Hello everyone, and welcome to the first Genius Sports Investor Day. My name is David Levy, Chairman of the Board at Genius, and I'm joined today by Co-Founder and CEO Mark Locke and the rest of the management team, along with an incredible group of customers and partners we have the pleasure of working with each and every day. I'll have Mark walk you through the agenda in just a few minutes, but before we begin, in addition to welcoming you to what I believe will be a highly informative and interesting session, I wanna tell you what first attracted me to becoming Chairman at Genius. Throughout my career, I recognized the importance of fan engagement and the value it creates across the media ecosystem.
As I see it, we are witnessing a new era of sports entertainment where innovation is accelerating the convergence of sports, technology, betting, and media at an unprecedented rate. The rise of legalized sports betting has significantly increased overall fan engagement. Just look at how the NFL ratings performed this year. A casual fan who places a bet on a sporting event is 98% more likely to watch that event live. This ultimately drives increased engagement with the sport, which leads to rating increases for the networks, which leads to higher advertising dollars, which then leads to increased franchise valuations, which ultimately leads to increasing league values. All arrows are pointing up, and that's a byproduct of increased fan engagement. I joined Genius because I believe this model works, and I appreciate the exciting opportunities ahead of us.
With technology and the network of industry partners, we are providing the tools to enhance sports content and continue driving fan engagement while accelerating this value proposition. I'd like to continue by sharing a bit of my perspective from my four decades in the sports media and tech landscape, and how I see Genius as uniquely positioned to drive our sector forward in the years to come. First, it's important to understand how media rights of the major broadcasters have evolved over these years. It began with leagues and media partners coming together in what I would describe as a highly traditional negotiation. Pay us X for the right to broadcast Y. It's that simple.
By the way, when CBS first paid the NFL nearly $32 million in 1964 for the two-year broadcasting deal, critics feared that the high cost of rights would price CBS straight off of television. Needless to say, CBS ended up just fine. In fact, this happened to me many times at Turner, and one of those that stands out the most was the NCAA March Madness Tournament, where people thought I was crazy for how much I spent for $11 billion for a fourteen-year deal. Let me guarantee you this, Turner's still profiting well off of that deal. By the mid-2000s, there was a strong desire, if not a need, to expand beyond these traditional negotiations.
It was no longer a question of what you can pay for the rights to broadcast, but maybe more importantly, about what you can do with the rights to broadcast. This includes expanding original content, pushing digital growth, building a direct-to-consumer platform, and connecting with fans on a deeper and more emotional level. Throughout this evolution of sports broadcasting, one thing has remained consistent: the power of innovation and the value it creates for leagues, fans, athletes, and sponsors. We are now at another critical juncture in the history of sports engagement and content consumption trends that are shifting rapidly. Fans expect access and authenticity in all of their sports content. Everything from zero latency stats to visualizations and more, all personalized to their individual demands.
Of course, the ongoing legalization of sports betting across the U.S. is creating a new engagement platform for leagues, teams, broadcasters, and brands alike. Every company across the global sports and media technology ecosystem wants to be part of this change to engage a younger, more diverse, and more international fan base. We at Genius Sports are the most uniquely positioned to deliver this. In the past year alone, we have transformed the value and range of services we can provide to any league, brand, sportsbook, or broadcaster, powering truly immersive experiences for our entire industry. Genius aims to keep our partners at the forefront of sports innovation. As you will see today, throughout our partnerships with leagues, Genius is powering solutions and experiences that are used and enjoyed by millions of fans around the world.
Yes, this includes delivering zero latency data and odds to the largest sportsbook globally, but equally includes broadcast augmentation solutions, highly targeted digital advertising for brands, free-to-play games, and much, much more. All of this rolls up to one word: access. Fans want access. Take Genius' relationship with the NFL, for instance. The NFL understood our vision of being much, much more than a partner that could capture and distribute their data. Genius was selected as the NFL's exclusive partner because with the access to NFL official data feeds, live game streams, and sportsbook advertising inventory, they saw in us the capabilities to transform the entire NFL experience. This is a remarkable business powering a high-growth industry filled with passionate leaders who you'll hear from today.
I am proud to be a part of this team, and without further delay, I'd like to turn it over to Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO of Genius Sports.
Thank you, David, and thank you to everyone who's joined us today. I'm excited to share our plans for the future as we embark on the new year and the next leg of our journey. Today's session will give you a clear view of our goals and expectations, and how we're driving the business to achieve them. We have an exciting and informative agenda for today, where you'll hear from several of my colleagues on the executive team, along with a few customers and partners of Genius Sports. We plan to cover a wide range of topics. First, you'll hear from key members of our management team, who'll provide a deeper dive on our three reporting segments. During these sessions, we will walk you through the differentiated solution we provide our customers, unit economics, drivers of growth, and the underlying building blocks for how we measure success.
Our CFO, Nick Taylor, will bring it all together with a detailed overview of our current financial position and future outlook. From there, we'll hold a session with two industry veterans that we're lucky enough to call our own, David Levy and Steve Bornstein, who will share their perspectives on the sports, media, and technology industries and what lies ahead in the years to come. Along the way, we will break up the agenda with brief segments from a few of our valued partners and customers, as well as a message from our board. Finally, the team and I look forward to answering your questions at the end of the day. Our goal today is to help you clearly understand the business, but if you walk away with nothing else, I want you to remember the following key points.
First, Genius Sports Group will be profitable in the near term, including in 2022 and 2023, and highly profitable as we scale over the next three to five years. Secondly, our core original business is performing strongly and is profitable. Third, since our public listing, we significantly expanded our U.S. operations at this critical point. This is an area of investment for us as we look to capitalize on the growth opportunity. We expect to achieve EBITDA profitability by 2024 like we have in our original business. Fourth is understanding the power of our technology and how our acquisitions have strengthened our position. Fifth is appreciating how deeply integrated partnerships position Genius at the heart of the ecosystem with competitive advantages via our differentiated technology. Finally, how our partnership with the NFL is strategically important to create value across the entire organization.
First, Genius will be profitable in the near term, including in 2022 and 2023. This year, we anticipate revenues of $340 million and Adjusted EBITDA of approximately $15 million. Looking ahead to 2023, we expect revenue and Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $430 million-$440 million and $40 million-$50 million respectively. Our updated guidance is based on a set of assumptions we will discuss today. This starts with our original business, which is performing profitably and delivering sustainable growth. Think of this as the underlying business as it existed this time last year, prior to our public listing. As a reminder, our original business produced $150 million in revenue in 2020 with Adjusted EBITDA margins of 11%.
We're expecting 26% revenue CAGR from 2020 to 2022, with those incremental revenues contributing a healthy EBITDA margin. This is evidence of our ability to reach sustained profitability at scale, and that the business is performing just as we hoped. The performance of our core original business is evidence of the inherent operating leverage that exists in the business model that we have. We've seen revenue growth far outpace the growth within our costs over time because of our scalable technology, and we anticipate this to be the case at the group level as well. Since many of the costs across the organization are not directly linear to revenues, we expect our revenue growth to contribute incremental EBITDA over time. Second, since our public listing, we've significantly expanded our U.S. operations.
This is an area of investment for us and we expect this U.S. business to be EBITDA positive beginning in 2024 based on assumptions that we're gonna cover shortly. From that point on, we believe the U.S. business will start to scale and look more like our original business. Our partnership with the NFL is key to our long-term success as the market matures. Our experience with tier one leagues in mature markets like the English Premier League, for example, is proof of the network effect and synergies that are created worldwide. We are confident that the NFL partnership fundamentally changed our business for the better 'cause it empowers Genius to reach even greater revenue scale and profitability in a market that we will anticipate will be the world's largest. Now, simply put, sports betting consists of two components, in-play betting and pre-match betting.
Typically, in a mature betting market such as the U.K., a mature operator can see as much as 75% of handle on in-play bets and 25% on pre-match. Correspondingly, the bookmaker win margins that you would expect can be circa 10% on in-play and 5% on pre-match. What we've learned in our first NFL regular season is that in-play betting as a percentage of NFL handle is what we expected and modeled at around 25%. However, in-play win margins were lower than what we had expected. As a result, because GGR is a function of win margin, in-play betting as a percentage of NFL GGR was also lower than what we expected.
Despite this, we have been able to consistently maintain our 2021 revenue guidance. Looking forward, we have assumed that NFL betting in the U.S. market will trend towards an increase in both in-play handle and in-play GGR as it moves towards the same way that more mature markets work. However, our assumptions here remain very conservative in comparison. To recap, in-play betting and win margins contribute meaningfully to our revenues. Our newly informed view sets the base of our assumptions and the guidance going forward. What you'll learn today is how our product mix and position at the heart of the ecosystem is arming our partners with the tools required to accelerate this desired shift to in-play betting.
For example, you'll see how Second Spectrum makes sports content more personalized and engaging, how our advertising solutions drive transactions for our partners, and how our data feeds can enable better quality in-play betting products, and how Genius is the perfect partner to bring it all together on a single platform. We're optimistic about the journey to higher in-play betting and the immediate benefits to our P&L, and equally, our ability to empower our partners along that journey to accelerate the adoption of in-play betting and work towards our shared goal. To be clear, our $340 million revenue guide for 2022 assumes that in-play betting will represent 13% of the NFL GGR. If you share in our belief that in-play betting will increase over time, then this presents upside.
The third point I'd like for you to take away from today's event is the power of our technology and how it has significantly strengthened with the businesses that we acquired in the last year. This technology puts our partners at the forefront of new fan engagement trends that David described and unlocks several exciting opportunities which you'll hear today. With our marquee partnerships, real-time data, and newly acquired businesses, we are uniquely capable of providing cutting-edge solutions and are quickly becoming the go-to partner for sports and broadcasters. Fourth is understanding our position at the heart of the ecosystem. We're central to the sports data value chain, and our partners rely on Genius. We provide mission-critical software, technology, and data which leagues and sports books around the world simply cannot function without.
We believe that the operations of both leagues and sports books would be significantly challenged without the key services of providers like Genius. You'll learn more about these products and services throughout the day. Sports betting operators demand a wide range of event coverage and content that's available 24/7, 365. Most leagues lack the infrastructure to capture live data and distribute it to a global network of sports books accurately and with low latency. Equally, sports books would certainly struggle to manage separate league integrations on their own, both operationally and financially. Additionally, the growth of in-play betting seen in many parts of the world only increased the need for real-time, accurate, and secure data feeds, along with the tech capabilities to turn that live data into lines in real time.
Not to mention, neither leagues nor sports books possess the technology or resources to continuously innovate to keep up with the evolving data requirements. In parallel with the growth of the sports betting market came the desire for broadcasters, publishers, and other media outlets to include real-time data within their content. Today, in many parts of the world, and increasingly so in the U.S., this also includes real-time odds or lines. This is an important function within the ecosystem that promotes fan engagement and keeps the flywheel spinning. Each part of the ecosystem relies on one crucial element, official data feeds to power it all. Without a central entity to streamline the data collection and distribution, these challenges would remain unresolved and the industry would quickly fall behind. Providers like Genius are absolutely crucial as the key link between leagues, sports books, media outlets, advertisers, and ultimately the fans.
Genius has best-in-class data collection technology, which is used around the clock and around the globe, providing leagues with the resources they lack and the sports books with the data they need so each can focus on their core strategies. Genius has the ability to automatically translate live data into lines for hundreds of thousands of events annually, and the scale to distribute this vital product to sports books on a global basis in real time. It is impossible to imagine this industry operating efficiently without the mission-critical data and technology solutions that we provide. Let me explain exactly what those solutions are. Throughout the last decade, Genius has partnered with leagues by providing them with technology to run their businesses more efficiently.
In the next session, you'll learn more about this technology and how we've included even more value added services to our offering that benefit leagues across all tiers. Because Genius is so deeply integrated with the leagues and the federations around the world, our software has become a core part of their overall technology roadmap, allowing us to grow our partnerships for years to come. This is evidenced by our incredibly low churn and long-standing partnerships with leagues of all sizes all across the world. Hopefully by now it is well understood that Genius is providing an absolutely critical service that sports books simply cannot operate without. To truly appreciate our long-term value, I think it's important to understand where Genius and other content providers plug into a typical sports book tech stack. We think about this tech stack in three layers.
First is the sports book brand, one of the key areas where sports books can differentiate themselves from one another over time. This is all about how well they manage their customer's journey, whether through our effective marketing, attractive promotions, the UX of their digital products and brand loyalty. The middle layer is their transactional platform. This is an essential function, which includes the customer account, payment methods, front-end management of the user interface, compliance, some liability management, and more. This function is increasingly being brought in-house by leading sportsbooks who have either built their own technology or acquired it. The third layer is the content. This is where Genius sits, and this is the layer that will continue to be outsourced because it's the only way to operate efficiently.
Every sportsbook in the market will inevitably use the same live data feeds, so there's no opportunity for differentiation in this layer. As the market continues to evolve and in-play betting becomes more prominent, there's also less opportunity for sportsbooks to differentiate on lines or pricing of in-play bets as there is limited time for sports bettors to compare odds or lines for a live bet. A sports bettor will inevitably transact with a brand that offers the best overall experience. Live data and lines are essentially vital commodities that underlie the sportsbook operation. This is all to say that sportsbooks are better off allocating time, capital, and resources to the areas of their tech stack and operations that offer opportunities for differentiation while leaving the data collection and distribution to those who can offer it at scale and continuously innovate to maintain a high-quality, reliable offering.
Sportsbooks need this content at all times of the day to stay competitive and service their global customers. Whether it's a Sunday afternoon in the fall or a Tuesday morning in the summer, sportsbooks will have a market available to their customers. Many of you may have seen this slide before, but it's worth reiterating the importance of having available content around the clock. Genius has accumulated a large portfolio of events under official rights to meet this demand for 24/7 content. Most importantly, we've done this in a cost-effective way through our contra model, where we swap our scalable technology and little or no cash in exchange for long-term data rights that cover 94% of the total number of events we offer. Our technology becomes deeply integrated with leagues, making us embedded in their digital infrastructure and protecting us from rights inflation.
This also results in near zero churn, and contract durations have only lengthened. Of the deals we renewed last year, the average length extended from roughly 3.5 years to roughly 6.5 years, which strengthens our strategic competitive advantages. As you may already know, we bring our products to market as a package, and our entire portfolio of events is much more attractive when led by tier one assets like the NFL and English Premier League. This enables us to structure mutually beneficial agreements in which Genius builds an all-encompassing offering around our most coveted events. This is how we monetize our long tail of events in a very cost-effective way. If I was to start a new business to compete with Genius, I wouldn't even know where to begin. First, consider the technology.
Genius has continuously developed its technology since the founding, giving us a massive head start. Consider how our technology is already used in tens of thousands of stadiums and arenas across the globe, which allows us to grow our partnerships over several years. Leagues rely on our technology, and the contra model allows them to benefit from it in a cost-effective way. It's worth reminding you that this is also supported by a network of about 7,000 statisticians who are highly trained on the Genius technology. Finally, our long-term contracts are growing in length, giving us a competitive advantage. Our natural long-term strategic advantages are the result of our significant technology investments over time, and they mean that we're miles ahead of our competitors, allowing us to focus on advancing our capabilities and expanding our partnerships.
The final point I'd like for you to understand today is that our partnership with the NFL is strategically important for Genius to create value across the entire organization. The U.S. is a huge opportunity, and our NFL partnership entrenches us in this emerging market and sets the business up for long-term revenue scale and profitability. We measure the success of this partnership not only on the direct NFL betting revenue, but also on the business we're able to build around the NFL. It allows us to enter the U.S. market with the leading name in sports backing our vision. The NFL puts Genius at the epicenter of betting, media, and technology within the U.S. market, and this is crucial to achieving our long-term vision globally. We'd now like to take this opportunity to give you a peek of how Genius envisions the future of sports entertainment.
In a few short years, the idea of trying to engage and monetize sports fans with generic one-size-fits-all content will be history. Accelerated through the acquisitions of Spirable, FanHub, and Second Spectrum in 2021, our tech allows leagues, teams, sportsbooks, and consumer brands to connect at every stage of a fan's journey in a personal and contextual way. Using contextual live sports data, brands can be part of the authentic conversation. It's localized, non-intrusive advertising that speaks the language of fans. We help our partners get in front of the right fan with content they love all delivered at exactly the right moment. Free-to-play games like season-long fantasy contests, fan polls, and pickems drive long-term engagement and capture that all-important first-party user data. The in-game experience is where individual personalization really takes off, and here we can see the world of convergence we are building towards.
Fans can already watch whichever game they want, but the experience becomes much more immersive and unique to every single fan. Second screen activities like social media will become part of an integrated UI, helping fans connect and share in real time. Non-intrusive, personalized e-commerce, with teams able to serve offers based on a fan's buying history and even their favorite place to sit in a stadium. Fantasy products and free-to-play games, already a huge marketing vehicle for brands, will be fully integrated, making it easy for fans to follow their teams in contests in real time. Second Spectrum has already been used to enhance and create new viewing experiences across major broadcast networks. Here, we can allow users to experience alternate broadcasts at the touch of a finger and watch a game from the camera angle or visual interface that suits them.
Of course, our official data feeds are the heartbeat of our products, and they're accessible at any time. Users can rely on and use live data to analyze performance and make informed decisions on in-game bets. Based on how fans have wagered before, the bet type, the stake, the period of the game, a sportsbook can recommend content attaching their brand to the biggest moments in games when emotions are running high. When viewers are feeling good, they can interact with any part of the experience to buy merchandise around their favorite team, player, or relevant brand. In this example, computer vision has identified the shirt of a specific player, and our integration into an e-commerce platform has allowed the transaction to take place. It doesn't stop after the game has ended.
By now, a team, brand, or sportsbook is primed to monetize fans and able to send highly targeted, unique offers to each fan based off of their interactions and preferences. From merchandise and tickets to betting odds and hotel rooms, they get more ROI for their marketing dollars. Maximizing the lifetime value of these fans is key. Our CRM tools, including push messaging, email, and rich inbox, means our partners can stay front of mind with data-rich, timely, and unique content in between every game. For the avoidance of doubt, I wanna be really clear. This demo, whilst having some areas that are aspirational, are technologies that Genius already has, already deploys, and already monetizes. With the exception of the merchandising, this technology is proven and delivered to customers on a global basis and is delivering value already.
Our mission as a business is to pull all of these technologies together in order to deliver the future fan experience. To summarize, I remain incredibly optimistic about the future of Genius Sports and our ability to drive growth and profitability in the near, medium, and long term. Our original business continues to deliver profitability. Our technology advantage and deeply integrated partnerships secure our long-term position at the heart of the industry. We partner with the leading names across sports, betting, and media. Our commercial structure sets the business up to share in the upside and grow alongside our partners. We've developed and acquired cutting-edge technology that is innovating the world of sports entertainment. As you've just seen in this video, Genius is focused on building an all-encompassing technology platform that facilitates all sports entertainment transactions, and more importantly, will allow us to profit from each of those transactions.
We've already made tremendous strides towards that goal. A key pillar of this platform is Second Spectrum. Before I hand it over to Jack and Rajiv to discuss our sports technology business segment, I'd like to introduce Second Spectrum with this quick video.
Second Spectrum lies at the intersection of sports and data and technology. Right now, there's basically a one-size-fits-all solution. As we know, we don't all like the same thing.
It's becoming an on-demand world, and that's a fundamental, almost inalienable right today that was nonexistent 20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.
With the information age, big data has hit sports. The problem is the data itself is not valuable to people. It's the ability to use data to turn the content into things people care about. What we're bringing at Second Spectrum is the ability to transform data into capabilities that can really change people's experiences.
The good news is you can get very specific, and you can target exactly what you want, when you want it, and where you want it.
That bridge is essentially a computer that understands the game because a computer that understands the game and understands you can give you what you want.
That to me is ultimate choice. It's gonna be a big part of the sporting experience.
We combine machine learning, computer vision, design, user experience to create a platform that is able to understand both sports and people and transform content into ways that people actually want to experience them.
That's where I see companies like Second Spectrum playing a role. They're going to continue to be that next growth area in making the experience richer and much more personal tomorrow than it is today.
My name is Rajiv Maheswaran, Co-Founder and CEO of Second Spectrum, which is now proudly part of the Genius Sports family. Technology transforms every industry. One day you have picks and shovels, and then you have bulldozers and excavators, and they let you make incredible things that you could never have imagined before. Sports are no different. It is being bulldozed as we speak, and those prepared to reap the rewards are those ready for it. Being ready means having technological DNA inside you, and Genius Sports has that DNA. What does that transformation look like in sports? Well, things that were done by people, collecting data, creating media, can now be done by machines. Now machines can watch, understand, and create sports content as well as elite humans can. We know this because we've already built it. Machines can watch like a human.
Watching us putting cameras in stadiums and knowing the entire skeletal pose of LeBron James or Cristiano Ronaldo for every frame of video for every game. What good is that? Machines can understand like a human. Understanding is taking all that data and automatically knowing that LeBron sees an ice defense and slips the screen and makes a skip pass to create a 52% shot. Or Cristiano Ronaldo is making an off-ball run, drawing defenders to create space for a teammate to receive a between-the-lines pass. Our machines understand hundreds and hundreds of words about events in sports that only elite professionals know, and only Second Spectrum possesses this degree of automated understanding. What good is that? Well, machines can now use that understanding to automatically create content, integrating video and data in ways that others only talk about in vision videos.
There are a lot of vision videos. We have a reality video. The reality is of executions where we have augmented entire games in the NBA, Premier League, Major League Soccer, and NFL, among others, doing things from shot probabilities to MarvelCast and Kids Cast, from RomoVision to Slime Trails with partners like ESPN, CBS, Fox Sports, BT Sport, the Clippers, and Bally Sports, among others. Not some vague promise, but concrete reality that we have executed hundreds of times the last few years. This stuff is real, and it's only going to get better. Here's a sample.
Higher than that. Curry. Oh.
Guys, this is a gentle giant, and you know, I'm only 4 ft, and I'm 10 years old. I mean, come on.
Threes that he's getting, seeing these percentages up there by Second Spectrum. You gotta be willing to give up something. The numbers say that that's a good shot. Rúben Dias who can head it on. It's away by Lukaku and now Kovacic. They've got runners here. Havertz and Werner going through the middle. Good defending by Walker as well. The final there being from distance. Good spot. Osuna running through the middle. It's Holst for Benito. It's 3-nil. This go like that, and this guy go here, and Burrow's gonna look to throw here, but it's not going to, and he's gonna go ahead and make the corner and save. Given a chance like Peoples-Jones who's back from injury. Yes, you're right. Watch the post route. They call it cover four. That means four guys across the field. One of them comes downhill. You gotta protect.
That front play, this. He's gonna come from your right. Ben pump fakes. Gives himself time and throws a strike.
When machines can watch, understand, and create content, it unlocks the ability for everyone to get what they want. Someone might want numbers. Another person might want to understand the game better. Someone else might want explosions. Or maybe it's the same person who wants different ways to watch when they're with their friends or their family or by themselves. Automation enables personalization at scale. Billions of experience for billions of people powered by technology uniquely present within Second Spectrum and Genius Sports. Why has nobody else done it? Well, it's very hard. It's hard to work with machine-generated data. There's so much of it. It's harder to work with live machine-generated data. Even harder to work with live machine-generated data and live video simultaneously.
It's incredibly hard to do that for every frame of every game. Even if you could do that, it's incredibly hard to work within the existing infrastructures of data and video for leagues and media. We have already done that with the most elite leagues and elite media partners on the planet. That's why others show only vision videos, and we show stuff we have already done. Our vision is built on a foundation of reality, and that allows us to see farther, see better, see the next way of seeing sports. We have a lot of cool stuff left in the bag, and we look forward to bringing it all to you. I'll now turn it over to Jack Davison to bring it all together and discuss our business model and go-to-market strategy.
Thanks, Rajiv. Hi, everyone. I'm Jack Davison, Chief Commercial Officer at Genius. We're thrilled to have Rajiv and the Second Spectrum team as part of the Genius family. For over 15 years, we've supplied technology infrastructure to power the world of sports, and we'd like to walk you through the product set that delivers an accurate, reliable, and fast data-driven technology ecosystem for hundreds of sports leagues and federations around the globe. Once I finish talking about this area of the business, the three things I want you to understand are the importance of Genius Sports to our sports partners, why these partnerships help drive our profitability, and the enormous opportunity ahead of us. Back to our products. Live Stats is the beating heart of that ecosystem.
LiveStats leads the way in the collection of live sports data, capturing every shot, goal, dunk, spike, and more across multiple sports in over 150 countries. Critical to this infrastructure is a network of 7,000 trained data statisticians who operate our LiveStats software in the stadia. The applications of this data, including scoreboards, coaching tools, broadcasts, OTT platforms, are numerous. Genius Live and Genius Live Plus is our fully automated streaming technology, working end-to-end on video capture, production, and distribution. This technology is affordable, removing the restrictive costs of hardware and camera personnel, and automated with track and zoom function powered by AI software. Leagues use Genius Live to provide fans live streams and video on demand from every game, combining their data and video content into a solution that benefits fans, attracts new sponsors, and ultimately, drives new revenue.
Enhancing the quality of competition is vital to the future of sports, and our coaching and player analytics tools empower coaches to make highly informed split-second decisions using rich data and integrated video streams. This system is highly customizable and enables coaches and their assistants to communicate with one another and their teams in every situation, from a timeout to a training pitch. We also operate a competition management platform, a digital software that is used to create fixture lists, allocate venues, manage rosters. Getting these tasks done quickly and accurately is critical to any league. Our software ensures that players, teams, venues, and schedules are all aligned and organized. In addition, we own a proprietary Sportzcast system, which links directly into every venue scoreboards to deliver accurate and official real-time game data in a universal format.
Our technology is compatible with over 194 different scoreboard systems in over 6,000 sports venues worldwide, including in over 400 U.S. colleges and universities. This data is critical to many in-venue and off-site applications. Lastly, there is not a single league we partner with that isn't deeply focused on the integrity of their sport. The entire sports ecosystem is underpinned by fair and transparent competitions, void of any match fixing or betting-related corruption. We combine 24/7 bet monitoring, education services, integrity audits, and over a decade's experience to provide a critical level of protection to each competition. I'd now like to bring this all together by discussing our business model and go-to-market strategy. We operate two primary business models. I'll start with our contra model, in which Genius secures long-term agreements with leagues in exchange for our technology and software services.
This allows Genius to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with leagues globally and integrate our technology and services deeply within each league's operations. This makes our churn with these leagues near zero, as not only do leagues value our offering, but switching costs are too high and often put the league's very operations at risk. We operate this strategy with over 300 Tier Two, Three, and Four leagues. While these non-Tier One sports are typically smaller leagues that are less popular at a global level, they are very popular in their local countries or regions and often have large, dedicated fan bases. The low cost contra strategy with these leagues helps mitigate the risk of rights inflation for the content we acquire and helps to lock in sports with strong future potential value into long-term deals.
As we'll discuss in the coming section, these tiers facilitate vital content a sportsbook needs to be competitive at all times of the day and all days of the year. Furthermore, this approach gives us the financial flexibility to be competitive for Tier One rights when we believe it will be strategically accretive to our portfolio. Turning to our strategy with Tier One leagues, the beauty of being a technology company is that we have many ways to work with leagues, even if we do not have their data rights. With powerful technology, Genius is an attractive technology partner with whom leagues want to work to help drive dozens of future initiatives. Let's talk about basketball. Firstly, this is exactly the relationship we currently maintain with the NBA, where we do not hold exclusive data rights, but we built and manage the technology for their global statistical system.
Second Spectrum remains the official tracking provider for the league, as well as for many teams, including the Clippers and the Mavericks. We are very comfortable working with many Tier One leagues in this capacity, even when exclusive data rights are not in the picture or are otherwise not a strategic priority. Conversely, our tech infrastructure has also been used to secure long-term data right deals with the likes of FIBA, the world basketball governing body, who oversees over 200 national basketball federations from all over the world. Our technology supported the growth of basketball worldwide and gave Genius the scale to commercialize the data in the global sports betting market, covering 100,000 events a year. Finally, the NCAA has also chosen Genius to digitally transform its system for the collection, management, and distribution of live game statistics across all sports.
NCAA LiveStats for basketball was successfully launched in 2018 with schools and conferences for both men's and women's basketball across all three divisions. NCAA LiveStats provides schools and conferences with an advanced level of game statistics to benefit coaches, fans, and partners, including shot charts, shot areas, lineup analysis, rotation summaries, and a range of other analytics. The NCAA has funded this project, which is managed by Genius and has developed a roadmap to implement similar technology across all sports. As well as for basketball, NCAA LiveStats is currently live in football, volleyball, ice hockey and soccer. Let's take a look at the long-term opportunity. As of now, our advanced technology is primarily used as a tool to further integrate with the leagues and secure long-term data and streaming rights, which we then commercialize in the sports betting and media markets.
However, this technology also leads to tremendous long-term opportunity. While the use case today is primarily as an enabler for long-term league partnerships, we see significant potential runway in the following areas. First is the opportunity we're already achieving. We're enabling a real solution for one-to-one broadcasts and second screen experiences that allow for complete personalization and customization based on preference of the viewer. As Rajiv said earlier, this is something that we are in market with today, and you may have caught Second Spectrum recently powering parts of a Nickelodeon broadcast for the NFL playoffs. We're deploying broadcast visualizations specifically designed around fantasy, betting, gamification, data analytics, and partnering with leading media brands around the world to bring this to market. With some sportsbooks specifically repositioning themselves as entertainment companies, the relevance of these technologies for them is increasingly clear.
Second is the potential to develop entirely new betting markets through advanced player tracking that we're uniquely positioned to capture. For instance, betting on player top speeds. Other ancillary applications could include an even deeper and richer set of coaching tools and analytics or replay review automation, a world where a ruling on a field can be overturned immediately or a player offsides can be called within seconds, not minutes. A longer term opportunity for our cost base is a potentially significant reduction and eventual removal of existing data capture costs as the process becomes automated through installation of low-cost optical tracking solutions. The opportunities are massive, and we share this longer term vision with the leagues we work with day in and day out. They want to partner with us for the long term to gain access to this technology and to fuel their future ambitions.
This is the hook we use to secure long-term data and streaming rights and commercialize to the betting and media market today. We're not highlighting these opportunities under the promise of revenue in five or 10 years out. Rather, we are highlighting these opportunities because this is precisely the reason why leagues want to work with Genius. This is also how we have built our official data rights portfolio of over 190,000 events, which we use to fuel our betting and media business in a profitable way.
I think when you think about sports in general, and you think about football specifically, it is something that appeals to hundreds of millions of people, and is a communal experience. Even though it reaches that many people, everybody's experience with sports is different, and it's highly personal. If there's anything that technology and data allow us to do, it's allow us to take a mass sport that is consumed by the masses, but also personalize it for each fan. I think Genius is a very important partner for us to help us do that with data.
They clearly do that in the gambling context, but they also do that in a non-gambling context, whether that's Next Gen Stats, which basically allows fans to go beyond the traditional stats that you see in a highly customized way, but also what they do with Second Spectrum and CBS and our broadcast partners, which is clearly a broadly consumed medium. I think the key to sports in the future and the key to the NFL's future is finding partners who can take a mass sport and serve the masses, but also do it in a highly personalized way. When we looked at Genius, there was a few characteristics that made them stand out with all of our alternatives. One was their scale. They clearly have scale to deliver data, not only in this country, but worldwide. Second, their ability to innovate, their history in innovation.
Some of the innovation ideas that they brought to us as we talked about our partnership were certainly exciting and made a big difference. Also it was their ability really to bring data to life, to make it visual for the fan. This is much more than betting for us. Betting is an important part of our segment. This is more about serving fans and helping them be engaged and retained in our sport 365 days a year. Legalized sports betting in the U.S. is obviously relatively new, but our core objectives as we attack legalized sports betting is to make sure we do it in a responsible way, a responsible way for the league and our brand, but also for our fans.
When we looked for a data partner, we needed to find a partner who had a proven 20-year plus experience in this area, and that's where Genius came to the top, what they did internationally. What they allow us to do is to approach gambling in a responsible way with a lot of the capabilities they have, but also to make sure that we're targeting sports bettors versus the general fan. We know that while every gambler is an NFL fan, not every NFL fan is a gambler. To be able to actually target and personalize a customized experience for gamblers and non-gamblers alike was extremely important to us. Genius's 20 years plus experience in this shows that we can not only engage these fans responsibly, but we can also retain them.
Year one has been a tremendous success for us and Genius, and has exceeded all of our expectations. Our data feed that we do with Genius is serving 97% of the betting market today, which is as high a market share as you can get, almost. When you look at the fact that New York is coming online, we expect that to grow, and Genius to be able to service that as effectively as they had the other legalized gambling states. I also think the opportunity internationally is growing and exciting. What they've done with data in Watch and Bet in the current markets has been outstanding, and we've just opened up new markets, South America and elsewhere, where we think that growth is gonna continue.
So far, year one has been a success, and we expect more great things to come.
My name is Adrian Ford. I'm General Manager of Football DataCo, which is a joint venture between the Premier League and the English Football League, and we also represent the Scottish Professional Football League. All of data rights for professional football in the UK gets vested in Football DataCo. Genius Sports' core role for Football DataCo is to collect and distribute fast betting data to the betting markets. We also, through their acquisition of Second Spectrum, have a variety of other roles around tracking data and analytics. It's a very wide-ranging brief. Official data is very important.
Official data is recognized by the leagues, and we think it has an intrinsic value as a gold standard, both because it's authorized by the leagues, it's collected in stadium, so therefore it will be the fastest and most accurate service, and it helps to preserve integrity of sport, as well as importantly provide a fair return to sport from the betting markets. Unofficial data could be regarded as pirated data, 'cause it's generated without permission of the leagues. If it's done in stadium, it's against the ground rules and ground regulations. It doesn't have any obligation to impose any conditions on the user, and it gives nothing back to sport, and that's the sport it's exploiting. Genius Sports is the official fast betting data collector and distributor for Football DataCo. It's a vital role because football betting is a huge global market.
Clearly distributing that data to as wide a market as possible is critical for Football DataCo. From a betting operator point of view, it's critical that that data is generated accurately and with as low latency as possible to ensure that they are not exposed to any particular market risk. There is a wider acceptance that official data is the best currency to trade in the market. Through those efforts we've seen the number of customers who are using official data increase, and therefore the applicability of the terms and conditions that we require to be utilized. I think from our perspective, appointing Genius Sports has helped the distribution and the message of the value of official data, so we've got a lot to thank them for. The U.S. is a growth market from the point of view of, I shall call it soccer.
As you see the U.S. market deregulate supporting sports betting, I see the growth for English soccer following the growth of other sports. If it is to follow what's happened in Europe, it will be the live in-running betting that will drive that growth. Second Spectrum were appointed as official tracking data partner for Football DataCo from the start of the 2019/20 season. What this means in reality is that all 380 Premier League matches are serviced by Second Spectrum, and the clubs and the leagues get access to all the data that's generated. Tracking data is a rich source of information for clubs, and you can see how that can aid performance and player management. I think the really exciting bit looking forward is how that data can also be used in a wider context, particularly for media, particularly for fan engagement.
Because the data is so rich, it can provide genuinely unique insights to help people's understanding of the game, and there are unlimited ways in which that can be used. This is a nascent market. We're right on the edge of this now. Second Spectrum have high capability in machine learning and advanced AI techniques to mine this data and provide really unique insights that I think have got huge potential.
Picking up where I left off, we leverage our sports technology to secure long-term sticky partnerships with hundreds of leagues around the world, which enables us to aggregate data. We then monetize that data across the global sports ecosystem with scale, starting with our sportsbook customers who simply cannot operate without it. In this section, we will review the core betting products we wrap around those data feeds and how we partner with customers to achieve our shared goals. Key takeaways for this section, the fundamental role we play in supporting our sportsbook partners, the commercial models that align us with both our customers and the growth in the market, and finally, the industry tailwinds that make our business more relevant as the market trends towards in-play.
Before diving into our products and commercial models, it's important to understand that official data is the fundamental backbone of the sports betting industry. It is absolutely critical for our customers to have the fastest and most accurate and secure data feeds. By utilizing official data and streaming content, customers can feel confident they are using the most reliable input to power their operations. For instance, real-time data feeds ensure that sportsbooks can maximize their market uptime, ultimately allowing them to take more wagers and increase total handle. Additionally, by using data feeds that are sanctioned by the leagues as the single verifiable source of truth, our customers can trust that the data is powering the most accurate pricing models, which supports higher margins for their business. Streaming content is another tool that has become increasingly important to attract audiences, drive fan engagement, and grow betting activity.
In summary, the content that Genius aggregates is packaged together and distributed to support the essential infrastructure that sports books need in order to win. Moving on, now let me tell you a bit about our range of solutions. The first and most crucial is our live data feed. A well-run sportsbook is focused on offering content around the clock, and Genius has the breadth and depth of coverage to deliver that content in its highest quality. A typical sportsbook is likely offering a finite number of events, which we estimate to be around 250-300,000 annually. This includes legitimate professional games of sport of sufficient quality and integrity for sports betting. This does not include amateur or underage games, nor does it include Mark and I playing table tennis in our office.
Our portfolio of coverage includes over 190,000 high-quality events under official rights, of which 116,000 are exclusive. This represents a significant portion of a sportsbook's total event coverage, and our portfolio is constantly growing, which we'll go over in a short while. Sportsbooks are increasingly focused on in-play betting, which represents a majority of the market in mature regions like Europe and the U.K. For any well-managed sportsbook in any market, it's critical to have accurate, low latency and reliable data feeds. In markets where in-play betting is already prevalent, it's equally important to have real-time odds powered by that same real-time data. Genius provides the technology to power pricing models, an experienced trading team to manage it, customizable solutions to drive margins, and the scale to support a global network of customers.
We employ hundreds of traders spread across two continents, pricing and trading live odds and lines at literally every hour of the day. As Mark mentioned at the start, data and in-play odds making are essential commodities that aren't necessarily differentiators for sportsbooks over time. This means Genius providing a cost-effective solution, which enables our customers to focus on other aspects of running their business. I've spoken in the previous section about Genius Live and Genius Live Plus and how streaming content drives revenue uplift for our sportsbook customers. Our rapidly growing content portfolio across multiple time zones now covers almost 40,000 events annually. This has been an area of investment for us, which, well, Nick will cover later today. Genius also offers all-encompassing trading services where customers can fully outsource the entire back-end operation across data, odds, risk management, and more.
This enables our customers to focus on the customer-facing product where they can differentiate their brand by attracting and engaging customers. We offer every tool to run a sportsbook, no matter what kind of customer they are. We will always be a relevant service provider, especially as customers evolve over their maturity curves and move between buckets of products and services. Genius is a strategic partner with value-add solutions across the entire customer journey. Let's explore how sportsbooks work with us in different ways. This concept manifests itself in our commercial contracts with customers. While this is purely illustrative, it's meant to demonstrate how our go-to market strategy accommodates what's most important to our partners as opposed to a one-size-fits-all packages. Let's look at Sportsbook One, for example.
Here's an instance of a customer who likely places outsized importance on leagues A, B, and C, and perhaps has a committed trading team to these particular events, so they're content with just taking data only. However, for leagues D, E, and F, they may lack the trading infrastructure or expertise, so they find value in outsourcing that to Genius. Additionally, they may also want to take our data, odds, and our live streaming content for all other leagues as a mechanism for boosting engagement in what may be less popular events on their platform. While Sportsbook Two looks similar, this is common for a sportsbook in more mature market who recognizes the efficiency of outsourcing both data and odds for even their most important events. Perhaps because in-play betting is more prominent and the need to differentiate in this area is lessened.
To recap, as in-play betting increases, sportsbooks are less likely to differentiate on these odds. Rather than dedicating an expensive trading team to these events, they're confident in outsourcing this function to Genius while they focus on things like UX, marketing, product design, and managing customers. Sportsbook number three represents a customer who might be newer and lacking the back-end operations and infrastructure. They're more comfortable relying on Genius to manage the entire back-end operation while they focus on establishing their brand and attracting customers. The takeaway of all this is that sportsbooks will inevitably evolve, meaning their preferences will change over time. Genius has the range of products and flexibility to support our partners as they continue along this journey. Let's take a look at the commercial models.
The fees we earn from these contracts will depend on the services we're providing, but can be categorized into two commercial models. The first, which is common in mature markets, is a fixed revenue model in which we offer a fixed number of live events for a predetermined fixed fee. For example, Genius may provide 100,000 events per year in exchange for a flat fee of $1 million in year one, $1.3 million in year two, and $1.6 million in year three, and so on. There is some variability to this model as customers exceed the 100,000 events or expand into new regions. This triggers incremental revenue for Genius. The second is a revenue share model, which is common in maturing markets like the U.S.
Simply put, Genius takes a share of gaming revenue generated from the events provided and aligns our interests with our customers. Before moving on, it's critical to understand that GGR numbers will vary depending on these two important factors, mix of in-play betting and the sports book's win margins. More in-play betting and higher win margins will drive higher GGR. The sports betting industry quotes the addressable market in terms of gross gaming revenue, which often ignores the math that actually result in gross gaming revenue. Allow me to explain. Our view is that the math begin with handle or the volume of bets placed. That total volume is split between pre-match bets placed before the start of the event and in-play bets placed during the event, or as we say, whistle to whistle.
The sports books then earn a margin on every bet placed, which we call win rate or win margin. We know from our experience in mature markets that for many sports books, in-play win margins are often twice as high as pre-match. Before moving on, it's critical to understand that GGR numbers will vary depending on these two important factors, mix of in-play betting and the sports book's win margins. More in-play betting and higher win margins will drive higher GGR. These factors inevitably benefit Genius as well. In the U.S., for example, with the NFL, we have deals in place that earn us an average take rate of 1.5%-2% on pre-match and 5% on in-play gaming revenue.
Not only does in-play betting lead to higher win margins, which leads to increased gaming revenue, but Genius also benefits from a take rate that's on average three times higher. This is how Genius benefits from this compounding effect, which acts as a double tailwind for our business. You can follow these illustrative examples on the slide to see how simply changing the two variables, percent of in-play win margin, can meaningfully increase Genius revenue potential. Absolutely no incremental cost. For simplicity of math, these illustrative examples assume a revenue share off of GGR to demonstrate this point. However, most revenue share contracts with US sports books are based on a figure that's closer to NGR, which deducts taxes and limited amounts of promotional spend. I'll cover this distinction on the next few slides. Where are we today with the NFL?
Well, as Mark mentioned at the start of the call, in our first NFL regular season, NFL in-play as a percent of handle is coming through nicely at 25%. However, we are seeing this convert to revenue at a far lower win margin than what we expected based on years of operating in Europe and the U.K. We, of course, speak to our sportsbook partners on these results and collectively are working towards driving product focused on growing in-play betting and delivering stronger in-play results. You have to remember just how new this product is and how in-play trading models only get better with time and repetition. We're confident that we and our industry partners will work together on this and that over time we can start trending towards our shared goal.
That said, we are cautious in our modeling and want to be transparent with how we are thinking about this and using data from our first NFL season to inform our forward guidance. First, there are a number of different estimates for the size of the market in terms of GGR. We've reviewed them and taken a blended median view and thus not being overly aggressive. We believe the U.S. market will increase by nearly 50% this year to a total of $5.5 billion GGR. By 2024, we see this nearly doubling to $10 billion. We're also assuming a blended tax rate across the U.S. of 20% consistently over the next three years.
As you can see, we are assuming that NFL in-play as a percentage of handle will grow modestly from 25% in 2021 to 27% in 2022, with growth continuing over the next several years as the market matures and in-play betting is more widely adopted. We also assume that win margins will begin to normalize, and we've conservatively assumed NFL in-play as a percent of revenue will stay consistent in 2022 at 13% and grow to 15% in 2023 and 20% in 2024. Should in-play volume accelerate or win margin improve, this would represent upside to our guide. Lastly, Genius currently earns a weighted average share of circa 1.75% on pre-match NFL gaming revenue and 5% on in-play NFL gaming revenue. This assumption is based on three-year contracts we have in place.
By 2024, we have the opportunity to renegotiate terms of those contracts. We expect the NFL in-play betting product to become increasingly more valuable to the sports books and for our offering of all other content and services to become even stronger, allowing us to reach favorable new terms as we grow alongside our partners. What gives us confidence in our view is the knowledge and experience we have in mature markets, where we have seen how in-play adoption curves have ramped over time and equally, how it has translated to better win margins. These are the two key trends to look out for, and we will be sure to update you as and when NFL results suggest that revisions in our assumptions are necessary.
For now, this is the starting point, and we are confident that at these levels we can hit the guidance that Nick will discuss with you later today. Taking a step back, it's important to understand that the NFL revenue share is just one component of our NFL strategy and US betting revenue. The partnership reaches across our entire organization. Having this must-have content allows us to increase revenue from the sales of many other products. As a quick reminder, our NFL deal gives Genius the exclusive global rights to its data for the sports betting and media markets, exclusive rights to international streaming, and makes us the official advertising partner of the NFL for sports betting and iGaming. As a result, when we think about our NFL partnership, we also consider revenue generated from selling the Watch and Bet streams internationally.
Revenue generated from our media business from selling NFL ad inventory, revenue generated from cross-selling other events and increasing utilization rents, not to mention a whole host of other strategic initiatives we have the opportunity to execute on now with the NFL on our side. Now that we've established the math and key drivers, let me walk you through a more detailed example of a typical revenue share contract. In its simplest form, Genius may take a share of GGR. In this illustrative example, let's assume $100 of GGR with a 20/80 split between in-play and pre-match. Assuming a 5% share of in-play GGR and a 1.5% share of pre-match, Genius would earn $1 and $1.20 in revenue respectively, for a total of $2.20 from that $100 of GGR.
Another common structure, and the one predominantly in place in the U.S. market, is taking a share of NGR, though with built-in contractual protections for Genius. Let's walk through another example of $100 of GGR. In this example, we've deducted $20 for taxes reflecting our U.S. assumption. From there, let's say we are in a highly promotional environment where operators decide to spend 70% of GGR on promos, bringing operator NGR to $10. This is where our contractual promotional spend protection comes into play. In this example, we limit promotional deductions to only 15% of GGR, which is typical for a real contract. As a result, the actual NGR figure we use to calculate revenue share is $65 versus the $10 from the operator NGR calculation, making Genius relatively protected from aggressive promotional spend.
From here, using the same assumptions of 80% pre-match and 20% in-play, you can then follow along to find Genius revenue of $1.43 off of that $65 of applicable NGR. In either scenario, Genius is completely aligned with customers such that as their businesses grow, we grow alongside them. Each commercial model has its benefits and unique growth drivers. The fixed revenue model gives us good earnings visibility given the minimum revenue guarantees with some upside variability as customers expand and book more events. Our revenue growth from this model comes in the form of contractual price escalators, increased utilization of events, higher uptake of products, customers moving into new markets, and as always, new customer wins. The revenue share model has unique benefits that allow Genius to share in the growth of the sports betting industry. Essentially, Genius grows as our customers grow.
For example, with New York launching online sports betting earlier this month and other states expected to follow suit, Genius and its sportsbook partners enjoy immediate revenue benefits by virtue of increased total handle. Additionally, our share of in-play gaming revenue is typically significantly higher than pre-match gaming revenue. Therefore, as in-play betting rises, Genius benefits to an even higher degree. To summarize, our revenue opportunity in this part of the business is multifaceted with several levers for growth, including market liberalization, revenues growing in lockstep with the industry and attracting new customers. Market-wide shift to in-play betting, earning Genius a higher share of revenue. Increased utilization, the heart of our official data strategy in providing more events to our customers. Finally, increased share of wallet, taking a higher share of revenue for essential data that has historically been under-monetized while continuing to expand our value-add services.
We've already seen significant growth in the size of the sports betting market and are still in such early stages. In the U.S., we're expecting significant growth over the next several years, with GGR expected to triple from 2021- 2025. Not to mention, our global customer base allows us to capitalize on the growth in the rest of the world as well. The opportunity for Genius, its partners, and virtually anyone in this space is massive, and we're only just beginning to recognize the benefits. Utilization with our customers is an important KPI that we track to ensure that we are commercializing our portfolio of rights. What you see here is a chart demonstrating the number of events offered by Genius. A single event could be a Premier League match like Tottenham versus Arsenal.
We've grown the number of events covered from 188,000 in 2018 to nearly 350,000 events in 2021. The other side of the chart, the orange line, shows our customer bookings which is the aggregated number of times a Genius-covered sporting event is booked by sports books. So if all 25 of our top operators use our data from Tottenham versus Arsenal, that counts as 25 bookings. Of course, you'll notice here that during COVID in 2020, the number of bookings decreased. That was because many of the highest quality events our top 25 operators typically would book were not played that year.
The key takeaway here is that not only have we grown the number of events we offer, but more importantly, we've grown the average number of bookings per customer. In 2018, our top 25 customers booked 2 million in-play events, or just around 81,000 events per customer. Today, that number has grown to 142,000 per customer as bookmakers take more and more events offered. This growth is attributable to the high quality of our content portfolio, our partners adopting our official data strategy, and as we have heard a lot today, the increasing demand for more in-play content as sports betting markets across the globe trend in this direction. To close, Genius is a key strategic partner to sports books, and we've established strong, long-standing relationships that are continuously evolving. We've successfully executed on our land and expand strategy.
We've done this by providing reliable data feed and services that are vital to their operations, offering a value-add product set to meet their changing needs, and structuring commercial deals that allow us to share in their growth. As a result, our dollar-based net revenue retention rate for our top 25 customers was 144% from 2020 to 2021. Our ability to sustain revenue growth over time is true not only for our top 25 customers, but for all of our customers, as you can see, demonstrating our value as a partner. While our core betting products are the key pillar of these partnerships, these net retention rates are inclusive of all revenue across our full suite of solutions, including our media business, where we enable these partners to leverage the power of data to engage fans in a personalized and cost-efficient way.
To recap, all of this is further evidence of the importance of Genius Sports as a supplier to sports books and clear evidence of market trends to in-play sports betting.
Hi, I'm Steve Birch. I'm the CEO of Sky Betting & Gaming. Sky Betting & Gaming is one of the U.K.'s biggest betting and gaming brands. We operate five brands, Sky Bet, which is one of the largest sports brands, and also Sky Vegas, Sky Casino, Sky Poker, and Sky Bingo. Genius Sports provides fast and accurate data for us to use. We use that in multiple different ways, so we use that accurate data and up-to-date data to put into models to work out what the prices should be. We also use that data on site for the scoreboard and stats experience that really enhance the customers who are then following the bets.
In the last 10 years, particularly, the U.K. betting market has really exploded, particularly driven by people taking on and adopting mobile betting and also football betting coming to the forefront. Sky Bet's been able to take advantage of both those two things with strong mobile products and then a heritage of football betting driven by our Sky branding. We've really focused on an easy-to-use customer experience, making things as simple as possible and also ultimately making it an entertainment product, so customers can really enjoy betting alongside the sport they're watching. In-game betting's been huge. It gives you a massive entertainment value to the sport to what you're watching, and actually the halo of that has definitely helped drive pre-live betting on as well.
Yeah, a big part of providing entertainment around match and getting people used to how to bet on football. Over the years, it's been great to work with Genius Sports to help evolve our betting products, particularly since Genius' deal with the Football DataCo, we've been able to get hold of accurate, up-to-date data for Premier League and EFL fixtures, which are vitally important to the Sky Bet business. We've definitely moved to offer more types of cash out market, more availability on cash out, but also different bet types and using new data and different sizes of data to develop new bets that are really interesting for customers. Yeah, as the betting market's grown and Sky Bet's grown, our partnership with Genius Sports has also grown.
We've increased going from taking odds to taking data, and now we've also increased the range of markets that we take from Genius Sports. Over the last couple of years, the growth in the U.S. market has obviously been huge. I think there'll be a bigger drive, an earlier adoption of more interesting entertainment in-game bet types, the type of bets that we're now seeing in the U.K. over the last five years. I just think there'll be a massive acceleration in the U.S.
Hi, I'm Josh Linforth. By now, you should appreciate our ability to collect data in partnership with leagues, the type of data points we have at our disposal, and how they power the global sports betting market. I thought I would take a moment to explain why Genius created a media business many years ago. Due to the commercial model we have in place with our sportsbook partners for the supplying of data, we developed an industry-focused ad tech business to help our customers acquire new players and drive turnover. Meaning the success we deliver via our ad tech business can help support wider Genius revenues. As we look to the growth of in-play in the U.S. market, we continue to look to our ad tech business to support our partners.
The content we obtain through our league partnerships makes Genius uniquely positioned to deliver contextually relevant content to the right audience at the right time. This is driven by a deep understanding of what's happening in a sporting event and who's watching. In essence, we're enabling our partners, ranging from consumer brands, leagues, teams, and sports books alike, to connect with a passionate sports audience by harnessing the power of data. There are a number of tools we use to increase engagement and ultimately drive a transaction for our customers, and we'll cover each of those tools shortly. Before we do, it's important to understand what differentiates our solution, which is unique access. We combine real-time sports data and odds, audience data, and live video content, and integrate it through various channels to empower our customers to reach targeted audiences in a personalized and cost-efficient way.
Whether it's Buffalo Wild Wings offering free-to-play games and rewards to diners.
FanDuel targeting first-time depositors, they equally benefit from the data and tools that Genius is uniquely capable of leveraging. To start, much of our revenues today are driven by programmatic media buying, where we operate the largest independent media buying trading desk for the gaming industry. By owning the full ad tech stack from buying through to creative execution, we are able to drive greater efficiencies for sports-focused marketing campaigns. We utilize two core data sets to power our ad tech: sports data and audience data. Let me give you an example. We see there's money being wagered on the Rams. We can use that to influence our media buying strategy in real time. In addition, we layer on audience data to ensure we are not only accelerating campaign pacing at a key time, but we're also targeting the audience that will respond best.
This leads to greater efficiency and therefore lower customer acquisition costs. In many instances, we're not only integrating our live data and odds, but creating ad content and serving that ad. Here are a few examples. You will see that the three exclusive NFL partners have utilized our dynamic creative ad serving technology for the 2021-22 season. The bet calculator you see in these ads is particularly successful in the U.S. market as sportsbooks look to convert casual fans into bettors. Ultimately, we can work with any dynamic content, odds, scores, matchups, jackpot feeds, or anything that is essentially available in a feed. Our technology also applies to social. We build dynamic creative across Facebook, Twitter, Snap for the largest sponsors in sport.
With social platforms being the go-to place for fans to communicate during live sports events, it's only natural that our sportsbook partners use our technology to promote live odds across these channels. One of the most recent campaigns outside of sports betting was with the NBA and Hennessy to promote upcoming games with a countdown clock and congratulatory message at the end of the game. Genius creative resulted in an 80% increase in ad recall rates for Hennessy. In Q4, we launched ads for connected TV. Our new ad format allows brands to use live data feeds within video, opening the door to a new generation of live sports TV ads for sports books. We launched the product with FanDuel and are currently rolling it out to a number of other sportsbook partners.
We also work with publishers to create content widgets that sit natively within their sites and articles. You can see here a number of examples that we have launched for this NFL season. If you're in a legal sports betting state, you'll be able to find our betting widgets on nfl.com and in the NFL app, as well as a number of other sites. Through the acquisition of FanHub, Genius strengthened its suite of engagement tools by now offering an extensive library of free-to-play games. Digital fan engagement through free-to-play games is a growing priority for leagues, sportsbooks, consumer brands, and our media partners. Genius creates games on behalf of leagues to increase digital engagement with the sport. The opportunity for Genius is exciting.
It gives us another hook with league partners, the ability to cross-sell FanHub customers on other parts of the Genius platform, and in some cases, more first-party audience data and advertising inventory to commercialize further. We anticipate brands turning to personalized video campaigns in 2022 as a way of keeping an active, opted-in customer base. In addition, this highly shareable content is a powerful way of generating earned media for advertisers, which is what PlayStation experienced. Outside of ad hoc campaigns and CRM integrations, we believe there is a significant opportunity to bake this technology into our free-to-play games offering, further cementing Genius's market-leading position in the free-to-play vertical. We also help customers to operate CRM platforms, which enables them to deliver highly personalized content directly to their audience. An example of this includes statistical content before, during, and after a game.
For instance, a consumer who we understand to be interested in player stats may be getting an alert with a game preview, including relevant stats for their favorite player. During the game, we can notify that individual of live updates. For example, a touchdown or a goal scored and a post-game recap, including stats and outcomes from the bets placed. Naturally, we can't be supplying our customers with all of the aforementioned technology without a way to measure and manage it. Our insights product acts as a centralized reporting platform for all Genius content and marketing services, giving our customers a self-serve tool to quickly query and understand their data. It's worth clarifying that our advertising partnerships with sportsbook partners predate the NFL rights.
Our partnership with the NFL only strengthened our value proposition and enabled us to take more share, resulting in aggregate initial committed minimum spend of $125 million through our ad tech platform. We take pride in our ability to deliver meaningful returns on media spend, which is why we allow our customers to set the targets. It's then up to us with the right tools at our disposal to outperform those targets. Through the first four months of our inaugural NFL season, we've done exactly that. One particular U.S. sportsbook customer has already spent their full 12-month commitment in four months. They set a target of $400 to acquire a first-time depositor. We kept the average customer acquisition cost to $169. They set a target of $140 to acquire a fantasy customer. We did it for $64.
$980 for a casino customer. Genius kept costs to $747. We're not just acquiring customers, but we're finding the right customers that drive long-term value for our partners. This is proof of the value of our capabilities and why we're so confident in our ability to continue taking share and winning new business. It's also the reason why our customers have consistently increased their spend with us. Since 2017, our programmatic customer base and average spend per customer has more than doubled. Advertisers recognize that our unique capabilities and data access allow us to spend more efficiently than they could on their own, and the quality is proven in our results. The AdTech business has grown significantly in 2021 through organic and inorganic means, resulting in a broad spectrum of products and services.
Currently, the AdTech products operate on a blended 46% gross margin. We have a roadmap to improve this through a combination of technology-led efficiencies, such as a new free-to-play games platform and owning more media assets to support our growing programmatic business. By continuing to expand our AdTech business, we're positioning ourselves to take greater share of sizable advertising market dedicated to sports. We see our addressable opportunity as the $60 billion global digital sports advertising market. Our unique capabilities lead to differentiated offering with high rates of return for our customers. Based on our penetration to date, predominantly with sportsbook customers, we believe a market share of 0.75%-1% is achievable in the long term for the entire sports advertising market.
In order to reach this long-term market share and the $500 million revenue opportunity it represents, we believe we'll need to continue broadening and diversifying our customer base, which today only represents a fraction of what it can become.
Welcome, everyone. My name is Nick Taylor, CFO of Genius Sports, and it's great to be here today. I'm excited to take you through the financial implications of what you've heard from the team and how this translates into sustainable profitability for Genius. If I could summarize the key takeaways from this run-through of the numbers, it would be the following. I expect Genius to be profitable in the near term, including in 2022 and 2023, and highly profitable thereafter. This is due to, firstly, the massive growth opportunities that you've heard from Mark, Jack, and the team discuss in detail. Secondly, the contractual building blocks that are already in place. Thirdly, a controllable cost base that does not need to and should not grow as fast as our revenue position.
As a point of housekeeping, as I walk through this section and make reference to our group level 2021 position, I'll assume the midpoints of our previously guided revenue and EBITDA ranges, $259 million and $2 million respectively. Our outlook for 2021 remains unchanged, and we look forward to providing an update on our next earnings call in the coming weeks. As you've heard from Mark earlier, today we are setting out our 2022 guidance at $340 million of revenue, being a 31% year-over-year increase from the midpoint of our 2021 guide, and I will go through the constituent parts of this shortly.
We also want to give you early visibility of our first view of 2023 revenues, being in the range of $430 million-$440 million, a further 28% increase on our 2022 guidance. At an adjusted EBITDA level, we're anticipating a 2022 position of $15 million, which will climb to a range of $40 million-$50 million in 2023, where we really start to hit an inflection point as we continue to scale. Also in 2021, you will see in the group Adjusted EBITDA bridge, the group has incurred additional governance costs in relation to being a U.S.-listed business for the first time.
This is predominantly due to increases in corporate costs, such as insurance, for example, which has increased by $2 million, professional and legal fees increases, and additional headcount required in areas such as finance, legal, compliance, and investor relations. We anticipate that this number will reduce from a $12 million cost in 2021 to $9 million in 2022. There is also a $6 million rights investment in 2021, which I flagged to you before, relating to new streaming and data rights. These are long-term rights which will drive revenues in future years in nascent geographies. We're anticipating these rights acquisitions to be accretive over the life of the contract, breaking even in 2023 and paying back by 2025.
I'm also anticipating $6 million of investment rights in 2022 as well, relating to these rights that I've just talked about, together with additional rights costs which secure incremental years on key specific rights. Let's take a look at the constituent parts of the business so you can understand better the story behind our 2021 performance and 2022 estimates. We have separated the group into three areas to help give you visibility. Firstly, the original business, i.e., that's the business that existed in 2020 as we went through the de-SPAC process. Secondly, the acquisitions we've made in 2021. To remind you, they're Second Spectrum, FanHub, and Spirable. Then thirdly, our U.S. expansion, and this relates to those incremental U.S. revenues and costs since we entered into the significant sports and sportsbook contracts from mid-2021.
Now to be clear, this is not always a precise science as to what items fall into which area, particularly in relation to the U.S., and increasingly this will be the same for acquisitions. It aims to give you a view of underlying performance and how year-on-year our overall numbers stack up. Now you can see when we go through each of these areas, that the original business remains highly profitable, with increasing EBITDA margin and good growth. We are also looking to invest in our acquisitions through 2022, as the technology acquired will be fundamental to the vision for Genius products of the future. The U.S. expansion is investment phase currently, enabling us to build a significant foothold in what we believe will be the largest global market. Let's move into the detail of the core business.
To remind everyone, in 2020, our original business contributed $150 million of revenue with an 11% Adjusted EBITDA margin. In 2021, we're estimating the core Genius business has contributed additional revenues of $65 million, being a 43% year-on-year increase. As importantly, though, from a profitability standpoint, we have seen incremental revenues contributing healthy margin, clearly demonstrating the underlying sustainable profitability at scale for Genius. This drives to an 18% Adjusted EBITDA margin in the original Genius group in 2021. We expect this growth of revenue and margin to continue through into 2022. A further $27 million of growth will be driven by the original business, most of which will be in the betting product lines.
This is likely to drive incremental EBITDA contribution at a 50% margin, meaning that core business EBITDA margin next year will continue to increase up to 21%. We are anticipating acquisitions to contribute $90 million of revenue for 2021, with a neutral EBITDA position. Acquisitions will contribute a further $21 million of revenue in 2022 and will start becoming EBITDA generative with a $2 million contribution. In 2022, and already included within these numbers, we are anticipating significant investment, particularly in Second Spectrum, to the tune of about $10 million to drive key technology advances, including creating products for new sports, such as American football, developing low-cost camera technology, and reducing latency. It is these products that will form the technology bedrock of the vision that Rajiv, Mark, and Jack previously spoke of, driving significant value for the group.
Lastly, in the U.S., as Mark's already talked about, this is an area of investment for us as we accelerate into this market. It's worth remembering that back in 2020, we had not built any significant U.S. presence, with only 8% of our revenues actually being derived from that region. As Mark has already said, we are learning more about this market every month in terms of sports book profitability, handle, in-play, preplay mix. This is an investment by the business. It's an investment in the growing market. It's an investment in ensuring that Genius is a key player in the U.S., giving us access to this huge opportunity. As you know, the market is still in its infancy, and this investment in 2021 and 2022 puts Genius in an exciting position to benefit significantly from that growth potential.
We are anticipating that the U.S. will drive a further $33 million in revenue in 2022 as our position continues to grow. Based on our growth assumptions, which Jack has spoken about earlier, we are anticipating that this area of the business will be EBITDA profitable by 2024 and will proportionately become increasingly important, with revenues from the U.S. estimated at about 30% of total group revenue by that time. As you can see, there is underlying core profitability with investment being made in the U.S. to gain that strong position to take advantage of the future growth. Indeed, any upside on our 2022 guidance as set out is most likely to be derived from the acceleration of growth in the U.S. TAM, U.S. margins, and moves towards that in-play wagering model.
Jack has already been through the underlying assumptions in the US model with you earlier this morning, but we thought it helpful to set them out here as well as a key reminder of what those assumptions are so you can track progress over the next three years. Looking at 2022 in a bit more detail, how does the revenue split down on a product basis, and what are the key drivers for that year? We're expecting betting to contribute an additional $38 million in the year, being a total of $216 million in 2022, a 21% increase year-over-year. That's driven by both our non-US markets such as Europe, as well as our growing US position.
We're anticipating the media products to drive a further $28 million in revenue, taking this segment to revenues of $75 million for 2022. This will increase media products as a proportion of revenues to 22% of group revenues in the year as we continue to build on the success of our proposition, predominantly in the U.S. Lastly, sports technology sector is anticipated to grow by $15 million in the year, almost entirely due to the contribution of Second Spectrum that we report in this segment. There are numerous different levers of growth, as Jack and the team has already set out this morning. The building blocks are already in place to drive that growth. Our U.S. sportsbook contracts mean that we are taking a clip of every bet placed on events provided by us to those sportsbooks.
So long as regulated sportsbooks around the world want to offer NFL wagers or Premier League wagers, for example, they have to buy data from Genius. As states legalize throughout 2022 and wagering continues to mature in those states, there's an immediate impact to our revenues, which you will see in our results. This is coupled with our take-home revenue being roughly three times higher from in-play bet as opposed to a pre-play bet. As sports wagering embeds as part of the U.S. landscape, we anticipate the move to in-play to accelerate. However, this is not just about the U.S. Global TAM continues to grow, both in mature markets such as Europe, but also in nascent markets such as South America and Canada, where we're equally well-positioned.
We are a truly global business, and growth in betting media TAM in any major economy is likely to have a direct positive impact to our revenues. Another area of growth is through a continued increase in utilization of our events. We have long championed official rights and believe that this is fast becoming accepted as an industry standard. You can see this, for example, with the NFL's official partnerships with the seven key U.S. sportsbooks who have committed to taking official rights only. As Jack mentioned earlier, average bookings for in-play data per top 25 customers has grown from 81,000 events in 2018 to 142,000 in 2021. This is attributable to the high quality of our content portfolio, our partners adopting our official data strategy, and the increasing demand for more in-play content.
Now, this is also supported by selective acquisition of further rights where we see value for our existing customers and where new territories are expanding their wagering legislation. A few recent examples include our long-term technology partnership with the Canadian Football League, which we announced in December 2021, and also our acquisition of a number of premier South American soccer rights, including Argentina and Colombia, both markets where we're anticipating significant long-term growth. We also continue to drive revenue by our land and expand strategy. We have seen a seismic shift in the conversations that we have had with sports leagues over the last year as sports begin to understand more comprehensively how their product will be viewed over the next five years, and therefore how best this could be monetized.
This has meant most conversations now are not just about data acquisition, although that's still an important part of our business, but are increasingly about wider technology partnerships. We've always had a strong core suite of products in place, which has allowed us to build up those relationships we already have, and these have now been turbocharged in 2021 with the inclusion of the fan engagement products of FanHub, Spirable, and Second Spectrum. We've also executed our land and expand strategy with sportsbook partners. As Jack mentioned earlier, our dollar-based net revenue retention rate with sportsbook customers has increased significantly over the last three years, not only for our top 25 customers, but all of our customers, demonstrating our value as a partner and our ability to sustain revenue growth over time.
Becoming ever more embedded in the global sports ecosystem is a key part to our long-term success, not only protecting our position, but also allowing us to take an increasingly large share of wallet. Now, I want to quickly touch on the quarterly position for 2022, which we have set out on the slide. There are some timing opportunities and risks which we look at on a quarterly basis, particularly in relation to media spend, where it is sometimes not straightforward to estimate when precisely our customers will spend their media commitments. Nevertheless, with that in mind, our best estimate is revenues of $78 million in Q1, reducing in Q2 to $68 million with less premium U.S. sport impacting our media revenues. We expect this to increase to $85 million in Q3, with $109 million in the final quarter.
I now want to walk you through our estimated income statement for the year. With the position of each cost item today, this is where we see it moving long term. Set out on the left-hand side of the slide is the anticipated breakdown of our 2022 income statement, reconciling to the $15 million of Adjusted EBITDA. Now, this does not include the statutory non-cash positions that we strip out of the income statement for Adjusted EBITDA purposes, including amortization and compensation-based payments. We're expecting cost of revenues to be about 68% of revenues in 2022. As you know, there are a number of different cost lines that feed into cost of revenue, so let me spend a bit more time splitting those out for you.
Firstly, there is the direct variable cost for providing our services, incorporating, for example, the trading teams, the statistician network, the client support costs. We are anticipating this running at about 16% of revenues for the year, and this tends in the short term to be directly proportional to revenues based on the number of events provided. As collection technology improves, this should reduce as a proportion of revenue over the medium term. Secondly, there are media direct costs, as described by Josh earlier today. We're expecting these to run at a blended rate of 54% of media revenues, and therefore be about 12% of total revenues in the year. Similar to the other direct costs in the short term, these costs will be relatively linear to revenue growth in media.
Although again, with technology advances, increased buying power, and more effective use of our own inventory, this is likely to increase the margin made by Genius over the medium term. It's worth pointing out that due to this margin from media, any change in revenue mix plays an important part to our profitability. With increased betting revenues and decreased media positively impacting EBITDA margin, and obviously vice versa, having an inverse effect in our short term. Finally, in cost of revenue is our rights fees. As you know, the vast majority of these rights are fixed in nature and therefore provide both an opportunity and a risk in relation to margin. In 2022, we're anticipating rights to be about 39% of revenues as our European business continues to produce high margins while we invest in the longer-term rights acquisition in the U.S. and other nascent markets.
On a longer-term basis, we have a target of driving gross margin to about 60%. This is predominantly driven by the continual growth in global TAM and in-play, and by our increasing share of wallet. Although rights cost will continue to increase in absolute terms, our long-term revenue growth projections far outstrip this cost increase, hence the gradual and sustained improvement in margin. Moving on to sales and marketing. We're anticipating that this will be about 6% of revenues in the period. We have invested, as previously discussed, in building out our U.S. business now that there's meaningful revenue generation in that geography. This has meant that we've retargeted some of this cost base to be more U.S.-focused and are not anticipating significant jumps in future years, and therefore expect that this will reduce over time as a proportion of revenues.
For R&D, you will have seen that this line grew as a proportion of revenues in 2021 as we invest in this area through the core Genius platform, and particularly in the suite of products acquired in the year. For 2022, we're anticipating that this will be about 10% of revenues, reflecting this increased investment. On an ongoing basis, I'm not expecting the majority of this cost to grow in line with revenues, and therefore expect to reduce proportionally in a similar way to that of the sales and marketing position. Lastly, G&A has grown in the year inevitably as we move from a private company to a public company with all the appropriate increased governance structures in place.
For 2022, we're expecting this to be about 12% of revenues, and again, should not grow in a linear fashion with revenue in 2022 or beyond. There's been discussion throughout the day about our exciting investment opportunities, and I'd like to help you understand three components of our investment strategy. First is our heightened discipline around capital allocation for only the highest ROI initiatives. Second is our targeted payback period of two to three years. Third is our focus on EBITDA accretion in every investment we make with the goal of delivering near, medium, and long-term shareholder value. It is worth noting that there will occasionally be certain significant investment opportunities that are highly strategic for the business, which will have longer payback periods and different metrics to evaluate.
There are three key areas where we have invested and will continue to do so where appropriate, and that is in technology, in rights, and in the U.S. In technology investments, as you heard from Mark, Jack, and Rajiv earlier, we have a clear opportunity to act as an enablement layer, helping sports leagues and teams better engage with the next generation of audiences and to deliver a new way of consuming sport. This is the bedrock of the technology you have seen today from our vision. At scale, we believe this can be a major driver of revenue at very healthy margins. We are deploying $10 million of our capital in this area this year, targeting a three-year payback for this type of investment.
As we talked about earlier, we will continue to invest in rights, where in certain circumstances it is important to invest ahead of the revenue curve. This includes geographies where we need a presence ahead of widespread wagering legislation and also includes sports which we feel are particularly high growth, where long-term rights deals help us secure valuable and strategic assets for the group. For this opportunity, we've invested $6 million in streaming and data rights in fast-growing territories on long-term seven to 10-year deals to be breakeven in 2023 and will pay back by 2025.
Lastly, in the U.S., we've made a number of investments, as discussed, in rights, in building out our team, and in the infrastructure to go after that U.S. market. The conversations we are having with the NFL are permeating across a multitude of leagues in sports, with particular focus on the opportunity in our ad tech business to engage U.S. brands outside of sports books interested in targeting sporting audiences. We expect the U.S. opportunity to represent a third of our group revenue in 2024, and anticipate that it'll turn profitable in the same year. Strategically, our investments have put Genius at the center of the sport ecosystem in the U.S., a market that's still in its infancy, and this will enable us to maximize the opportunity for the group.
In conclusion, to summarize the key takeaways from this section, we expect Genius to be profitable in the near term, including in 2022 and 2023, and highly profitable thereafter. This is due to, firstly, the massive growth opportunities that you've heard us describe today. Secondly, the contractual building blocks that are already in place. And thirdly, a controllable cost base that does not need to and should not grow as fast as our revenue position. We remain confident in our ability to execute on this plan, and look forward to keeping you updated throughout the year.
There are four main reasons that made Genius an attractive investment opportunity back in 2018. The first one is the favorable market backdrop. In the original markets where the company was operating at the time, the growth potential was quite significant. Sports betting was growing at mid- to high single-digit rates in those markets. In addition to that, the adoption of the Genius services for sportsbooks was also growing. The two effects compounded resulted in double-digit growth potential in the original markets where Genius was operating. The second reason was really the upside potential coming from additional markets in which sports betting was not legal at the time, but which we were expecting to be legalized in the years to come.
The main example is obviously the U.S., which was legalized in 2018 and is now growing quite significantly and will represent a massive growth opportunity for years to come. The third reason was really the favorable competitive environment in which the company's operating. Genius is providing a mission-critical product where technology and scale really matter, and barriers to entry are high. There are only very few players operating in this market. The last reason is the management team. This is a very strong team that has been with the company for a long time, and that has a very strong and distinctive vision for the company. Mark, the founder of the business, was really the pioneer of the official data strategy and also of the media services, in the space, and he has a proven and successful track record.
Since 2018, the company has exceeded our expectations, certainly in terms of revenue growth, where the existing market represented roughly $80 million in revenues in 2018, and are now three times that size. Also in the U.S. where, as I say, this was just an upside at the time, and now is a tangible reality and will be the main market for the company, the most important market going forward. The company has also performed very well in terms of EBITDA, where the original markets were not profitable at the time of the investment in 2018, and are expecting to generate EBITDA margins in excess of 20% this year.
The U.S. is clearly earlier in that journey of profitability, but given the track record of the company in the original markets, I have no doubts that the U.S. will become a very profitable operations for the company in the coming years. In addition to that, the company has performed a number of strategic acquisitions, and I would like to highlight Second Spectrum in particular. This is a company with a very distinctive technology that will reinforce the technology leadership that Genius has in its markets and will make the business more defensible and future-proof. Genius continues to be a very exciting opportunity going forward. There's no need to comment about the market potential. The U.S. market potential is huge, and we're still in the early innings of the market development. This will continue to provide massive tailwind for years to come.
The competitive market environment also remains disciplined and favorable. There haven't been any new entrants. There are only very few players that have the scale and the technology to provide this service. This continues to be a very strong attraction of the company. The most exciting part of this business and what is really an opportunity going forward is that Genius provides a mission-critical service for sports books and sports leagues, and only capture a very small portion of the sports betting profit pool. I think that going forward, thanks to the new product that the company continues to develop in sports technology, but also in media services, the company has really an opportunity to make the pie larger for all the market participants and at the same time, capture a higher share of the profit pool.
In conclusion, Genius represented a very attractive investment opportunity back in 2018 because of very strong market and company fundamentals. The company has exceeded the expectations by delivering very strong revenue and EBITDA growth over the past few years. We really think the best is yet to come, as the company has a real opportunity to leverage on its technological leaderships and its new products to capture an even higher share of a fast-growing market in the coming years.
I started at ESPN in its beginning and spent over two decades there, doing a variety of jobs, but the last 12 years I was the Chief Executive Officer of ESPN. In that time, ESPN became something greater than just a singular linear network. It became a multiple channel into the consumer's home. Our motto was to serve fans everywhere, and we did that, I think, extremely well by developing new products and new platforms to distribute our content. I see a lot of parallels between my experiences at ESPN and the NFL with Genius Sports. Most prominently being the fact that when ESPN became successful was directly related to when they first acquired the NFL in 1987. I see a very similar opportunity here at Genius Sports.
I'm kinda unique in my career. I don't think a lot of people spent 33 years at one company, but I did at Turner Broadcasting System. My last six years at Turner, where I was the President of Turner, running the network's distribution, sales, marketing, and pretty much everything other than CNN's journalistic content business. Left in 2019 and worked with the Brooklyn Nets for a while as the CEO of the Brooklyn Nets, and now here at Genius.
Well, when we were at ESPN, we looked at you as our number one competitor, quite frankly.
Well, it was good. It was mutual. The good thing is all tides lifts all ships, right? Rising tides lifts all ships.
I mean, you know, at ESPN, as I mentioned, we said, serving fans everywhere, and that was, you know, that was a nod to mobility and the transformation and multiple platforms. Today, you know, it's all about consumption of content and how you consume that content and where you consume that content and how engaged you are when you consume that content, to me, are the three most critical questions that need to be answered and as a content provider need to be served. I see us as being a way to help content IP owners deliver that experience to the consumer.
To me, the consumer will only appreciate the fact that it's a personal feed for them and that it's something that's important to them and has meaning to them as opposed to, you know, let's sit down and watch an entertainment with our family. That those days are gone.
Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the future of where Genius is gonna connect to all this is, you know, there are times where you don't even wanna watch certain parts of the game. You may be, let's say, I'm gonna use golf, for example. Let's say Sergio Garcia is not even in the golf tournament, but he's still playing on Sunday. You'll never see Sergio, right, in a normal telecast. But if you have a bet or you've put something that he's gonna have 4 birdies today, you're gonna wanna see that. There's an opportunity to put a camera on almost every golfer and let the audience, let the fan decide what they wanna watch. I think that's where the future, really where this content business is going.
As people gamble, as people consume, as people gamify the content, their interest level, engagement level only increases astronomically. By providing those services, you're increasing the content and you're increasing the engagement.
Yeah. I'll go back to your comment earlier, you know, 'cause you have to personalize this. What's personalized for an 18-year-old is gonna be very different than a 50-year-old. What that 18-year-old wants, we're gonna have to provide, the network's gonna have to provide, Genius is gonna have to find products for that, as they have to find products for an older generation. All right? That's why personalization, and augmentation and visualization, all those key terms are gonna be important as you personalize the content. That's what's happening right now. I mean, the 18- to 34-year-old male is completely leaving the linear channels. They're almost not on the channels anymore. No matter how big your programming is and so forth, you're finding it in different places.
You're finding it in different ways as well, whether you're finding it on social, whether you're finding it on Twitter, whether you're finding it on Facebook, you're finding this content where you want it and how you want it.
It's a necessity for consumption.
Right.
Otherwise, they're not gonna consume the content.
Right. You have to fish where the fish are. You know what? They're not in the same place. They used to be in one place, they're everywhere. I don't think there's a business that I can think of that data isn't important. It's actually essential to all businesses. We at Turner were using data for our target marketing for our advertisers to make sure we found someone who's looking to buy car insurance or looking to buy an automotive or gonna travel. You can get this data through all different mechanisms, whether it's credit card information or whether it's set-top box data, all these different avenues to collect it. You collect your own first-party data as well. Right? You know, you add that to the mix.
As Genius you know, collects this data and goes after the data for all different teams, as well as their league rights with the advertising content, that's only gonna help sports books get referrals, more pizzas being sold, more insurance being sold, and of course, the data allows for all the different types of personalization of the gamifying the game that you're watching.
Yeah. To me it's the nexus of content and gamification. I think the first application will be in sports. I don't think it's gonna be limited to sports.
No.
I think all content will be gamified.
Academy Awards.
Absolutely. We're at the cutting edge, and what we're doing is we're writing the protocols for how people are going to engage with content going forward. I don't see anything on the horizon that is more important, and I see nothing that was gonna stop this. I mean, data is clearly part of how you make that gamification work and how you make that engagement level increase. That's what we're starting to measure now. It's billions of minutes engaged.
Right.
It's not just.
There's some people that don't want that kind of information, and there'll be a product, a television production.
Yeah, they're all dying. I mean, you know.
Right. No, but there'll be that still production, and then there are people that wanna get more betting and more information and more gamification. They'll get that opportunity. I just think there's gonna be a variety of screens that people are gonna be able to choose how they wanna watch that content.
I totally agree.
Right? You know, not everything is gonna be about betting, 'cause by the way, not everybody bets, right? It doesn't mean they're gonna wanna have different opportunities and different screens to watch their content. Listen, I think we are at the cusp. That's what brought me here. You know, I said earlier that, you know, if you're engaged, there are higher ratings. If there are higher ratings, right? You're gonna get more media rights. If more media rights come in, your franchise values go up. It's just an opportunity all from engagement and people watching the game.
I'll go back to what you said, gamification is not just gambling.
Right.
Gamification is engagement.
Right.
You know, the NFL is and has proven not countless times, but dozens of times, it is the most important premier platinum standard content in the United States, in North America. It launched-
Yep.
DirecTV. It launched ESPN. It launched the Fox Network. It launched TNT. It launched Genius.
Yeah.
It launched anything it touches because it's so critical and so important to the fabric of our daily consumption that there is no second place.
I don't disagree. We lost it in 1996, and we were trying to get the NFL back on Turner since then.
It's a network maker and breaker. It's a platform maker.
Destination programming.
I look at that, our ability to acquire those rights last year, as it is critical to the success.
100%.
of Genius going forward as those examples I just gave you.
100%. I would say this also, I actually believe, and I saw it this weekend, with my friend and his friends, they were watching games that honestly were typically blowout games.
Blowouts. They were.
They were engaged because they had certain bets, 'cause in-game betting is going to keep these games alive. That normally if someone would flip the channel or change off to go to their social channels or do something differently, they were engaged and watching it and cheering. I think that's gonna be where I think the flip is gonna happen, is I think there's gonna be a lot more what I would say in-game betting. Now, also what Genius does really well, and what they're doing right now with the NFL, is expanding it outside the United States. Because, you know, it is growing. You know, the world's getting smaller. And Genius is now entering into Latin America and places in Europe they haven't been before with the NFL.
I think that's one of the reasons why the NFL actually worked with Genius is because of the dominance that Genius has in the European market and around the world.
I think that's right. I think that your point's well taken. It's not like any of this is new.
Right.
We're just making it easier and more fun to engage on this level.
Right. Which then brings in new viewers and new fans, right? With the NFL, every league looks for one thing. How do I create the next generation of fans? This is a way, this is one of the ways, not the only way, but one of the ways to do so.
We hope you found this session to be interesting and informative. As I mentioned at the start, we're confident that Genius Sports Group will be profitable in 2022 and 2023, and highly profitable as we scale over the next three to three years. We're encouraged by the strong performance and profitability we've already achieved in our original business. Our expanded U.S. business represents a significant growth opportunity where we anticipate EBITDA profitability by 2024. Our cutting-edge technology acquisitions from last year have strengthened our position in the market. We have deeply integrated technology partnerships that position us at the heart of the ecosystem with strategic competitive advantages. Our partnership with the NFL helps Genius create value across the entire organization and drives us towards our vision. Again, we remain incredibly excited about the future of Genius Sports, and look forward to answering your questions.
Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us today, and thank you for sticking around for this Q&A session. As a reminder, today's webcast and presentation materials will be available on the ir website shortly after the conclusion of this event. So thank you to everyone who submitted questions. We have a long list of questions here, and we'll try to get through as many as we possibly can in the next 30 minutes or so. So Nick, I guess we'll start with you. One of the questions is, you know, last quarter, the commentary focused on the investments and limited profitability essentially through 2022. I guess the question here is, what's changed?
Well, I guess I'll start, Brandon, by saying nothing's changed. It's the sort of short answer. You know, casting our minds back to November, what we said is that we would manage the business to EBITDA neutral or better, I think that's the phrase we used. That's what we're intending to do. I guess what's happened since then is we've, you know, reviewed our priorities since those results. You know, what we've done is we're concentrating on really those key projects that we believe that drive the best return for shareholders really.
You know, what we said in Q3 was that the three areas that we would concentrate on are rights, U.S. infrastructure and technology, and all those three we're gonna continue to do, and they're built into the numbers that we've just presented.
Thank you. A lot of the questions that we're getting has to do with the in-play margin on NFL. Jack, maybe we'll start with you on this one. Why is in-play margin so low for the NFL? And how does the mix of in-play betting relative to pre-match betting increase over time? And related to that, you know, we mentioned historically that in-play betting had, you know, double the win rates as pre-match, but our guidance implies that that'll be about half of the win rate. Maybe talk a little bit about what's also causing that divergence.
Sure. Thanks, Brandon. Like, there's a lot of numbers floating around here, and I think it's probably worth just sort of recapping a little bit. You know, what we've seen and what we've learned over the last four months, really, September through December, is the numbers we've got. We've learned a lot along the way. What we've seen as part of that is, in-play as a share of NFL handle is about where we expected it to be. It's about 25% of all bets placed on the NFL. About 25% of those are placed in-play. That's about where we thought it would be in terms of that.
What we've also learned during this period with the actual numbers we've seen is that, when you look at that as a share of GGR, that's a smaller number. It's currently trading about 13% of all GGR on the NFL. So that's, I guess, to start the piece here, a little lower than we expected. You know, when we originally looked at this, we expected a bit of consistency between that there. So that delta between handle and GGR is definitely something that we've learned over the last three or four months, I guess. The reasons why is a really interesting one.
Like as you've seen in other markets and Europe and more mature markets is it's almost the other way around, where you'll see better margin on in-play events than you will traditionally on pre-match stuff. You know, the good question is why? Now, our firm belief is that that will trend favorably in our direction over time. You know, we believe that both the share of handle and and by definition share of GGR will increase over time. Why do we think that will be the case? Well, we think really it's a product question and a market maturity question as much as anything else. In immature European markets where lots of betting, more betting is in play.
Frankly, on other sports, soccer, tennis, the models have been really battle-hardened and tested very, very well. In the NFL, it's a pretty tough sport to model in play, and operators are finding that harder than they do on other sports. That's the reality of it, you're seeing that trend there. From our point of view, we've got no doubt, because of the history of other things going on in other markets, that you will see improvements and you see the betting market will definitely shift. You know, more handle will go in play, and we think operators over time will improve their margins on in-play on the NFL in there. How do they do that? Well, they do that in a lot of things.
A more battle-hardened model is one part of it, but also other elements of, you know, your product around the edges of that, you know, in-play player props, in-play same game parlays. You know, the thing we're certain to see which is more engagement type products here. As they transfer more betting across, margins will typically increase. We're highly likely to see some of the big U.S. sports start offering this live streaming to operators. That in turn creates breadth of product that enables operators to drive better margins. We can do some things to influence that. We build product ourselves. We allow operators to have data to be able to improve that stuff.
On top of that, I guess, you know, from a marketing point of view, whether that's streaming or indeed our marketing technology can help drive that and improve those things as well. That, that's the sort of, you know, a big answer to one question, but product will be key, and we're absolutely certain that that will evolve in a favorable way for Genius over time.
Thank you. I think that's something that's helpful.
It's also-
Yeah.
It's also probably worth mentioning here as well that, you know, everyone's aligned. You know, the sportsbooks ourselves, all the stakeholders in the market are aligned in pushing the sort of the punters or the bettors into the in-play space. It improves fan engagement materially. I mean, you know, I've always said that, you know, you don't have a more engaged fan than someone who's gonna win $100 on the next down. On top of that, the operators' margins are so much better.
You know, when we think of the market, we think of that evolution, this concerted effort from, I guess, all parts of it, us, the sportsbooks, but also the sports leagues, to drive people to sort of more engaged product and more engaged interactions with the game means that, you know, we feel very confident that, you know, we're on a good path to seeing the same sorts of shares that we're getting in the European market. Again, just to remind people, you know, we're up to sort of 70%-75% of all bets in the European markets are live or in play. You know, the margins on them are very robust.
You know, I mean, like, one particular sport that we've been doing for a long time, one of the major operators, I think we generated 9.97% or 9.98% in two consecutive years. You know, you're absolutely solid margins and really a robust product set.
Thanks, Mark. I think we'll stick with you for this next question because, you know, I think it's important. A lot of questions we're getting is on this topic of the future of fan engagement and specifically on the vision video that we showed at the beginning of this day. I guess a few of the questions are about, you know, why doesn't something like this exist today?
Yeah, sure. I mean, so fan engagement is an interesting one. I mean, you know, we've been talking about fan engagement for a very long time. We've done a lot of work on it, and increasingly now we sort of think about things, and this may sound slightly semantic, but about fan monetization. We're about, you know, working with the sports leagues, working with the sportsbooks in order to bring fans in. You know, we've been doing that for a long time through the marketing business. Now we're thinking more about how do we monetize those fans in multiple different ways.
Really that vision video is starting to show, and really demonstrate where Genius is going as a business and how we're bringing all of the different technologies that we actually have that are already working, albeit independently in a lot of cases now, together to really help monetize those fans. We're seeing a huge shift in consumer demand. You know, everyone's seeing this massive digitalization. You know, the broadcast market, the broadcasters are under pressure. Those business models are changing. Really it's, you know, there's a huge focus on personalization.
The way that sport is consumed now, you know, I look at my kids and how they consume sport and compare that to, you know, how I consumed, you know, sport when I was their age, and just for the record they're about 14 and 11. They, you know, it's really these days about them having that sort of ability to, you know, watch the highlights, you know, short pitches of the game. Increasingly, the way that they like to engage in this digital world is through personalized content. Ultimately, we've sort of got a very strong eye on how that's happening. The broadcast landscape that's changing is really providing a big opportunity.
You know, the sportsbooks are increasingly putting video content up on their site. That's driving engagement. The sports leagues, interestingly, they're changing the way that they're looking at this. The rights deals today are very different to the rights deals that were around five or even longer ago because there's new ways of distributing that content and new ways of engaging that content. As a result of that, you know, we see very much that the sportsbooks are going to be a portal of the future. A lot of fans are gonna engage with sport and through these digital means, through these sportsbooks platforms.
I think that's such. You know, I think we're pretty unique in the market. I mean, you know, before Second Spectrum came along, there was, you know, Rajiv's Genius and his team's fantastic product set. There wasn't really a way of doing a lot of the product development that's required to really drive that sort of future video. You know, it's gotta be computer vision, it's gotta be automated. You know, we've got that in one place. On top of that, we've got the rights and relationships. We've got the partnerships with the sports leagues. We've got the partnerships with the audience, the different components and I think that's unique.
Having that all under one roof really means that we can meet that demand that's coming from the consumers for more personalized content where we're giving sportsbooks and other parties in the sector much better ways of monetizing those customers. Really, you know, from our point of view, this is not vaporware. I mean, I thought the way that Rajiv in his video put it so well, this isn't vaporware. This isn't stuff that doesn't exist. This is stuff that we're already working with. You know, our ticketing product, we've done a lot of work with the MLB, the elements, and we're gonna be driving that out.
Yeah. Just to follow up on that, I think that, you know, I think when we created a lot of what we created, I talked to people in the industry and people would come up to me and say, "You know, what you have already built, I wrote on a napkin 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And the question is, why doesn't it exist today?" You have to look at what's happening. There's three big things I think that's happening in the world that we all see. There's all these interactive devices that people are using. There's incredible internet connectivity, and there's easy access to computation. Those are new things that are happening in the world. A, that allows us to build a lot of these things that couldn't have been built before.
The second most important thing is people are on these platforms. They're connected, they're on interactive platforms, they're on devices, and they want the demand is there. You can see that right now leagues are basically engaging with that. Not just in sports content, in all content when people are engaging with sort of digital consumption. Betting is just a way of people saying, "I want an interactive experience. I want a personalized experience. I want to participate, and I want to have some control that's different than somebody else." The space is shifting, the content owners are engaging, and the third piece you need is, well, somebody's actually gotta go make it, and they gotta have a lot of things in their house to deliver that experience.
Here at Genius, we have not just Second Spectrum, but we have Second Spectrum and FanHub and Spirable and Sportzcast and Genius Live and LiveStats. We have a lot of stuff in-house that can be brought together to basically deliver the vision to the world. That's why it's there. It's been there for a while, for a long time, but now it's both. A good chunk of it is there, and we have what we need to deliver to the world.
Thank you, Paul. Good segue to the next question that we have here. You mentioned interactive platforms and engaging with digital content, which leads to our ad tech business. One of the questions we got is, why make such a large investment in your ad tech business today when it seems the sports betting customer acquisition window will only exist for a finite period of time? You know, when the market matures and the promotional environment inevitably slows down, what happens to that business and the investment we're making in it today? Josh, maybe I'll turn this one over to you.
Sure. Thanks. That's a great question, which is to ultimately drive player lifetime value, and that's hugely important for the sportsbook. As the market continues to mature, what we'll see is the use of our technology, particularly in the U.S., probably shift more to that retention play. That's the first part of that. Secondly, you know, originally we've obviously built this technology to help sportsbooks, but now we're seeing a whole host of applications for all of our other partners, right? Our technology is being used by sportsbooks of course, but also by brands, by leagues, by teams, by our broadcast partners. Really household names who spend significant sums of money on being associated with sports and advertising around sports.
The investments we've made with our sports partners to have access to these fan bases as well as the investments we've made in our technology gives us a really differentiated product in the market that will allow us to grow our customer base outside of sports betting further as we've talked about. You know, we certainly see, you know, a long-term future for our advertising business.
Thanks. On the promo deductions from GGR is typical for our commercial contracts. Is that 15% number something we've negotiated with the NFL or with the sports books? Was this in place for this past NFL season?
Thanks, Brandon. That's a good question. The short answer to one part of it is no, the NFL did not have a view on that. That's a decision that we at Genius have made in terms of how we structure our contract. The next bit of it is, yes, that is part of our existing customer contracts for most of our U.S.-based contracts, where we allow our customers to deduct an element of their promo and bonusing before we take our share. It's a good question. The question is why and all of these things, and you know, that's a commercial negotiation as much as anything with our customer base.
why we're motivated to do that is, you know, what we've got here in the market, if you think on a macro level, is you've got the sports books marketing, and they're spending a lot of money, as everyone knows, on this stuff, but they're driving the market here. That marketing spend is driving the market. If they weren't doing that, and they weren't driving the market forward, you wouldn't be seeing the sort of growth in TAM that we're seeing and the sort of incredible levels of growth from where we are with 2021 to where we think we'll be next year and the following year and the following year. We want them to spend, right?
We want them to do that because that is the thing, one of the things that drives the growth in the overall market for us as a supplier, for them as businesses, for the whole ecosystem, really. What we wanna do is we wanna align ourselves with those customers by allowing them to do that, encouraging them to do that, while at the same time protecting our business. We do that by setting a cap on those thresholds. That, that's the reason why we do it. Yes, it's in place. No, it's not an NFL decision. It's a Genius decision in terms of how we approach the market and how we partner with our customers. I think that answered the question and, you know, obviously happy to go into more detail if you think it's necessary, Brandon.
Yeah. Just to follow up on that, what are your expectations around the promotional environment in the U.S. and whether that will subside? Similarly, how do you think about Canada legalizing and any investments in that market that may be required?
You're gonna see a great big land grab for a few years yet. As Josh has just highlighted, you know, when that land grab has subsided, there is certainly gonna be a more balanced approach. For us, you know, we start to think about our marketing tech from a retention and a lifetime value perspective as opposed to just a pure customer acquisition perspective. We think it's got a few years left to run. I think you're gonna see it as certainly as big states open up, you're gonna see some significant spend. The operators have to balance their, you know, them striking that right balance in terms of short-term and long-term is a key thing for the whole market. They'll be thinking long term.
They'll be thinking about the really big size of the overall TAM in the U.S. market. Really we're at the very early stages of that at the moment as we sit here at the start of 2022. There's a long way to go. I think we'll push pretty hard for a little while yet. Canada, look, you know, for the way we view it is Canada's another state regulating. That's absolutely superb news from our point of view. It's more product opportunity for us to go and work with some existing partners as they extend into new markets, which is one of our growth drivers in our business. More excitingly, I guess, is that we were able to do that.
We were able to service the Canadian market really without any new investments. We've got all of the things that we need in our business, whether that's technology or content or rights that enable us to service the Canadian market in a good way. I'm sure what you'll see as Canadian states open up is pretty strong marketing spend, and we'll help service that, and we'll see pretty strong operator growth, and we'll see some of the major U.S. operators entering those markets. You know, we feel very good about Canada for lots of different reasons. That's a great opportunity for us.
Jack, sticking on the topic of Canada, we recently announced a deal with the CFL. One of the questions we got was around the partnership with the CFL and what the plan is with the league going forward.
Look, brilliant, a brilliant timing for a great question. Great, the CFL from our point of view as that market opens up. Clearly, when we think about a market and we thought about those deals, we're thinking about that with half an eye on the betting market and the ways that that sports asset, we believe will be an important part of the Canadian market going forward. Okay? That's on one level. What we've seen throughout the entire presentation today is all of this technology that we've got with our business that can help move that business forward, and we'll do that in partnership with them. They're interested in the Second Spectrum stuff. They're interested in augmentation, they're interested in personalized content, they're interested in improving ticket sales, they're interested in driving all of those things.
For us, the CFL is like a great case study. Change their relationships with their fans, change their relationships with their broadcasters and rights holders, change their relationships with their brands and sponsors and all of those things. All of the things that we've talked you through today and the technology and the product are all about that same thing, really. Our relationship with CFL, it's about all of that stuff. It's about the vision. It's about the CFL as being important in the newly regulating betting market in Canada. Hopefully that summarizes the why everyone following today.
It's a good case study, and we spent a lot of time speaking about the way that we partner with leagues. Mark, I'll turn this question over to you. Has there been any change in the competitive landscape for the lower tier leagues?
That's a good question. The lower tier leagues are a huge focus for our business. We tend not to talk too much about it. I mean, these conversations tend to get dominated by some of the conversations around the bigger leagues, but they are a key focus from us. I think in the video that we just played, you know, we showed the move that we've gone from roughly 3.5-ish-year average contracts to around 6.5-year average contract lengths. What we're seeing in these lower tier leagues is our average contract length materially increasing.
One of the things that, you know, I've been asked dozens of times about is, you know, things around, you know, well, aren't the leagues gonna do it themselves? You know, I guess this disintermediation risk that people talk about. From our point of view, you know, this is really demonstrating that that really isn't something that we're concerned about. You know, the more software technology we deliver, the longer the, you know, the greater the sort of gap that we continue to and increase over our competitors.
The more partnerships that we do with these sports leagues, which is really, you know, being exemplified by this material contract, average contract length increase to 6.5 years from 3.5 years, that's really sort of showing that, you know, and reducing the sort of, you know, I guess muting somewhat the argument around this disintermediation, because fundamentally, these sports leagues need the technology that we've got, you know, whether it's the, you know, the more rudimentary, I guess, but incredibly important technology around some of the competition management services that we've got or whether it's some, you know, some of the absolute cutting edge stuff that Rajiv and his team have built.
You know, we've got the whole spectrum and really these sports leagues and these partnerships with these sports leagues are
Thank you. We also got a question about, obviously, you've talked a lot about Second Spectrum and the investments that we're making in that technology. Question for Nick is, how will we see the benefit of Second Spectrum investments turn up in the financial statements?
Thanks, Brandon. I'll tell you what, Rajiv shout if there's something you disagree with in this answer. Let me have first go. Well, I guess it's just picking up actually just what Mark said, firstly in terms of rights. I mean, if you look at it from a cost-based side, I mean, the first thing you'll see is deeper, longer, stickier rights deals, potentially some cost avoidance and certainly insulation from rights with Second Spectrum in the same way we do with all of our technology that we've done, you know, prior to the Second Spectrum acquisition. That, that's the first side of it. I guess then you look at it in revenues and really it's across all of our areas, I think.
I mean, if you think about it in terms of, you know, sports book revenue, we'll see increased revenues from sports books. You know, higher engaging fan experience. I think Jack talked earlier in the session about, he talked about marrying, you know, live video with live data and really giving that to a seamless user experience. There's that side of things. That will attract higher sports books revenues which will obviously benefit. Clearly there's higher revenues from the sports leagues themselves, and that's been the kind of model up to now that Second Spectrum have worked on. Then I guess obviously there's the higher media revenues as well. I mean, you think about CBS RomoVision, for example, that's live today.
You know, as the technology and it's all about product, as that product increases then there'll be higher media revenues on that basis as well. If you think about on those three lines. If you go to the extension of the vision video that you've seen earlier today, you look at higher revenues from brands, higher revenues from the transactions as all of this knits together as one of the guys was saying in the previous answers. It's right across the P&L how we'll see it. I mean, there is things that are slightly more longer term that are probably things around some of the cost avoidance around some of our statistician network as well, but you know, that's probably a little bit further down the line.
Can I just jump in on one of the things that Nick said. Viewing a broadcast and doing some interesting things which are moving this sport along and how fans are engaging with that. That's one of the things that we're doing in that area. I guess what we're really trying to say now is at the moment that feels like the exception. That's the new thing, it's innovation. What we believe and what will drive revenues is this will become the norm and all sports will be, you know, augmented with new data and new things. What we're really talking about here is revenue, the revenues that are driven by the whole new sector, which we're driving and creating, which is around how does a sport, how does a fan engage with.
You know, when we talk about narrow revenue buckets and things like that, I think it's important to work out where that fits in with the vision of what we're trying to do, which is this stuff will become the norm as we go forward.
Thank you. I know we're just about up on time, and I think this is probably a good place to pause for now. I know there were quite a few questions that we didn't quite have time to get to, and as always, you know, feel free to reach out to me directly, or through the IR website. We are always available to answer your questions also on the IR website. And we thank everybody for your participation today.