BetMGM’s latest results show how a gambling business can grow without adding more players: retain valuable customers, increase wagering per customer and keep a larger share of the money bet. Reporting on the company’s third-quarter update, Legal Sports Report’s Sam McQuillan describes a 3% decline in average monthly active players across sports betting and online casinos, alongside a 7% increase in total revenue to $710 million.
The sportsbook figures make the mechanism clearer. Handle per active sports bettor rose 13%, while net gaming revenue per active sports bettor increased 18%. Across the sportsbook, revenue rose 7% to $216 million even though total handle—the amount wagered—grew only 3%. Gross hold increased to 10.7% from 10.1%, helped partly by a greater share of parlays and same-game parlays. Handle is not the same thing as customer losses, and gross hold is not net profit, but the combination shows revenue growing faster than betting volume.
Management described a deliberate shift toward retaining premium customers and reducing acquisition costs. CEO Adam Greenblatt also said favorable sportsbook results had left bettors with less money to wager again during the opening weeks of the NFL season. What appears in an earnings report as favorable results has a corresponding household side: money customers no longer have available, whether to bet again or spend elsewhere.
Sports betting is also connected to a larger casino business. Online casino revenue reached $483 million, roughly 68% of quarterly revenue. Greenblatt said 55% to 60% of BetMGM’s sportsbook customers also play online casino games in a typical week. The report does not establish that sports betting caused that crossover, but it shows why evaluating the sportsbook alone misses much of the company’s relationship with its customers.
These are company-reported commercial results, relayed by an industry trade publication, not a study of gambling harm. They do not identify customers’ incomes, affordability or rates of addiction, and “higher-value” does not itself mean a person has a gambling disorder. What the figures document is the incentive structure: business performance can improve as a smaller customer base generates more revenue per player. Whether those customers can afford the spending is a separate question the earnings measures do not answer.