relationships in the right places around the world. There's a couple reasons why it fell. The primary one was, you know, we didn't have sports for a few months of the year. I think SBTech, like everybody else, certainly suffered for that. DraftKings' core revenues would have been higher if we had a full calendar of sports. DraftKings B2C, I should say, revenues would have been higher if we had a full calendar of sports.
Our B2B revenues were no different. You know, there were some relationships that made sense to, you know, transition from, you know, as we sort of normalize what that B2B business looks like. I think that was something we expected and, you know, it's really, like you said, the focus and the reason for buying it. While we certainly think we'll have a very attractive high-margin B2B business, and that's something that we're excited about, the primary reason is to power DraftKings' B2C products.
Can you provide any color on the mix of your customers in terms of VIPs versus casual? For example, how much of your revenue do VIPs account for?
Well, we aren't disclosing any exact percentages of revenue. That said, I think we probably view ourselves as having a larger base of casual users than most competition in the market, given how mainstream our brand is. You know, like every business, whether it's gaming or non-gaming, we do have VIP customers. We do see them, you know, as a very important and meaningful part of our business. We think we're actually playing very well in both segments, the VIP segment and casual segment. If I had to guess, I would say, you know, relative to most competition, we're more casual-heavy because we have such a broad and large customer base.
Can you talk about the timing and process around renegotiating revenue share agreements with skin partners?
You know, each contract's different. You know, some of them, you know, are very long-term, some of them are shorter term. Some of them have things like opt-outs in them. I think in general, you know, we feel like our position will continue to improve. We've really established ourselves as a major player that's here to stay. I think as more consolidation happens in the market of revenue, not necessarily M&A driven, but just more and more consolidation happens as you saw in that initial launch in Michigan, there's gonna be a select group of partners that are key relationships for any skin or any license holder to have. I think that that will have a positive impact on our ability to negotiate really good deals.
I also think you're seeing more and more states do direct licensing. We saw that in Virginia. That's something that we think, you know, we saw it in Tennessee. That's something that we think also might, you know, end up being a little bit more than we thought. We'll have to see how it plays out, but certainly, we think our position will continue to improve.
Are there any other states besides New Jersey that came close to contribution profitability exiting 2020? If not, do you expect your older, more mature states like West Virginia or Indiana to be positive in 2021?
Do you wanna speak to that, Jason?
I would just reiterate that we underwrite each new state entry on that cohort-driven two to three-year payback, which results in unit economics turning positive. I would add that to the extent that a state is only a two-product state, DFS and OSB, we adjust the LTVs accordingly, and that impacts how we think about our CAC within each of those units.
Yeah. The only other state that's had sports betting, you know, two years plus has been West Virginia. I actually don't think it's even quite two years plus yet, so I may have misspoken on that. It's about 1.5 year . We'll consider, you know, sometime in the next few quarters having an update on West Virginia. Indiana this fall will have hit the two-year mark. Those will be some things we'll talk about. As Jason said, we actually haven't seen any states that are even in that window that we've predicted, you know, two to three years to reach profit, contribution profit, profitability in a state.
Do you expect advertising to ever be a significant contributor to revenue? Is this a business that you can grow in the future?
We think it'll be, you know, something that we do. Right now, we do have advertising on some of our content, on our free games. We have premium advertisers such as Netflix, Amazon, Budweiser, Pepsi, others that have been, you know, seeing great results. We have chosen and will continue to choose not to on our paid sports betting product, on our paid DFS app, to take ads. We do have a little bit on our website, but that's not where most of the customers are engaging right now. Yes, we will probably continue to do that. I think if it does become more meaningful, it'll be because we make a more significant foray into the content space, and I think that's really, if anywhere, where we will go.
We actually are seeing more demand from advertisers than we have inventory right now. We've had to turn advertising dollars down, so it could be a bigger line item if we are willing to actually put ads into our paid products, which, you know, outside of the website for DFS, we have not been and do not intend to. You know, I think it'll really be, can we grow inventory through more free-to-play? Can we grow inventory through a deeper content investment? If so, I think you'll see an increase in ad revenues.
Is DraftKings open to utilizing cryptocurrencies?
It's something we've certainly explored. We know that it's popular with many of our customers. I think that, you know, being in a regulated industry, there's obviously has to be a conversation with regulators, around whether they're comfortable with that, and right now they're not. You know, we haven't really been able to move in that direction. It's something we're keeping a close eye on. I think should the opportunity arise, we would have to consider it strongly.
Why haven't we seen more of the illegal OSB market migrate to legal?
I think it's just stickiness. This comes back to the point we made earlier that early mover matters. People get comfortable with a particular product, a brand, a UI, and, you know, they just don't wanna change, and I think that's a good sign for the longevity of our customer. You know, obviously, you would think that most people would prefer going onto a legal app, the reality is that the reason there's so many people that are doing it in the illegal market now is they were already comfortable with it. You know, I think that's something that, outside of seeing, you know, significant enforcement action taken, will just take time.
Again, I think it's a positive. It shows that it's such a sticky experience that even people using an illegal provider, are inclined to stick with what they are doing currently, than immediately jump ship to the newest, and latest thing.
I would add, I think, the acceleration of those players onto the regulated platforms is going to be partially driven by our own innovation. As we bring offerings to our regulated app that illegal offerings cannot provide, I think that will act as a catalyst to bring some people to the regulated offerings.
That's a great point.
How do you think fans returning in full stadiums will impact your business and your marketing expense?
That's an interesting question. I think that, you know, more people going to games means more engagement with sports, which should be a good thing. That said, you know, we've been saying the stay-at-home nature of the pandemic has been a positive benefit for us. I think the larger impact is going to be if people are returning to stadiums, are they also returning to other activities like travel and leisure, dining out? Those are the big categories of spend that we think, you know, some portion of has shifted in the direction of online offerings such as DraftKings. You know, I think that's probably more, meaning fans in stands is more of a proxy for other sorts of behaviors than itself a direct impact.
I think in of itself, it's probably, you know, neutral, you know, or plus or minus slightly one way or another, but not really a significant thing.
Are you concerned that legislation could compromise your TAM estimates, whether that be a higher tax rate in a newly legalized state or potentially single operator models in other states?
Well, I think if legislation doesn't happen in the right way, it certainly could impact the TAM. You know, higher tax rates, for example, mean that it's harder for us to compete with the illegal market, even if we have more innovative products. If we have to give worse odds or, you know, we can't invest as much because we're having a bigger piece taken out in taxes, that's gonna make it harder to compete with the illegal market, and that could ultimately, I guess, the TAM will still be potentially larger. It'll just be more of it, you know, staying and coming onto the illegal market. I think it's really important that legislation and regulation happens in the right way, and if it does, we think that this is a huge TAM.
That's certainly one of the things that we're keeping an eye on.
How should we think about incremental margins should you exceed the $5.4 billion in revenue assumed in your long-term EBITDA margin bridge? In other words, what does EBITDA look like if you are at the top end or above that revenue number?
Well, I think really it's discretionary, as we talked about earlier. It's how much do we wanna roll back into investment in the product and technology? You know, that's something that really will be driven by what we think future upside is. If we think the market's reaching a true maturity level, this is sort of like pseudo maturity, where this still doesn't have 70% of the U.S. for iGaming, 35% of the U.S. for online sports betting, 36% of Canada for online sports betting, no international beyond Canada. You know, we've kind of assumed in this case there's still growth and upside here. Once we reach true maturity, we're gonna start taking more margin, just like any other business at that stage of the life cycle.
This is kind of that in-between place, and for that reason, I think, you know, if we were to go above this, it would really be driven by do we see big future growth opportunity, and if not, we would start to take more profit.
Are there better economics for casual players or for your VIPs?
You know, it really, it varies. The I assume, you're talking about unit economics, actually let me reframe that. I was gonna say, you know, VIPs obviously generate more revenue. From a unit economic standpoint, the casual player is a little bit better. You know, they aren't as, I think, you know, savvy in terms of, you know, shopping around for things like odds and promotions. VIPs are a very small percentage of our players, though, you know, most customers really don't do that. It also depends on the VIP. Some VIPs are just, you know, really not as, you know, as much of odds shoppers or anything like that either. It kind of depends, overall, the casual customer has a little bit better unit economics.
Jason, our last question today before wrapping up the Q&A session is: how important is streaming for betting for long-term player engagement, monetization, and retention?
I think the most important thing is that people can watch it somewhere. Where we've seen great impact with streaming are on having streaming integrated for things that people can't watch in the U.S. You know, when we, for example, rolled out streaming on some international soccer or, you know, on ping pong, those are examples where, you know, People couldn't, you know, find places to watch it. I think as long as people can watch it's going to be, you know, that's going to be the predominant factor. One other thing I'd add, though, is that, this is a big opportunity, I think. Right now, due to latency in the broadcast, there's actually a disconnect where the data on the smart device for DraftKings updates faster than the action on screen, which isn't a great customer experience.
I think that as you see leagues consider lower latency products and, you know, they may consider doing that in an integrated fashion through us, we certainly hope so. You know, that could actually be a big opportunity simply from improving the customer experience. I think the important thing is that you can watch it somewhere, that it's synced up between the data on the phone and the data and the action on the screen. As long as that's the case, you know, it could be directly through us. It could be through partners that are doing streaming. Really doesn't matter. I think it's just important that people have access to a good experience.
Okay. That's all the time we have today for Q&A. We want to thank everyone for spending some time with us this morning. We certainly look forward to doing this in person next time, and hope you have a great rest of your day.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone.