Sports Betting Up 20% During March Madness

More than 3 million US users per day were active in sports betting apps last weekend

Sports betting activity driven by the March Madness college basketball championships for men and women was about 20% higher during a week at the peak of the action than at the same time last year, according to Similarweb estimates of active users for popular mobile apps.

Sports betting on iOS and Android

The nine mobile apps available in the US that we’ve been tracking collectively attracted more than 3.4 million daily active users on Friday and Saturday, 3.2 million on Sunday, and 2.7 million on Monday.

FanDuel leads

The most popular sports betting app, FanDuel Sportsbook, attracted 1.6 million daily users on Friday and Saturday, followed by DraftKings app, which had more than 870K active users on Saturday and Sunday.

This app usage also includes other sports betting activity, but it’s safe to say that the surge over the past few days was driven by March Madness.

While not at quite the same level as the Super Bowl or the NBA championship, March Madness is the beginning of a major cultural event that culminates in the early April championship. Legalized sports betting is now an increasingly big part of it.

Betting might be even more intense if there was a little more suspense about the outcome. Following a couple of bracket-busting upsets in the first round of competition (like Oakland over Kentucky), the men’s basketball tournament coalesced around a more predictable set of top names for the Sweet Sixteen runoff underway now. Defending champion UConn is still favored to win the men’s championship in the end, while South Carolina could take it all for the women. Still, enough uncertainty remains to give fans something to bet on.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Photo by Jacob Rice on Unsplash

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".