00:00All right, let's get to Arkansas. Some very big results here from some of these sports betting
00:05operators. You can read about this over at legalsportsreport.com. Sam, why is Arkansas
00:09having such big numbers here in the month of March? Is it solely surrounding college basketball
00:13or is there more to this? Yeah, Arkansas is one of those states that for a long time has really
00:20only had one sports betting app and it's been a very limited market as a result. But just in March,
00:25it allowed DraftKings and FanDuel to enter the market now with three operators and betting growth
00:31was up about 40% year over year in March. So some of that obviously was the NCAA tournament,
00:36more people betting. But a lot of that is because DraftKings and FanDuel were coming to town and
00:41bringing a lot of money with them. It was about $87 million was bet in the month of March, which
00:47is not only a March record, but it's a record for Arkansas in general. And it was really interesting
00:52to note to DraftKings and FanDuel were only active for about 12 days of the entire month
00:57and still betting growth was up about 40%. So just kind of shows you the brand power that those apps
01:02still have, even when you talk about prediction markets and other alternative platforms that are
01:08out there. The interesting thing here, however, is the state didn't make any tax revenue from it.
01:13And that's because the operators didn't make any revenue themselves. They actually paid out $8
01:18million more than they took in. So revenue was more than handle. And that's because a lot of that
01:24handle was just promos that they flooded the market with because of the state structure,
01:29sign up bonuses, free bets, just basically FanDuel and DraftKings buying market share
01:34very aggressively in Arkansas, which if you look at the online sports betting map, it was
01:3930 out of 30 states last year in handle per capita. So basically, out of all the online sports betting
01:46states, people were betting the least there. And that's because, you know, again, they really only
01:50had one brand. There's also some complicated rules with operators being required to remit at least 51%
01:57of their revenue to their casino partner. So that complicates the framework a little bit as well.
02:02The new deal that DraftKings and FanDuel are under is not public. So but it's kind of, you know,
02:08we can kind of look at it and say maybe they don't have that stipulation as well, which again,
02:12is why there's so much more money being flooded in the market. So, you know, the big picture is
02:17kind of there's, it's generating more betting and it's good for the market. The bigger kind of
02:22takeaway is that the state's not making any tax revenue off of that, at least right now. So we'll
02:27see how that changes going forward. But it's definitely an interesting state to watch as we
02:31talk about online sports betting for the rest of the year.
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