An insight to the Italian betting market with Eskil Kvarnström, CEO of Leadstar Media

The Italian betting market has a long and established tradition dating back to the post-war years of the 1940s. A familiar feature to many generations of Italians, it continues to register growth on an annual basis. 2019 in particular was a positive year for the betting market, registering a total spend of €1.6 billion. It builds on the €1.46 billion spent in the previous year, marking a considerable increase of 7.4% in total.

A key player driving the expansion of the market as a whole is the online betting community in itself. Recent figures presented by Agimeg, show an exponential increase for the Italian online betting market with a growth of 59.8% in January 2020 compared to January 2019. Data that confirms the ongoing trend of the increasing popularity in betting online as opposed to visiting the conventional brick and mortar shops across the whole country.

To discuss this further, we have invited CEO & Founder of Leadstar Media Eskil Kvarnström, who hosts the affiliate page  in Italy.

For those that don’t know Leadstar Media, please tell us a bit more about your company?
Leadstar Media was founded 12 years ago with the aim to conquer the iGaming affiliate market and deliver high quality leads to our partners. To achieve this, we focus on creating high quality content that is combined with a strong SEO-strategy. Currently, we are active across 16 different geographical markets including the Italian market.

What lays behind the decision to create a product geared towards the Italian market?
We always knew that the italian betting market was one of the largest in Europe, and with the belief that we deliver the best product for our customers in other countries, we were certain that we would also find success in Italy. Today, BookmakerBonus.it has established itself as one of the leading sportsbook comparison sites in Italy.

Do you have any insights into the current trends of the Italian online betting market?
The shift of many italian players deciding to undertake a part or in fact all of their betting online rather than visiting brick and mortar shops is clearly visible in the increase of the traffic to our site. BookmakerBonus.it provides these players with guides and help on how to get going with their online betting. Additionally, we also discovered that most of the users visiting BookmakerBonus.it (around 80%), do so by using their mobile phones. Therefore it is crucial to have a website which is optimized for this section of the market.

What are your future plans for the italian market?
The current strategy is to continue to improve the site and achieve a 10/10 product with it. We want to provide our customers with whatever information they might need in regards to the online betting market and offer guides to help them in their shift from doing their betting offline to an online platform. For the future we are considering an expansion of our product portfolio in Italy with a completely new website that could be targeting the online casino market.