A Betting Community for the Future

Jun 29th, 2011 - Posted by Thomas in Other

I am the Chief Strategy Officer at bettingexpert focusing on developing the site and making the betting industry more transparent for our users.

What is the future of BettingExpert? Today BettingExpert Director Thomas shares how recent developments and feature additions are all part of the future vision for our quickly expanding social betting community.

As the director of this great betting community, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the BettingExpert community, how it has developed in recent months and where our social betting community is heading into the future.

Firstly, I am humbled by the fact that so many talented tipsters, friendly people, intelligent minds and betting geeks choose BettingExpert as their home for writing and reading betting analysis. It's great to engage in such lively discussions on all things sports betting with so many friendly members of our community.

There's alot happening at BettingExpert these days. The most visible thing happening right now is the new site design we are developing and rolling out over the summer. In this new design, we have attempted to make it far easier for members of our community to find good betting tips, quality analysis and stats relating to each tipsters performance. And from the feedback we have received so far, the designers have suceeded.

How big is the community?

This is perhaps a little difficult to answer. At the time I am writing this post, 525 tipsters have been active over the last 30 days. This number covers the core contributors of the site. But many people enjoy the work of these betting analysts and tipsters which is shown in the fact we have around 10,000 visitors a day, a number that has virtually doubled from 5,000 a day 12 months ago.

The number of tips has also risen significantly over the last 2 or so years with the site averaging 32 tips per day in the first half of 2009 and that average climbing to 76 tips per day in the first half of 2011.

Why share tips?

BettingExpert is a vibrant community. And the pulse of this community is the many free betting tips and analysis reports created each and every day by the great members of the BettingExpert community. We have done some tipster surveys under the years, and three reasons seem to motivate tipsters to offer their free tips and analysis:

Help other members of the community beat the bookies (Yay!)
Receive feedback on their tips and betting analysis
Win prizes in the many competitions on offer

The recent design updates have helped attain all three goals:

1. Beating bookies

We have done a couple of things to help people beat bookmakers. Firstly, we have created a new section with hot betting tips. In this section, you can easily see the most liked, the most discussed and the most viewed tips. (the algorithm is a little simple right now, but we'll be working on it over the summer). This means you can help vote up tips you like by clicking the support button.

Hot tips, voted by community

The other thing we have done is to highlight the tipsters performance on each tip they provide (plus make it even more clear who worte each tip). As you can see in the screenshot below, each tip report shows the tipsters historical performance all-time, their last 6 months as well as their performance in the league the tip is in.

BE Community Tip Stats

2. Feedback on Tips

Another thing we are working on is providing useful feedback on tips. We have implemented two features over the last year: a comment box and a "support tip" button on each tip.

The number of comments written each day varies quite a lot. In recent times, the number has varied from anywhere between 20 to inexcess of 100 comments a day. The graph below shows the recent growth in community discussion with over 500 comments made in a 7 day period through the middle of May this year.

The number of supports given is lower than the number of comments. Of course this is understandable since members will always comment on tips whether they like them or not.Below you can see the 7 day totals for Liked tips from the middle of March to the end of May this year.

3. Win prizes

An important part of this sports betting community of ours are the prizes on offer for our tipping members. As you might have seen, the number of betting competitions have increased drastically over the last year, with more competitions coming at an increasingly fast pace. Lately we added a £5,000 Golf competition and a £3,000 Rugby competition. In addition to this, the prize pool for the Monthly competition was increased to €1,000 a month and will increase once again later in the year.

Hint: two new competitions will be launched in late July-early August - so stay tuned and follow the BettingExpert News and Blog.

BettingExpert on other Social Networks

We consider BettingExpert to be the leading online community for sports betting (or at least becoming this very soon). But beside being a community ourselves, we do spend some time on other social networks.

You can follow us on Twitter via @bettingexpert as well as our Chief Blogger Andrew via @AndrewBexpert. And of course, you can follow us on Facebook.

The future of BettingExpert? Help shape the vision.

The most important thing I want to say in this post is (oddly?) here in the conclusion. And that is to remind you all that as we are a community, it is you, the members of the BettingExpert community that will help define what we are to become as we head into the future. So don't be shy. If you have thoughts on our current development and recently added features and if you have any ideas for what you would like to see in the future, please feel free to tell us.

Afterall, this is what community is all about. And BettingExpert is all about community.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like:

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10 Things you need to be successful at betting on sports

How the size of your bookmakers commission impacts your betting bank

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Hi siouxrs, It's a good idea. We are sketching up a plan for a live section of BE right now (to be developed in early fall) - including a shoutbox or something like this is a great idea. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Thomas

Thomas

30.06.2011, 10:05 CET

Hi guys. It's an honour to be a part of the team. I was thinking, is it possible to have shoutbox for active or free tipsters where we could exchange informations and toughts in a " real time" about live betting and all other issues? If you and other tipsters agree, of course...

siouxrs

29.06.2011, 18:05 CET

I agree Jesper - I love the development too. Not going to lie - I am a bit proud of us having attracted this many great tipsters over the last two years. Attracting people is one thing, but attracting very talented tipsters is so rewarding and humbling :)

Thomas

29.06.2011, 13:18 CET

I second those sentiments Jesper. Great read Thomas. You really spell out what BettingExpert is all about and what it hopes to be going forward. Great piece.

Andrew_Brocker

29.06.2011, 12:45 CET

Hi Thomas Thank you very much for this insightful blog post about where our community is heading. What I'm most proud of on BettingExpert is that constant debate and commenting, which almost always happen in a positive and respectful way. Big thumbs up to the entire community for caring about and helping each other. All the best, Jesper BettingExpert

Jesper

29.06.2011, 12:31 CET

A Betting Community for the Future

How big is the community?