Canada

Exclusive interview with Jo Lambert, Head of Consumer at Verizon Media

Published

5 years ago

May 26, 2021

It is always a pleasure and honor to work with experienced leaders and without any doubt, this is also the case when interviewing Joanna Lambert, Head of Consumer at Verizon Media.

So, I hope that you enjoy our Q&A with Jo, which you can read below.

Gaming Americas (GA):

Yahoo has been a global household name on the internet. Not many companies of that stature have entered the gaming vertical. Could you share a quick briefing into Yahoo Sport’s entry into gaming?

Jo Lambert:

That is correct. Today, sports betting serves as a key cornerstone of our holistic strategy at Yahoo Sports to serve as a single destination for sports fans. Years ago, we saw the growing rise of sports betting and pending adoption of online gambling in states across the country and leveraged it as an opportunity to diversify our revenue streams – combining the best-in-class features we already had as a trusted content provider with those of a gaming company.

With our strong roots as a media company and through our cutting edge BetMGM partnership, we’ve been able to successfully recast our approach, adopting a hybrid model that balances compelling content with sports betting opportunities to provide a one-stop-shop where fans of all levels can have it all, from AR (augmented reality) to “see” more of the game and get the inside information to ultimate fantasy control and the tools they need to wager on BetMGM.

GA:

It has been over three years since PSPA Act was repealed, opening the way for legalized sports betting in the US states. How do you rate the growth of the sports betting sector in the country both in terms of the increase in the customer base and in terms of the number of states that chose to legalize sports betting? What are the plans to start operating in other states where sports betting is legal?

Jo Lambert:

In November 2019 we launched a ground-breaking multiyear strategic relationship making Yahoo Sports an official Digital Media Sports Partner of MGM Resorts. Via the BetMGM partnership, we offer sports betting opportunities on BetMGM covering the NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL, college sports, and more and have integrated them into the Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Fantasy apps and desktop experiences. Today we are live in nine states that have legalized sports betting, including New Jersey, Indiana, West Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee, Virginia, Michigan, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.

Since the ruling, the popularity of sports betting has been growing steadily for hardcore sports fans, fantasy sports enthusiasts, and even casual fans. In fact, the number of consumers taking advantage of opportunities to wager on BetMGM continues to grow for us as over 80% of our converted bettors have come from Sports and Fantasy Products.

Additionally, interest in betting has increased from 43% to 58% across our consumers while opposition to it has declined from 21 to 17% over the past 2 years.

GA:

Tell us more about Yahoo Sports’ partnership with BetMGM, which is also a pioneering partnership of sorts for an organization dealing with news and editorial content, and how that fits into your overall strategy?

Jo Lambert:

We were one of the first digitally-native media companies to ink a deal of this type and to this day, remain one of the top betting affiliate partners of BetMGM. Up to that point, our success was due to our commitment to delivering great news and immersive editorial and a 20+ year track record of offering fantasy sports. Today, Yahoo Sports is combining the best-in-class features of a media company, content provider, and gaming company to provide a comprehensive 360 offering, surrounding users with research, insights, technology, immersive experiences, and a seamless connection to sports betting opportunities. As part of our strategy, we are working to create experiences within Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) and sports betting that serve both our casual users as well as our most passionate fans including providing users with opportunities to wager on the BetMGM platform via Yahoo Sportsbook as well as paid and free DFS contests for those looking for different ways to get in on the action.

GA:

As you mentioned, Yahoo Sports has been offering fantasy sports platform over the last two decades. Is there any change in customer response to the platform after sports betting options became available? What has been the reaction of your long-time fantasy players to this closer linking of DFS with sports betting?

Jo Lambert:

Our fantasy players love it. The data, tools, analysis, and content we are providing our users have resonated and those users in legal betting states are signing up and betting on BetMGM. And our fantasy integrations with player props have resonated as well, as we have consistently heard from our fantasy users regarding their interest in player props.

We also recently introduced single-game, DFS multi-entry contests for all major events with significant prize pools, beginning with the NBA Playoffs as well as continue to offer paid and free DFS contests for those looking for different ways to get in on the action.

If anything, our success with fantasy sports has grown since sports betting has been an option. In fact, 80+ percent of total Yahoo Sportsbook users registered with BetMGM are also active in the Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Fantasy Sports apps.

Today, we reach millions of fans per month and in 2020 those fans consumed over 80 million pieces of betting content across our properties – so we believe we are well-positioned to continue driving adoption as user interests evolve, especially with the increased momentum around sports betting.

GA:

Could you elaborate on the cutting edge of content that Yahoo Sports offers to end customers compared with that of the other affiliate or betting websites?

Jo Lambert: At Yahoo, we have the unique opportunity to tap into our ecosystem that serves nearly 900 million users monthly. We’ve been strategically embedding new customer promos in our betting content to help seed the BetMGM accounts of our core sports followers in anticipation of major sporting events. We amplify that marketing strategy with content to help inform potential new bettors of everything they need to know to start betting responsibly while helping our existing betting audience form their own strategy in anticipation of marquee events.

At Yahoo, we truly have the unique position as BetMGM’s partner to be able to program multiple endpoints to reach all fans — one of the fantastic opportunities presented by major sporting events ranging from the NBA Playoffs to the Super Bowl. To add on to our strategy for core sports fans, you’ll see betting content on our homepage, in Yahoo Mail, on Yahoo Finance and In the Know, and more.

GA:

Tell us more about Draft Together, a recent feature in the fantasy league platform.

Jo Lambert:

Draft Together on Yahoo Fantasy Sports showcases our innovative spirit to deliver next-gen experiences that create connection and community. By leveraging Yahoo’s ecosystem, technology, and streaming capabilities, we have the unique ability to create the powerful and immersive entertainment experiences of the future today. Draft Together is a first-of-its-kind feature in the massively popular fantasy sports industry, enabling multiple fans to uniquely experience and interact with each other through video chat as they draft their fantasy baseball team on yahoo.com/fantasybaseball and create a personalized community of friends and family.

The experience is now available for live drafts and to private leagues with 12 teams or less. At launch, Draft Together will offer support for 12 rotating video frames to be displayed alongside the Yahoo Fantasy draft interface for the 2021 fantasy baseball season. For the first time, users can virtually smack talk, taunt their opponents, bond over all the action and more through video chat while drafting fantasy leagues in real time.

Draft Together continues to evolve the consumer experience of Yahoo’s first-to-market co-viewing product – Watch Together, that debuted in September 2020 and connects audiences to live news, sports and entertainment by providing them with the ability to video chat, interact and immerse themselves in top cultural events. The NFL was the first launch partner for Watch Together. Draft Together will be available to private baseball leagues at launch, with additional features and league support available in the coming months.

GA:

You have recently launched Yahoo Fantasy Plus. What’s new in it and how are the customers responding to it?

Jo Lambert

We’ve seen great responses so far to Yahoo Fantasy Plus, a new premium subscription product that offers tools to bring the fantasy experience to the next level and improve the user experience. Yahoo Fantasy Plus offers valuable features, including a Research Assistant, Start Optimal Players tool, Trade Insights, and Advanced Stats. Users have expressed excitement over several upcoming features including the Trade Hub and Draft Assistant. While we’ve only launched with Baseball to date, we will be rolling out Fantasy Plus across all Fantasy Sports we support as new seasons kick-off. As far as early signs go, Fantasy Plus subscribers have displayed significantly increased engagement with the game they play over other fantasy players. Retention has also been a highlight as 90% of trialists have stayed on as subscribers.

GA:

What is your take on the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on fantasy sports and sports betting in general?

Jo Lambert:

People are social and want to connect, whether that is with their friends, families, or their favorite sports. With empty stadiums during the peak of the pandemic and the inability to gather together to watch the game or host a fantasy draft has, in my opinion, created a void… a void which fans previously filled with all the excitement and action of live, in-person sports shared with others, whether that was in a bar or at the stadium. Our unique range of offerings, including Draft Together, Watch Together and integrated sports betting enable fans to enjoy the social aspects and excitement of sporting events by delivering immersive experiences around the sports they love while also enabling them to enjoy connecting with others.

BCLC

Canada’s Safer Gambling Gap: Why Market Success Doesn’t Always Equal Player Safety

Published

7 hours ago

July 9, 2026

GamingAmericas.com

canada’s-safer-gambling-gap:-why-market-success-doesn’t-always-equal-player-safety

Canada’s online gambling market is the third-largest in the world. It generated approximately CAD 13.15 billion in 2025, growing faster than virtually any other country. By the metrics the industry tends to reach for, it is a success story.

Unfortunately, where many of the metrics that matter for player protection are concerned, the story is different. Unlike several other countries, Canada has no national self-exclusion register and no national licensing framework.

While Ontario is regulated, and there is a lot of excitement around Alberta opening its regulated market this summer, the overwhelming majority of online gambling in the country still happens on unlicensed platforms.

An Ontario or Alberta player who self-excludes still can gamble through offshore sites or outside the province. Canada has no single stop button.

Key Findings

Canada has no national self-exclusion register, no national licensing framework, and the last national survey predates the legalisation of single-event sports betting.
Offshore leakage outside Ontario ranges from 49% to 93% by province. The offshore market grew at 40% year-on-year in 2025.
Ontario has a 91.1% channelisation rate, but 20.2% of players also play on unregulated sites.
Player awareness of RG tools in Ontario stands at 65.4%, according to iGO’s own Leger survey baseline. No province publishes data on actual tool uptake rates.
A CMAJ study found gambling helpline contacts in Ontario rose 198% after market privatisation, concentrated almost entirely in men aged 15 to 44.

A Fragmented System

Canada’s gambling framework is a product of its constitution. Sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution Act distribute authority to the provinces, and Section 207 of the Criminal Code permits them to conduct and manage lottery schemes within their own borders. A 1985 federal-provincial agreement completed the transfer, leaving Ottawa without a gambling regulator and the country without national standards of any kind.

The result is ten parallel regimes, all operating at different standards. Ontario operates an open market, and Alberta is building a similar structure. Every other province runs a government monopoly: BCLC’s PlayNow, Loto-Quebec’s Espace-jeux, and the Atlantic Lottery Corporation.

The issue is that there is no connection between these. A responsible gambling tool in one province has no power in another. A self-exclusion registered in Ontario does not block a player from gambling elsewhere.

Changes do not appear to be on the horizon, with no federal legislation on those issues currently before Parliament.

The Offshore Risks

The Blask 2025 USA and Canada iGaming Landscape Report highlights the scale of this problem. Saskatchewan carries an estimated 93% offshore leakage rate. Alberta and Manitoba sit at 88%. Quebec, where Loto-Quebec has operated since 2010, holds only around 17% of a market estimated at CAD 2.3 billion.

Even British Columbia, with years of PlayNow operations behind it, retains approximately 49-51% of its online market, according to Blask’s reports. Offshore platforms grew at 40% year-on-year in 2025, nearly double the 23% growth of domestic licensed operators.

Ontario’s Success and Limits

Ontario deserves genuine credit for its current position, and it is often hailed as an example of a strong regulatory market.

The regulated market generated CAD 82.7 billion in wagers and CAD 2.9 billion in gross gaming revenue in FY2024/25. Channelisation, measured by the share of online gamblers using regulated platforms, reached 83.7% in early 2025 and 91.1% on the most recent IPSOS survey.

However, the Ontario story is often viewed as the national story, and this is not the case. Even within the province, 20.2% of players using regulated platforms also gamble on unregulated sites.

BetGuard, launched in May 2026, finally delivered the centralised self-exclusion system that the market should have had from day one, allowing a player to exclude from all regulated platforms at once.

The early take-up numbers show more than 500 people registered for BetGuard in its first two weeks. That is not a negligible start, and iGaming Ontario has stated it will measure the platform’s success by renewal rates, term lengths selected, and connections to addiction support services.

However, Ontario’s market has 1.235 million active player accounts. The gap between the scale of the regulated market and the early uptake of the tool is wide.

The deeper problem is that BetGuard is province-bound. A player who is excluded in Ontario is not blocked elsewhere.

Many other countries have solved this problem. GAMSTOP in the UK covers all licensed remote operators under a single registration. Spelpaus in Sweden does the same across online and land-based channels. BetStop in Australia covers approximately 150 licensed wagering providers with a five-minute sign-up.

Canada has no equivalent, and there is currently no route to making one.

What the Evidence Says

The academic case for nationally coordinated self-exclusion is strong. A comparative review of self-exclusion programmes across multiple jurisdictions found that the reach and enforcement of any scheme vary directly with how completely it covers the market.

A review of BCLC’s voluntary self-exclusion programme found that 97% of participants who gambled while excluded did so at venues not covered by their agreement. The exclusion worked where it applied, but not beyond that.

The tool-uptake literature is equally sobering. Studies analysing voluntary deposit-limit setting across large player populations find uptake rates in the low single digits over three-month periods. Ontario does not publish equivalent figures, but iGO’s own Leger survey in 2024 found that only 65.4% of regulated players were aware of available RG tools.

The gap between knowing a tool exists and using it is consistently wide, and no regulator publishes data on actual tool engagement rates. That absence is itself a significant accountability problem.

Where public health data does exist, it is alarming. British Columbia’s 2025/26 prevalence study found that 35% of past-year online gamblers showed moderate or high-risk behaviour.

The most striking recent evidence comes from a January 2026 CMAJ study analysing contacts with Ontario’s ConnexOntario helpline over thirteen years.

The study found that gambling-related contacts increased from a monthly rate of 13.4 per million before online gambling launched, to 17.0 after PlayOLG’s introduction, to 26.2 following the market opening in April 2022.

The increases occurred almost exclusively in adolescent boys and men aged 15 to 44, with the 15-to-24 age group estimated to have seen contacts rise by 337.8%.

A regulated market that generates record-breaking wagers and a near-200% increase in gambling-related helpline contacts simultaneously is simply demonstrating that market growth and player protection are not the same thing.

The Future

Alberta’s launch will introduce centralised self-exclusion from day one, requiring all registered operators to integrate with AGLC’s self-exclusion programme as a condition of registration.

This is a huge step in the right direction, but, like BetGuard, it will still be province-bound.

The case for a shared register is strong. Licensed operators are also competing with offshore threats. A functioning national self-exclusion infrastructure, combined with the channelisation benefits that a well-regulated market delivers, serves their commercial interests as directly as it serves players’ welfare.

If Canada is going to solve its responsible gambling issues, it needs to admit that the fragmented framework has shortcomings in customer care and stop using Ontario’s success as a stand-in for the country as a whole.

The post Canada’s Safer Gambling Gap: Why Market Success Doesn’t Always Equal Player Safety appeared first on Americas iGaming & Sports Betting News.

Canada

Gaming Corps expands Entain deal with Ontario live and Alberta launch planned

Published

1 day ago

July 8, 2026

Wladimir P.

gaming-corps-expands-entain-deal-with-ontario-live-and-alberta-launch-planned

Supplier content is already live on BetMGM in Ontario, with Party Casino & Sports Interaction lined up ahead of Alberta’s July iGaming opening.

Gaming Corps has expanded its partnership with Entain, extending distribution of its casino content across more Entain brands and markets, with Canada positioned as a key near-term focus.

The supplier went live with Entain’s joint venture BetMGM in Ontario in December 2025, followed by a wider Entain rollout in the province in March 2026. Gaming Corps and Entain are also preparing for Alberta’s regulated iGaming market opening in July, with Gaming Corps content “ready to go live from day one with BetMGM” and Party Casino & Sports Interaction to follow.

Outside Canada, Gaming Corps said it completed a full content launch in Brazil with Sportingbet and Betboo in May, and launched 3 Pigs of Olympus exclusively across Entain’s UK-facing Ladbrokes, Coral Gala and Foxy brands in June. The company also said additional launches are being prepared for Portugal, Spain and New Zealand.

The latest phase includes football-themed titles such as Penalty Champion, Goals to Glory: Football Fever and Goals to Glory: Instant Blitz, alongside the supplier’s 3 Pigs IP. Graham Greensmith, Chief Commercial Officer at Gaming Corps, said: “For Gaming Corps, this is a huge milestone. Entain is one of the biggest names in global gaming, so to see our relationship grow in this way is a clear sign of the trust, performance and commercial value we have built together.

“What makes this particularly exciting is the scale of the opportunity. This is not a single-brand launch or a one-market rollout. Entain is continuing to take Gaming Corps content into more territories, across more of its brands, and that says a lot about where we are as a business.

“We have worked hard to build a portfolio that gives major operators real flexibility, from high-performing IP to timely, event-led content and new game formats. To see that strategy being recognised by a partner of Entain’s calibre is incredibly rewarding, and we are very excited about what comes next.”

Obdulio Bacarese, Global Gaming Director at Entain, added: “Gaming Corps has been a valuable partner over the last four years. The strength of the relationship lies in how easily the content can be activated around different commercial priorities, from supporting new market entries to adding timely releases around key calendar moments. The studio understands the need for content that is flexible, relevant and easy to position locally, and we are pleased to continue building on the partnership.”

The post Gaming Corps expands Entain deal with Ontario live and Alberta launch planned appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

Canada

Gaming Corps expands Entain partnership with major Canadian rollout

Published

1 day ago

July 8, 2026

GamingAmericas.com

gaming-corps-expands-entain-partnership-with-major-canadian-rollout

Gaming Corps, a publicly listed game development company based in Sweden, has expanded its partnership with Entain, one of the world’s largest sports betting and gaming groups, marking the latest phase of a relationship that began with the companies’ original partnership agreement in 2022 and now spans multiple Entain brands.

Canada is a major focus for the extended partnership. Gaming Corps went live with Entain’s Joint Venture, BetMGM in Ontario in December 2025, followed by a wider Entain rollout in the province in March 2026. Both are now preparing for the opening of Alberta’s regulated iGaming market in July, with the studio’s content ready to go live from day one with BetMGM and Party Casino & Sports Interaction following shortly after.

The partnership has also continued to grow internationally, with Gaming Corps completing a full content launch in Brazil with Sportingbet and Betboo in May of this year, followed by the exclusive launch of 3 Pigs of Olympus across Entain’s UK-facing Ladbrokes, Coral Gala and Foxy brands in June.

Additional market launches in Portugal, Spain and New Zealand are also being prepared.

The latest phase includes a mix of Gaming Corps’ most recognisable content, from football-themed titles such as Penalty Champion, Goals to Glory: Football Fever and Goals to Glory: Instant Blitz, to the studio’s high-performing 3 Pigs IP.

Graham Greensmith, Chief Commercial Officer at Gaming Corps, said: “For Gaming Corps, this is a huge milestone. Entain is one of the biggest names in global gaming, so to see our relationship grow in this way is a clear sign of the trust, performance and commercial value we have built together.

Obdulio Bacarese, Global Gaming Director at Entain, added: “Gaming Corps has been a valuable partner over the last four years. The strength of the relationship lies in how easily the content can be activated around different commercial priorities, from supporting new market entries to adding timely releases around key calendar moments. The studio understands the need for content that is flexible, relevant and easy to position locally, and we are pleased to continue building on the partnership.”

The post Gaming Corps expands Entain partnership with major Canadian rollout appeared first on Americas iGaming & Sports Betting News.