The business, as we mentioned earlier, is really stable other than the onetime callouts of new supply and road construction.
Barry Jonas: Got it. And then just, as you think about sort of the longer-term opportunity to work with the ESPN personalities, around ESM BETS. How should we think about it being similar and maybe how different than your experience with Barstool personalities?
Jay Snowden: Yes. I mean, look, it’s it’s similar in the sense that you’re working with individuals who are pretty passionate, or in the case of the ones we’re talking about on both sides, very passionate about sports and sports betting. But every one of them is different, in terms of what their preferences are and how much they like to talk about the betting aspect of sports entertainment. I think what we found in our discussions with the team at ESPN is that, there’s a tremendous amount of excitement. It wasn’t hard for ESPN to find the first 2 personalities to get involved in creative and commercials. And I think you’ll see more and more of that, as we get into 2024. This is a big deal. I’ve mentioned this before, and I think you guys will all start seeing, we no longer have to speculate and who’s right and who’s wrong about how committed to ESPN BET — ESPN is.
We know what we see and hear and engage with them about every day. And you’ll start seeing that, and that includes the personalities. But the list is pretty long in terms of involvement and excitement on the ESPN side.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brandt Montour with Barclays.
Brandt Montour: So on ESPN BET and the launch and it looks like — it sounds like you guys have a fair amount of momentum here building under the service. And sometimes, we just kind of think about, what could go so right that it might go wrong and worry about that. And so one thing that pops into my mind is just you’re getting so much volume that on day 1 or 2 or 3 and you never had that level of volume before. And I’m just curious if you’re able — if you’ve been able to stress test the system, and how comfortable and confident you feel that you’re going to be able to handle that throughput?
Jay Snowden: Yes. I’ll say a couple of things. Todd, obviously jump in if you have anything to add to this as well. We’ve been part of why we decided to launch in November, despite having announced this partnership in August, we probably could have rushed to try to get ready for post of the start of football season, but there were really 2 things driving the decision. One, let’s make sure that the product is first class, when we launch — don’t — you have 1 chance to make a first impression. We had a number of enhancements to the app that we wanted to make in advance of launch, which we’ve done. And we wanted the reskin to really fill all things ESPN and ESPN Bet by the time we went live. We’ve had time to do them. And Noah Live and the product team have done an amazing job getting us ready for the launch.
I just want to say. And then on the load testing side, that was the other factor really driving the dates. And our engineering team has done a great job of really thinking through, low testing preparation. We have had plenty of time to order additional servers and hardware to prepare for what we anticipate with volumes being the highest we’ve ever seen. And we sort of — we use information that’s out there around top players in the space and how much volume per second — bets per second on Super Bowl. And the nice thing about launching on November 14, is that it’s a Tuesday, and you kind of build into this before you get to Thursday night football, which is a big deal, but not — not what Super Bowl is, certainly. And then by the time you get into the weekend.
So we’ve thought about this. And again, pending final approvals of November 14 is the date. It’s going to be mostly NBA, NHL, maybe a little bit of college football for a couple of days, then you roll into NFL 1 game, and then you get to Rivalryweekend, that weekend and roll right into Sunday and then the big Monday night football game. So we feel really good. Benji and team have been spending a lot of time and load testing has probably been the biggest piece of preparation on along with the product enhancements. Todd, if you want to add anything?
Todd George: No, I think you covered it in the second half. Just the CapEx went through rather quickly and thank you to our vendors for working with us, all the new servers are in. And the example that Jay used really was the guiding force where we tested it compared to Super Bowl volumes of the market leaders. So we feel really, really comfortable that we’ll be ready to handle, going into such a busy time of year.
Brandt Montour: That’s super helpful. And then a bit of more nuanced question on the customer experience sort of on day 1. I think you just said, Jay, or earlier in the prepared comments that on day 1, we all wake up and be prompted to download ESPN BET, if we already have Barstool app on our phones. I think we were expecting that it might sort of download itself at some point and maybe it’s just semantics, but is that something that could be considered a minor extra layer of friction? Or how do you kind of foresee that playing out for the consumer experience?
Jay Snowden: Yes. I think there’s plenty of examples of companies that have done this before. Felicia, you use one all the time.
Felicia Hendrix: Yes. If you’ve used HBO Max and then when it just went to MAX, when you open the app, it prompted you to download the new app and then you could use all your prior credentials. The whole thing took like — takes like 2 seconds. That’s the experience that we’ll have on — with ESPN BET.
Jay Snowden: And part of the thinking there also is that you start — you get an opportunity to just reset everything, in terms of the history and the ratings and the comments and all of that stuff just resets. So it will be consistent, all focused on ESPN BET and no historical information in the app when we go live, again, pending final approvals on November 14.
Operator: Our next question comes from Sam Gaffer with Macquarie.
Unidentified Analyst: Jay, you previously mentioned that you hope to grow the overall size of the market, given the strength and reach of the ESPN brand, I was wondering if that changes your your strategy in the earlier stages of your launch, as it relates to pricing, hold rates and retention. And then as a follow-up, are there any stats or data points that we can look to, as we think about retention rates for new sports betters versus more experienced sports betters?
Jay Snowden: Yes. I would say let’s sort of — let’s put that one on hold, in terms of how are we thinking about retention of existing versus new. What I would say is that the first part of your question, in terms of growing the TAM, that’s a big focus for us. And we have — we have a great starting point. We have roughly 2 million digital customers within our ecosystem that we picked up, obviously, the bulk of that with Barstool Sports book and then we’ve got Hollywood Casino, the historical database there, social gaming. We’ve got Pen play. So we’ve got a pretty big digital database that we’re going to be able to cross-sell those 2 million people to ESPN BET, and we know their history. We know them very well. And then, of course, ESPN, the brand, the brand equity, we think that we can really grow the market with a lot on the side of casual betters.
