B2B Esports Publisher Acquires Newsletter in Bid to Expand via Creator-Led Titles
Esports and digital entertainment start-up GSE Group acquired Sharpr, a Substack newsletter that covers internet gambling for the gaming, betting and tech industries. Terms were not disclosed.
It marks the first acquisition for GSE (short for Gaming, Sports, Entertainment), which says it wants to build out new verticals by acquiring more small, creator-led entities. Through subsidiary The Insights Group, GSE’s media and events focused vertical, the company currently publishes self-funded B2B news and flagship site The Esports Radar, and ran its first event, Global Esports Industry Week, in Austin last month. The Insights Group launched with investment from esports and gaming venture firm Continuum X Group but is majority-owned by GSE, itself wholly-owned by co-founders Sam Cooke and Alfie Wright.
“These days, it’s easier to grow it from the get-go with something of a face attached to it,” said Cooke, GSE’s chief executive, explaining the acquisition.
Cooke was previously managing director of Esports Insider, a B2B media company he co-founded in 2016 and exited in January when the brand was sold to Maltese affiliate marketer ClickOut Media.
Esports, or competitive video gaming, is a growing industry and has taken on some of the features of traditional sports, like dedicated stadiums and—particularly following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that liberalized sports betting in the U.S.—gambling. Estimates as to the size of the industry vary, with Bloomberg placing the sector’s 2023 revenue in China alone at $3.7 billion.
The Esports Radar and Sharpr are targeted at businesses, rightsholders, professionals and influencers in the space. Typical coverage on Sharpr, which is written by former Esports Insider gambling reporter Cody Luongo, might discuss an online casino that lets third parties publish games directly onto its platform or a marketing stunt by a cryptocurrency casino. Stories on The Esports Radar, meanwhile, might focus on media rights partnership decisions for a tournament and funding deals for new gaming arenas.
“Sharpr is exactly the kind of thing that we want to be doing more of—these highly-engaged brands in strong niches,” Cooke told AMO. “These more creator-led and creator-driven brands, as well, are definitely what we find interesting.”
Although GSE is beginning as a B2B business focused on esports and gambling, Cooke intends to build it out into adjacent markets like sports and digital entertainment more broadly, ultimately adding B2C or B2B2C components. Cooke told AMO the company currently employs 10 to 12 people and is expanding using both money put in by Cooke and Wright and the investment from Continuum X Group. Cooke said the growth is not being fueled out of debt: “We’re building this sustainably and for the long term, meaning we are being sensible, and building and spending appropriately.”
Cooke felt a personality-first approach to building out the business works particularly well in esports.
“It is with a nod to the streamers, and to the greater level of accessibility that fans of esports have to the players—or think they have to the players. That is more important, having that relationship—that’s where I think there is a lot more opportunity to carve out these niches and to grow more rapidly than the traditional route of just a news site.”
Sharpr, which Luongo founded in 2022, has around 2,000 subscribers and is monetized through ads and sponsorship. Its revenue is in “the low five-figures,” Luongo said, adding that the newsletter “has always been a side job for me.” Juggling his full-time role alongside Sharpr has forced Luongo to limit its frequency, and it goes out only when he has advertising agreements to write against, or a scoop that “would be perfect for my audience,” which currently works out as about once a month.
“It’s difficult to write, design, brand, pitch it and also be the sales arm, which is part of the reason I approached Sam,” Luongo said. “To have the commercial relationships and sales strength and network that Sam and his team brings is going to be super valuable for Sharpr, and something that I wasn’t really able to do.”
Cooke said GSE would complement its newsletter efforts with social-first content.
The company does not just see social-first content as a route to growing its audience. LinkedIn, he said, has become where the company picks up a lot of its business: “Very good recurring clients have discovered me or us through various LinkedIn posts.” The social network “has enormous capacity to do well for us.”
To Paywall or Not to Paywall
Luongo will stay on to write Sharpr for now and intends to keep it on Substack. “Beehiv has more tools, but Substack is just so easy,” he said. “It’s where the audience is now. Don’t want to mess with the formula when it’s working.” He will also take on a strategic advisor role at The Insights Group “with more of a focus on the media side” while working on his new content strategy consulting service.
“We’re looking at a couple of other acquisitions right now around the esports gaming creator space,” Cooke said. The company will also launch its own brands.
Like Sharpr, The Esports Radar is free to read and is monetized through ads and associated events like its Global Esports Industry Week, which Cooke said attracted more than 250 attendees. He added that The Insights Group was looking at implementing a premium subscription or membership model on some of its forthcoming brands, but he was nervous about using it for the existing esports vertical.
“In what remains a growing but new and challenging vertical, we want to increase the awareness of the esports industry as much as we can,” he said, suggesting paywalls may impede that goal.
“But I do think there are ways that we can have a paid membership that can be a nice revenue stream and that can add value—and if that’s a mix of access to certain events, as well access to certain content without paywalling the vast majority of the content that goes out, then I think that can work well.”
Eventually, GSE hopes to create B2C verticals that can get in on the esports ecommerce market—for example earning affiliate revenue by recommending esports-related products and services—but Cooke said it doesn’t make sense while the company remains predominantly B2B-focused. “It’s a significant portion of the market these days for a number of operators… we’d be remiss, and we’d be frankly silly, to not look at that going forwards.”
Luongo added there were “a lot of creative ways you can monetize media,” citing work he did at Sharpr for an esports data supplier named Abios. The company approached Luongo about sponsoring Sharpr, but he proposed thinking “bigger”: each quarter, they hand over “all of their data and I package that up into a quarterly report that’s like a snapshot of the esports industry—bettting trends, demographic data, regional popularity and things like that.
“That, to me, is a more valuable type of product and piece of exposure for them, and it also allows me to charge more for that, because it’s obviously a fully-skinned, branded newsletter for them, where their data is front and center.”
