DraftKings Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 7, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Core business momentum strengthened, with sportsbook handle up 11% year over year, sports consumer volume up 15%, and monthly unique payers growing 9%. Management said the core business is on track to generate approximately $1 billion in Adjusted EBITDA in 2026.
  • Positive Sentiment: DraftKings reported $115 million of second-quarter Adjusted EBITDA and maintained its 2026 revenue guidance of $6.5 billion-$6.9 billion and Adjusted EBITDA guidance of $700 million-$900 million, despite continued investment in predictions.
  • Positive Sentiment: The predictions offering exceeded expectations, attracting more than 600,000 customers year to date and growing annualized traded volume nearly fivefold from April to July. DraftKings expects its vertically integrated brokerage, exchange, and market-making model to improve long-term customer economics.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Customer acquisition increased nearly 75% year over year, prompting DraftKings to spend about 10% more than planned, although underlying acquisition costs were approximately 25% better than expected. Management may increase or reallocate spending if customer-acquisition returns remain attractive.
  • Positive Sentiment: iGaming showed early signs of recovery, supported by the Lightning Link launch and Flex Spins feature, with customer acquisition stronger than expected and market share stabilizing after several quarters of declines.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
DraftKings Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DraftKings' Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again.

Operator

I will now hand the conference over to Matt Rappaport, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

Matt Rappaport
Matt Rappaport
VP of Finance at DraftKings

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Certain statements we make during this call may constitute forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, as discussed further in our SEC filings, that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our historical results or from our forecasts. We assume no responsibility to update forward-looking statements other than as required by law. During this call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe may be useful in evaluating DraftKings' operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for DraftKings' financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP.

Matt Rappaport
Matt Rappaport
VP of Finance at DraftKings

Reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings release, slide presentation and business update, which can be found on our website and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Hosting the call today, we have Jason Robins, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of DraftKings, who will share some opening remarks and an update on our business. Following Jason's remarks, our Chief Financial Officer, Alan Ellingson, will provide a review of our financials. We will open the line to questions.

Matt Rappaport
Matt Rappaport
VP of Finance at DraftKings

I will now turn the call over to Jason Robins.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining. We had a fantastic second quarter. Our core business continues to grow and is generating significant free cash flow, and our newly launched predictions offering is growing faster than we anticipated. We are executing on the super app strategy that we laid out in our Investor Day in March, and we are seeing massive new customer acquisition in states without regulated sportsbook. We generated $115 million of adjusted EBITDA in the quarter, which would have been even better if not for customer-friendly sport outcomes and our higher-than-expected customer acquisition. Strong retention and engagement of our newly acquired customers, along with sportsbook-friendly World Cup outcomes in July, have been a positive tailwind so far in the third quarter.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Our core business is in an even stronger place as a result and is on track to generate approximately $1 billion for adjusted EBITDA in 2026. Our confidence in our ability to win in predictions has only grown. After including our expected investment in predictions, we are maintaining our fiscal year 2026 revenue guidance range of $6.5 billion-$6.9 billion and adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $700 million-$900 million. Let me start with company-wide metrics. Customer acquisition, retention, and engagement all exceeded our expectations in the second quarter. Customer acquisition grew nearly 75% year over year as interest in the NBA Finals and the World Cup surged. Notably, in the second quarter, we achieved our best enterprise-wide Customer Acquisition Cost since the first quarter of 2025.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

We acquired roughly 30% more customers in this quarter than we had planned. We leaned in, investing about 10% more in Customer Acquisition spend as we saw the data and captured that incremental demand. Even with that investment, underlying Customer Acquisition Costs came in approximately 25% better than we anticipated. We view this as a pull forward of acquisition and an optimized use of investment. In the second quarter, monthly unique payers growth accelerated 9% year over year and more than 6% when excluding World Cup-only customers. Sports consumer volume, which includes sportsbook handle plus predictions consumer volume, increased 15% year over year in the second quarter. It is clear that our Super App rollout is already paying dividends.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

While we have all seen the amazing social content showing global World Cup fans traveling to North America for the tournament, it is important to note that 100% of our new customers are North America-based. We expect them to generate gross profit for years to come. Spanish language availability within our app also proved popular and helped us reach new customer segments. We will upgrade our Super App again in August and expect to have the best offering across our main verticals, including predictions, this NFL season. We are on offense. The core business is firing. Sportsbook handle increased 11% year over year in the second quarter while parlay handle mix continued to rise. For the third consecutive quarter, our handle share across sportsbook states improved year over year. When normalizing for sport outcomes and Customer Acquisition, revenue increased 10% year over year in the second quarter.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

On a trailing 12-month basis, net revenue per unique customer grew 14% year over year in the first half of 2026, a view that smoothed the timing of Customer Acquisition and reflects the durable growth in revenue we generate from each customer. Our data is also confirming that there is no discernible impact from prediction markets on our sportsbook revenue. We continue to see only about 1% customer overlap between our sportsbook and the largest prediction market operator in sportsbook states, which tells us these platforms are drawing a fundamentally different and largely professional audience. Based on internal analysis, we estimate that 80%-90% of prediction market consumer volume in sportsbook states comes from professional betting syndicates and institutional traders, which is volume that mostly would not have been on sportsbooks to begin with. This continues to strengthen our confidence that predictions is a large and incremental opportunity.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Lastly, our strong core performance was matched on the cost side. We operated with discipline in the quarter. Cost management will continue to be a major focus for the company going forward. We have confidence in the underlying earnings power and free cash flow generation of the business. Diving deeper into predictions. Let me start with the customer. DraftKings Sports is now live nationwide, housing all of our customer offerings under a single app umbrella, which is proving to be a significant accelerator to our business. Over 600,000 customers have engaged with our predictions offering year to date. The pace of adoption has far surpassed our expectations. We are acquiring these customers at attractive customer acquisition costs well below what we invest to acquire sportsbook customers. Early data on volume per customer and month-over-month retention is similar to a sportsbook customer, which is what we expected.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

More than half of our predictions customers have engaged with Combos. Combos are already approaching 20% of predictions consumer volume. As a result of strong acquisition, retention, and engagement, we are seeing rapid volume growth. From April to July, our annualized total volume traded grew nearly 5x, from $2.3 billion to $11 billion. This is only the beginning. We expect to build on this momentum as we improve our offering. That engagement starts with our offering, which we expect to be best in class this NFL season. We are building on more than a decade of experience across sportsbook, fantasy, and iGaming. We know what sports customers want.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Our sportsbook and iGaming apps are top-rated in the industry by third parties for a reason. We will bring that same excellence to predictions with intuitive customer experience, content packaging, and promotional mechanics that already resonate with sports fans. We significantly improved our offering in the second quarter as we executed on the roadmap we laid out at Investor Day. We expanded our sports content offering from April to July by over 25x. Now offer over 30 markets per MLB, NBA, and WNBA game, including player markets and quarter, period, and inning markets. We broadened our coverage across multiple soccer leagues. This step was bolstered by the launch of Combos, which have quickly become one of the most popular ways for customers to engage with our offering.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

In June, we launched our in-house exchange, DKeX. In July, we attained approval as a futures commission merchant from the National Futures Association. Both steps position us to rapidly expand content depth, improve the end-to-end customer experience, and capture more of the unit economics and lifetime value of our customers. We are also seeing meaningful traction on the market-making side as we leverage our industry-leading sportsbook modeling and risk management capabilities. We are live on three exchanges and consistently making markets on both singles and Combos at a profit. While still early, we are seeing double-digit share in the markets where we participate. That DKeX is live and our market maker is integrated, the opportunity is even more compelling. As DKeX grows, it will create more opportunities for our market maker, while deeper and more diverse liquidity will make our own offering more attractive to customers.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

This is a core differentiator that will provide a meaningful lifetime value advantage versus our competitors. As always, we are focused on the economics. As we continue to improve our platform and monetization over the next several years, we believe that we can generate lifetime values on predictions customers similar to those on our sportsbook customers. Our vertical integration is what makes this possible. We own three key layers of the predictions stack in-house: the brokerage, the exchange, and the market maker. This integration lets us capture economics across the entire value chain. We are the only operator that has all three up and running today, which gives us a structural lifetime value advantage over our competitors. While the revenue per customer may be lower than that of our sportsbook offering, the high margin profile of the business supports a similar level of gross profit per customer over time.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

We have driven meaningful lifetime value improvement in sportsbook for nearly a decade through our top-rated offerings, and we are confident we can run that same playbook in predictions. To wrap up predictions, the similarity of predictions customer metrics to sportsbook customer metrics, our advantage lifetime value position, and our playbook to develop and innovate on a leading predictions offering all underpin our confidence that we can win in this space. We are already seeing encouraging results, and our share rose as the second quarter progressed. We are excited to update you over the next quarter as this momentum continues. NFL kickoff is next. We continue to enhance the Super App ahead of football season, which will deliver a sports experience that no other operator can match, a top-rated sportsbook offering, and a fully vertically integrated predictions offering.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

We enter the season from a position of strength with a strong core, access to nationwide customers, and a playbook for how to win in sports that leverages our in-house marketing, product, and technology infrastructure. At our Investor Day, we laid out a path to a $55 billion-$80 billion industry gross revenue opportunity by 2030 and at least a 30% long-term adjusted EBITDA margin. The progress we made in the second quarter made that path more tangible. We are moving with urgency and discipline. We are not building to participate. We are building to lead and win.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

With that, I will turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Alan Ellingson.

Alan Ellingson
Alan Ellingson
CFO at DraftKings

Thank you, Jason. I'll hit the highlights, including our second quarter performance and our fiscal year 2026 guidance. Please note that all income statement measures discussed, except for revenue, are on a non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA basis. As Jason mentioned, we generated $115 million of adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter. This would have been even higher absent customer-friendly sport outcomes and stronger than expected customer acquisitions, both of which weighed on near-term profitability. Normalizing for these factors, revenue increased 10% year-over-year in the second quarter. This top-line strength was driven by continuing robust demand. As Jason noted, the nearly 75% increase in year-over-year customer acquisition was at our best customer acquisition cost since the first quarter of 2025, and was combined with sports consumer volume increasing 15% year-over-year and sports handle increasing 11% year-over-year, while parlay handle mix continuing to rise.

Alan Ellingson
Alan Ellingson
CFO at DraftKings

We had a tremendous NBA season, with total handle growing 7% year-over-year and parlay mix increasing more than 400 basis points. The World Cup also provided an excellent opportunity to engage customers with sportsbook handle approximately 6x higher than during the 2022 World Cup and approximately 4.5x on a same-day basis. Importantly, these customers are continuing to engage with us beyond the event, reflected by continued double-digit year-over-year handle growth in July after the World Cup ended. We did experience some customer-friendly outcomes in June after seven months of sportsbook-friendly outcomes, mainly driven by the Knicks championship win, which had an outsized impact in our largest sportsbook state, as well as by the World Cup group stage performance. We held nearly 12% for the World Cup in total, with positive outcomes in July, mostly offsetting the aforementioned customer-friendly outcomes experienced in June.

Alan Ellingson
Alan Ellingson
CFO at DraftKings

Our overall World Cup performance is another demonstration of how outcomes can swing in the short term and typically normalize over an entire season or tournament. We also continue to operate with discipline on the cost side. Adjusted G&A expense declined 6% year-over-year, and adjusted operating expenses, excluding external marketing and predictions, also improved year-over-year. We remain focused on improving the efficiency of our cost structure while continuing to invest behind the opportunities that we believe will create the most long-term value. Strong retention and engagement of our newly acquired customers have further strengthened our confidence in the business. Our core business is on track to generate approximately $1 billion of adjusted EBITDA in 2026. Now I'll touch on our fiscal year 2026 guidance.

Alan Ellingson
Alan Ellingson
CFO at DraftKings

Last quarter, we communicated fiscal year 2026 guidance of $6.5 billion-$6.9 billion in revenue and $700 million-$900 million in adjusted EBITDA. That adjusted EBITDA guidance range already reflected our expected investment in predictions, which we continue to view as a significant and incremental opportunity for the company. Given the strength of our core business and our ongoing expectations to invest in predictions, today, we are maintaining our fiscal year 2026 guidance ranges. Our confidence is supported by what we're seeing across customer acquisition, retention, engagement, and operating efficiency. While we remain prepared to invest where returns justify it, the underlying earnings power of our core business continues to exceed our expectations.

Alan Ellingson
Alan Ellingson
CFO at DraftKings

As always, we remain disciplined in how we allocate capital. As our balance sheet strengthens and the business grows, we have increasing flexibility in how we fund our operations and investments. We will continue to evaluate opportunities to optimize our capital structure as our debt maturity profile evolves while maintaining a prudent approach to leverage.

Alan Ellingson
Alan Ellingson
CFO at DraftKings

That concludes our remarks. We will now open the line for questions.

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand, and to withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality, and if muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Stephen Grambling with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Stephen Grambling
Stephen Grambling
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Hey, thank you. I think one of the questions that we often get, or pushback we get around prediction markets is, you gave the stat that most of the volume coming through some of your competitors appears to be professionals or syndicate-type things. Why do you think you're able to capture a different customer, and why will that be the same in prediction markets? Are there any limitations you see as you look at your vertically integrated platform in terms of the product set that you can offer them, or even the promotions and personalization that perhaps you can get in OSB that might be different as we look at prediction markets and the ramp there?

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Great question, Stephen. I think it's really the difference between states that have a legal and established OSB market and states that do not. In states that don't, like California and Texas, we are seeing a very similar customer profile to who we get on OSB in the states that we have OSB. I think if you look back at prior competitive launches, and there have been many, as you know, having followed this for a while, most of them, even if they get a little bit of volume to begin, don't really make a dent long term, and there's really a couple reasons why. One, customers are sticky.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Two, we have an excellent product experience, and in the case of predictions, as you noted, it's very differentiated in the content we offer, our ability to do promotions, and lots of other things that are very different from the experience that you get on a sports prediction app. Even if you didn't believe that, even if you thought it was roughly equivalent, you can look at other launches from other competitors, and it really just doesn't ever make a big dent.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

We looked at a lot of internal data, also used some third-party data, we have a number of different ways that we've triangulated various metrics to come to the same conclusion, which is, one, there is very minimal, if any, cannibalization happening, two, where these volumes are coming in legal OSB states on the prediction markets are from where the demand was, therefore, where the volumes are coming, were from the institutional professional syndicates, people that were not previously active on DraftKings.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Great to see it's an incremental opportunity and not something that we believe will ever be cannibalistic, we're obviously taking that seriously, we're continuing to invest in the OSB product. Again, to answer your first question, the reason I think it'll be different for us is where we're focused is on the states we don't have an OSB offering, there, because you don't have competitive OSB offerings, it's a very different picture.

Stephen Grambling
Stephen Grambling
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Dan Politzer with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Dan Politzer
Dan Politzer
Executive Director of Equity Research at JPMorgan

Hey, good morning, everyone. Thanks for the question. I wanted to touch on the core business. One of your peers, obviously, has been talking about incremental sports investment in the promotional environment. They're investing a few hundred million dollars more. How do you think about the competitive environment, the promotional environment as you go forward, and the confidence in being able to achieve your guidance range for the year? Thanks.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

We've always seen fluctuations in promotions. In the grand scheme of things, them spending a few hundred million more on promotions is not a major shift. We've always been able to be more efficient with our promotions. I expect that to continue to be the case. For years now that we've seen fluctuations, honestly much more significant increases in spend from certain other competitors than what we're seeing now. This is kind of a blip on the radar from what we're seeing. There really isn't a big difference in the competitive environment on the OSB side.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Just as we've always done, we are going to stay steady with our strategy. We're going to continue to execute. We believe that we have really demonstrated over the last few years that we can be more efficient with our promo, and we can grow our handle and GGR share at the same time. Those are not things that we view as a trade-off, we're going to continue to execute that strategy.

Dan Politzer
Dan Politzer
Executive Director of Equity Research at JPMorgan

Great to hear. Thanks so much.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Katz with Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

David Katz
David Katz
Managing Director at Jefferies

Morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to get, Jason, you ran through some of the economics of players in prediction markets versus OSB players and get a sense of the arc to profitability of those players, given that we've had the experience with OSB. One of the things we've been asked and delving into is about best execution requirements and predictions and can you route all of your volume to your own platform, right? Is that a more complicated dynamic than maybe we realize?

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

I don't think it's more complicated. We're certainly planning to shift the volume that we have, in sports at least, to our platform in the coming months. I think we will continue for probably certain tail sports even, but certainly for things that are in the non-sports category, we will continue to use third parties. Even that, we ultimately believe we can shift to our exchange. No real reason that we can't do that. As far as the economics go, we're looking at this in a way that is very similar to how we evolved in Sportsbook. We started off, we had an LTV model that we built in the early days of Sportsbook. We were pretty cautious because we didn't have a lot of data.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Here we do have comparable data on the Sportsbook side, which I think particularly when it comes to customer acquisition, gives us a good sense of what to expect, but a little bit less so maybe in terms of modeling out what the ultimate monetization of these customers will be. I think we've been very careful and disciplined in how we're doing that. We're not assuming major increases that we don't have line of sight to. We are, however, assuming a reasonable roadmap for when we will start to migrate. We've just got our FCM license, for example, that changes our unit economics by bringing more to us, and we are assuming some timelines for when we'll be able to migrate volume over, as I mentioned, to our exchange, and then we are making some assumptions on how we can grow market making in there.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Being, I think, very cautious in doing that. I believe we can actually do better than what we're assuming. The good news is right now, customer acquisition looks so strong that we really don't need to assume anything more aggressive to make the numbers work. As I noted, we really saw incredible efficiency in Q2. We actually spent a little bit more. We spent about 10% more than we were planning, but we had 25% better customer acquisition costs. That gives you a little sense of how strong the environment is right now.

David Katz
David Katz
Managing Director at Jefferies

Appreciate all that. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jordan Bender with Citizens. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Jordan Bender
Jordan Bender
Managing Director of Gaming and Leisure Equity Research at Citizens

Everyone, good morning. Thanks for the question. Jason, early days, you often gave what the cross-sell from DFS into OSB looked like. Are you maybe able to talk about that dynamic of cross-sell from Horse and Jackpocket and DFS into prediction markets in these new states versus how much of these people are just net new adds? Then maybe the second part of that is, how is ESPN playing a role in all of this? Thank you.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah, it's great that you brought that up because I think what you're touching on really is the underpinning of our strategy when it comes to acquiring and monetizing customers and growing our geographic footprint. It starts with we want a full product suite. We want to offer as many customers as many products as we can in as many jurisdictions as we can around the country. On that mission, we have gone beyond, as you noted, DFS into other verticals like lottery and horse. We right now have, I think, the strongest footprint of anyone in the legal regulated betting space when it comes to our product portfolio. That's a huge advantage for us and something we'll continue to press.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Having a really strong cross-sell engine so that not only can we get those customers onto predictions and things like that when we launch, but we can continue to create that flywheel where we're engaging customers on all of our products throughout the year, which again, is really a great thing for monetization as well. That's really the core of the strategy. At this point, we have not put out any direct cross-sell numbers from DFS or anything else to predictions. As you can imagine, it's a very similar product to when we launched sports betting in these states, so we're seeing similar types of numbers, actually a little bit better because we've honed our ability to cross-sell since the early days of Sportsbook launching.

Jordan Bender
Jordan Bender
Managing Director of Gaming and Leisure Equity Research at Citizens

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Shaun Kelley with Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Shaun Kelley
Shaun Kelley
Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director at Bank of America

Hi, good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking my question. Jason, I just wanted to go back to the prediction market spending target, the $200 million-$300 million. I know you said that CACs are a little bit better there, but you're also chasing in Q2. I think we always think of DraftKings as kind of fishing when the fish are biting a little bit. Just help us think through if we go through a really successful customer acquisition period in the third quarter and heading into the fourth. Do you think that you'd be willing to go above those targets if you're just really encouraged by what you're seeing in the data? Or are you able to put some guardrails around it, just given the flexibility of dollars elsewhere?

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Well, it's a great question you're asking, Shaun. We have always been and will continue to be very data-driven as a company. What we do is we model out ROI on any capital investments, and we try to make the smartest capital investments we can to position the best returns for our shareholders over the long term. This is really no different. I do think in this case, though, remember, we already have a huge national marketing footprint, partners like ESPN, NBC, Amazon, several sports leagues, and others. We already have a lot of capital going towards those things that is going to now, basically just be more effective, because it's reaching the same customers that we were reaching before in the sportsbook states, but now it's also reaching all these remaining states that have predictions. That in itself is a huge advantage for us.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Then, as we've noted, we're planning on investing an incremental $200 million-$300 million this year, which is not a small number. Yeah, you're right. We are going to follow the data. As we said in Q2, we did end up spending about 10% more than we expected. That was because the customer acquisition environment was so strong. Even with that 10% incremental spend, we got 25% better CACs than we expected. If we see something like that line up this fall, then yeah, I think it would be the wise move and our shareholders would want us to invest in that type of environment.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

At this point, we feel like given the data we have, this is the right place to be, and obviously we'll tweak it and make adjustments as we see data come in. It's really something that, you're right, I think is how we've always operated, and we did that in Q2. Just literally last quarter, we invested 10% more than we expected in customer acquisition.

Shaun Kelley
Shaun Kelley
Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director at Bank of America

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Brandt Montour with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Brandt Montour
Brandt Montour
Director of Equity Research at Barclays

Good morning, everybody, Thanks for taking my question. Just looking at the guidance for the rest of the year, it does imply a pretty big fourth quarter. Just curious if you could give us some sense for how you think the sort of building blocks can get you there between sort of sports versus iGaming, but more specifically within sports, sort of the rough expectations for market-wide growth, if you're expecting market share growth and the swing in or sort of what we can kind of think of in terms of theoretical win margin for sports. Thank you.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah. Q4 is always our biggest quarter. I expect it to be the same. Really what we're encouraged by is the strength we're seeing in the core business. As we noted on the call and in our letter, we are expecting about $1 billion this year in our core business for adjusted EBITDA, which is a really nice gain over last year. Then, the other thing we're really excited to see is that the momentum in the core is increasing. I know everyone was questioning handle last quarter, and in Q1, I should say. Nobody's asking about it now, which is good, I guess. We're onto the other things. Handle, which was the big question mark, and everyone was worried about predictions, cannibalization. Handle grew 11% in Q2, but even more importantly, handle has been absolutely on fire since Q2.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

July, even after the World Cup, right? Obviously, World Cup affects things. Even if you take post-World Cup, July handle was up 20% year-over-year. To me, that shows real momentum in the business. We're seeing it continue into August. I think it's going to be a big NFL season. I think a lot of this chatter. Sometimes what happens is when there's just overall marketing and awareness and chatter about something, it lifts everything. I think what's happening here is that both the World Cup impact and also just predictions and having everybody talking about this all the time, I think is really just going to lift everything. I'm expecting NFL to be really large for us, and I think we're going to have a huge back half of the year.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Now, that said, we didn't assume anything crazy outsized when we put the guidance out there. We assumed what we thought we were going to do earlier. Really, we're not changing anything in the back half in terms of our assumptions. Seeing the strength, seeing the momentum, not just through the World Cup, but post-World Cup in July, gives me great confidence that we are on track to hit and maybe even exceed what we're expecting to do in the core business in the back half of the year.

Brandt Montour
Brandt Montour
Director of Equity Research at Barclays

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Clark Lampen with BTIG. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Clark Lampen
Clark Lampen
Managing Director and Digital Gaming Analyst at BTIG

Thanks for taking the question. Jason, I wanted to come back to sort of DKeX Exchange, and now that you have all of the sort of pieces here in place with brokerage exchange and market maker, could you help us understand, I guess, the philosophy as you sort of are seeing really favorable CACs right now and going to market? Should we assume that the majority of the onboarding volume from here forward is going to be running through the exchange? If that's correct and it starts to happen, what's the sort of derivative impact to the fee structure? Is there a level that maybe you believe you can achieve or have targeted for the fall? Thank you.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah. It's a great question, I'll come to the fee structure piece in a moment. First, the first part of your question on just what the strategy is. The nice thing about predictions is, and actually this is true of Sportsbook too, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can plug into multiple exchanges. You can source content from multiple places. What we will do is we will phase DKeX Exchange in. Our expectation is that the vast majority of our sports content, at least in the major sports that are going on this fall, starting, of course, with CFB and NFL, that we're going to try to port as much of that volume over to the exchange as fast as is reasonably possible.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

The really important thing, the number one thing that we are making sure is that we feel like we have the best possible consumer offering out there. To the extent that that means we have to move a little slower or a little faster on moving things onto our own exchange, we will. Number one is making sure that the customer has the best experience, because you can do things at a different pace in the background that maybe help the economics, but what you can't do is repair a poor customer experience. That's something we are holding as sacred.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

I do expect that as we continue to move more and more volume through our own exchange, those unit economics will continue to improve for us, and that should be a tailwind, not just through this year, but through next year as well. Remember, in Sportsbook, this was a multiyear tailwind. It took us several years to bring all of our content in. We don't even have all of it now. We have about 95% of our sports content that we price and trade in-house.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Similarly here, when you think about exchange and market making, we're going to try to get to those kinds of numbers. I don't know exactly how long it'll take. I do think it'll be faster than it was in Sportsbook, because we have so much more core infrastructure now that allows us to move faster. As I said, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

In terms of the fees, that's a good question. I think right now, the fee structure for the industry has been pretty stable. I don't expect it to change much. The more that we bring in-house, the more we can just capture LTV from those exchange fees ourselves, and that gives us a unit economics advantage and an LTV advantage over the competition.

Clark Lampen
Clark Lampen
Managing Director and Digital Gaming Analyst at BTIG

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Robin Farley with UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Robin Farley
Robin Farley
Managing Director and Leisure Analyst at UBS

Great. Thanks. I wonder if you could kind of help us think about the components of your EBITDA guide. It didn't change, but in total, and not that you're going to give the specific quantifications, but could you kind of talk us through, was there an increase in what you thought you'd make in market making that's sort of offsetting some promotional or offsetting maybe hold impact? Or just kind of think about what the puts and takes are of the unchanged guide. Thanks.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah. There's always little pieces moving around that affect things for sure. The big components to think about are, number one, core business is on track to do approximately $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA. Really excited about the momentum we're seeing there. I think there could even be a little bit of upside on that one, but right now we feel comfortable saying approximately $1 billion. Then $200 million-$300 million of predictions investment expected on the year. Those are kind of the high level components to some of the things you're alluding to, market together. These are our little pieces moving underneath the hood. Some of those things, they're so small that they kind of wash through.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah, we do obviously update them in our forecast, but they're not material enough for us to be really calling out as individual line items.

Robin Farley
Robin Farley
Managing Director and Leisure Analyst at UBS

Okay. Thanks. Maybe just as a quick follow-up. In Q2, you talked about the revenue decline being a combination of sport outcomes and the higher commercial spend. Can you give us a sense of kind of what the split was, just so when we're thinking about what you're comping, the sport outcome kind of an easier thing to get back in theory. If just sort of rough proportion of which of those, versus I think what you said would've been up 10% in Q2 in revenue.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah. Sport outcomes basically drove about an $80 million revenue headwind, the rest was customer acquisition.

Robin Farley
Robin Farley
Managing Director and Leisure Analyst at UBS

Okay. Thank you very much.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

You're welcome.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Trey Bowers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Trey Bowers
Trey Bowers
Managing Director and Senior Gaming, Lodging and Leisure Analyst at Wells Fargo

Hey, guys. Just wondering if you could dig a little more on the iGaming business. The revenue growth was pretty similar to the previous quarter and actually better than, I'd say, some of the state level GGR was suggesting. Just curious about kind of the promotional environment, how you see that trending over time, and any thoughts on expectations for what that growth might look like for the balance of the year. Thanks so much.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Yeah. We're actually, iGaming, despite the fact that we have not performed the way that we had wanted to over the last several quarters, we are starting to see some real momentum there. As you noted, I think it was a little better than maybe some of the state reports might have led people to conclude. A big piece of that was the Lightning Link launch. That was something we really leaned into. One of the biggest land games ever, and really the last big land game to make its way online, at least of that magnitude. That was a big one for us. We launched a product called Flex Spins. Flex Spins allows you to give bonus spins across any game that people choose. Most of our competitors do not have that.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

They only allow you to get bonus spins on a particular game that they assign them to. Customers have really been responding well to that. We've been getting a lot of positive feedback on that. Our share has really stabilized after several quarters of losing share. I'm hoping we can kind of turn around and start gaining share over the next several months. I do feel like we have some real momentum there between the various things that I talked about. Acquisition into iGaming has been really strong, too. We talked a lot about sports, of course, but we also saw better than expected customer acquisition in iGaming, too, in Q2. It really feels like that business is on the rise, and I have big expectations for the next several months.

Trey Bowers
Trey Bowers
Managing Director and Senior Gaming, Lodging and Leisure Analyst at Wells Fargo

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Jed Kelly
Jed Kelly
Executive Director of Equity Research at Oppenheimer

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. Circling around that 600,000 prediction customers, typically when you launch in the state, I think you said previously you're able to get mid to high single digits of a population. Is there something structural or product-driven that precludes you from doing this as the product gets up to your standards where you really want to market it and get it into, call it, your meat and potato sports fans? Thanks.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

It's a great question. I think that there's two things going on here. One is, we are obviously still learning and we are taking a little bit more of a cautious approach in Predictions investment for various reasons. One, we're still learning about the numbers and what the ultimate LTVs can look like. Two, there are some regulatory questions that make the future and exactly what that's going to look like not entirely certain. We aren't leaning in quite as hard as we would in, say, a new state launch at this point. As those things become more clear, obviously, we will always think about adjusting, but right now that is how we are philosophically viewing it.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

The second thing is, there have been a lot of states that DraftKings has not operated in for many years that have been seeing national advertising. I do believe there's an education period that needs to occur for people to understand that they can actually, if you are in California, you can use DraftKings now. If you are in Texas, you can use DraftKings now. That's something that we started to do in the World Cup, I think will really become apparent in the NFL season. I think when you start to see that broader awareness really take hold, that's when you're going to see much, much faster customer acquisition come in. This is not too dissimilar from when we launched our first OSB states. If you recall, New Jersey, which is our first OSB state, ramped much slower than our more recent state launches.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

That's a combination of us honing our state launch playbook for sure, so it's part of it, but it's also a combination of just general awareness, general market momentum, people knowing when a state's launching now, being ready for it. Just different stage of that development curve than where Predictions is. Predictions is still a growing thing and there's still an education process happening for people to understand they can access DraftKings in these states that they couldn't before. The nice thing is we have this big national marketing footprint now, so we don't really need this massive amount of incremental spend in order to create that awareness. We can just refine our message, which we started to do in Q2, that DraftKings is now available in all these other places.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Really make those same dollars work for us across the country, whereas before it was only about half the population.

Jed Kelly
Jed Kelly
Executive Director of Equity Research at Oppenheimer

Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Bernie McTernan
Bernie McTernan
Senior Analyst at Needham

Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to circle back on something that you said in the prepared remarks about the flywheel of being vertically integrated. Just hoping you could dive into that a little bit more, talking about the structural advantage and network effect that come from being a vertically integrated prediction market operator.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Well, it's really important the question you're asking, it's been core to our strategy, not just in predictions, but virtually every product we've had. I'll actually start by explaining it via OSB, but it's really no different conceptually than predictions. In OSB, when we started off, we launched a product on a third-party platform called Kambi. We were not using our own backend technology. We were not doing any of our own pricing and trading. Thus, we were seeing two things. One, a lot of the unit economics were going out the door to others. Two, we didn't have full control of the product and customer experience. Really where you see this flywheel develop is across two dimensions, LTV being the centerpiece of it.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

The first dimension is that we can now capture more unit economics because we are on our own technology platform. We are doing our own pricing and trading. All that value is accruing to DraftKings. That allows us to then invest more back into customer acquisition because we now have higher LTVs. The second thing you're seeing is that we are improving our retention, improving our monetization because we are actually developing product at a faster pace and putting out differentiated offerings that we couldn't do before because we didn't have the full product control. Our pace of development and the ability that we've had to increase our retention and our monetization of customers has just been absolutely tremendous the last few years.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Predictions, same story. In predictions, there's really three components. There's the front end, the IB, also FCM is a piece of that, too. There's the exchange and then there's the market making, and DraftKings is playing in all three of those. We have a right to win in all three of those. We expect to be able to execute a similar playbook where we can capture a very large percentage of the total unit economics in LTV, which should give us that advantage that we have in Sportsbook now. Similarly, we expect to be able to use these capabilities to develop proprietary content and create new offerings that other competitors will either be slow to catch up on or may not even be able to do, depending on what capabilities they have in-house.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Very similar, in fact, exactly the same playbook that we executed in the other verticals and the reason that we have a high degree of confidence that one, this works, and two, we can execute it is we've done it before.

Bernie McTernan
Bernie McTernan
Senior Analyst at Needham

Makes sense. Thanks, Jason.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Chaiken with Mizuho. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Ben Chaiken
Ben Chaiken
Equity Analyst at Mizuho

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Jason, you mentioned acquiring more prediction customers than planned and seeing retention and volume similar to OSB, which is encouraging with lower CACs, I believe. It sounds like, I think if I caught this correctly, spending 10% more on predictions than you had planned. I guess I ask this question in the context of external marketing spend overall that I believe is lower than expected, which is presumably better OSB. Maybe the exact question is, can you clarify or add some color to what was seemingly much more efficient EM spend within OSB, assuming I have all the implied moving parts correct? Thanks.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

It's a great question you're touching on because, when I say we spend a little more, it doesn't always mean incremental to enterprise. We're also constantly optimizing our acquisition spend and all of our spend across every product that we have. There may be times where we think, hey, it makes sense to add incremental, but there might also be times where we just think we should shift some spend from this vertical to this one because we're getting more efficient performance here. We have such a large portfolio spend at this point across so many different channels, verticals, and other parts of the ecosystem that we really have a lot of flexibility to do that.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

It's a great question, and yeah, you're right. If we do see really strong predictions results, it is possible we invest more as an enterprise, but it's also possible that depending on what we're seeing in our other verticals, we shift some of that spend over.

Ben Chaiken
Ben Chaiken
Equity Analyst at Mizuho

Anything particular in the OSB efficiency, EM spend wise?

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

We saw really efficient OSB spend results on the CAC side as well. I think there were two things. One, obviously, was World Cup. Two, I think being able to really have this broader DraftKings everywhere message has helped everything lift. In the core, for example, in Q2, we saw a 40% year-over-year increase in customer acquisition, at the best CACs we'd seen since, what was it? Q1 2025. Six quarters, since we've seen this kind of efficiency, and I think next quarter is going to be much more efficient, just based on seasonality. Really experiencing a great tailwind here across everything, and I expect that to continue going into the fall.

Ben Chaiken
Ben Chaiken
Equity Analyst at Mizuho

Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Joe Stauff with Susquehanna. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Joe Stauff
Joe Stauff
Senior Equity Research Analyst at Susquehanna

Thanks. Good morning, Jason. Going into the new sports calendar and the app upgrade in particular coming out in August, what do you think are the most relevant product upgrades you think will be material?

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Well, I don't want to get into too many specifics because my product team wouldn't be too happy about that, but we do have a big upgrade coming up in the next few weeks with a number of new features and content planned to launch. More recently, maybe I'll talk about some recent features that we're going to continue to ramp across a few products. First on predictions, Combos has been absolute smash. Not surprising, but we're seeing incredible traction there. We just launched DKeX exchange. We just obtained our FCM license. Tremendous progress on the vertical integration strategy. Combos as an example is about 20% of all of our volume now, which to put in perspective, took us years to get to in Sportsbook, so much faster ramp on that front there.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

In our other products, we've had really great progress too. We launched something called Moonshot, which is an OSB product that we're really excited about. On iGaming, I mentioned Flex Spins. There was the Lightning Link launch. A lot of good stuff going into the fall, we have more things planned. This is always August, when everyone's taking vacations in the Hamptons or wherever else. We're always working hard because it's the weeks leading up to our busiest time of year, we ship the most product in August than we do all year long, really. This is a big moment for us in terms of upgrading the consumer offerings.

Joe Stauff
Joe Stauff
Senior Equity Research Analyst at Susquehanna

Thanks a lot.

Operator

We have now reached the end of the Q&A session. I will turn the call back to Jason Robins for closing remarks.

Jason Robins
Jason Robins
CEO and Co-Founder at DraftKings

Thank you all for joining us on today's call. We are excited to be well-positioned for continued success in the future, and thank you for your continued support. Have a good day.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Executives
Analysts
    • Stephen Grambling
      Managing Director at Morgan Stanley
    • Dan Politzer
      Executive Director of Equity Research at JPMorgan
    • David Katz
      Managing Director at Jefferies
    • Jordan Bender
      Managing Director of Gaming and Leisure Equity Research at Citizens
    • Shaun Kelley
      Senior Research Analyst and Managing Director at Bank of America
    • Brandt Montour
      Director of Equity Research at Barclays
    • Clark Lampen
      Managing Director and Digital Gaming Analyst at BTIG
    • Robin Farley
      Managing Director and Leisure Analyst at UBS
    • Trey Bowers
      Managing Director and Senior Gaming, Lodging and Leisure Analyst at Wells Fargo
    • Jed Kelly
      Executive Director of Equity Research at Oppenheimer
    • Bernie McTernan
      Senior Analyst at Needham
    • Ben Chaiken
      Equity Analyst at Mizuho
    • Joe Stauff
      Senior Equity Research Analyst at Susquehanna
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