FanDuel CEO speaks on company's advantages as ESPN enters betting space

Gambling isn't the easiest way to make money for consumers, and one betting company's leader said it's not a smooth ride for its well-funded competitors, either.

Speaking at CNBC's Evolve conference on Thursday, FanDuel CEO Amy Howe said that new entrants into the industry such as ESPN could face challenges establishing itself as a destination for bettors, saying "It's certainly not for the faint of heart."

Howe spoke about FanDuel's first-mover advantage in an industry that's still finding its footing five-plus years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized sports betting throughout the U.S.:

“Because we’re still in the early days, like any e-commerce business, there’s a race for eyeballs and a race to make sure that we can responsibly bring the best consumers onto our platform,” Howe said. “These are partnerships that we’ve been building up for years long before online sports betting was legal in the states.”

FanDuel, along with DraftKings, bombarded America with ads for their daily fantasy sports platforms back in 2015. The commercials were inescapable during that fall to the point that fans were sick of them before the first week of the NFL season even finished. Those companies eventually found themselves facing multiple lawsuits by state attorneys general for allegedly deceptive practices that allowed them to unfairly profit from DFS activities.

Those campaigns, however, had done their job to build a groundswell of consumer support as those companies were preparing for what felt inevitable, the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018. That act, passed in 1992, previously placed a federal ban on sports gambling, though it exempted a handful of states, most famously Nevada. As of now, 35 states and Washington D.C. have legal sportsbooks, with Florida seemingly next in line to legalize gambling.

ESPN Bet is set to launch on Nov. 14, going live in 17 states according to the New York Post. Not only will the new sportsbook need to compete with FanDuel and DraftKings, but casino companies such as Caesars and MGM.