News “betting” site Hubdub.com has secured £810,000 in first round funding led by Pentech Ventures and Scottish Co-Investment Fund and backed by a group of angel investors including Rikki Tahta, founder of Covestor.com, and Simon Murdoch, founder of Friendsabroad.com. Hubdub users bet on the outcome of news stories, but for Hubdub dollars instead of real money, and can set up their own questions. The Edinburgh-based site was founded by husband and wife team Nigel and Lesley Eccles last year. Nigel is a former group business development manager for Johnston Press and previously worked on Flutter.com, since acquired by Betfair.com.
The site gets 250,000 unique users a month, who, between them, make about 100,000 predictions a month, and the site has content partnerships with Reuters, Independent.co.uk and Huffingtonpost.com. The company says it will concentrate on finding new partners and ways for online news media to incorporate Hubdub betting into their stories. Hubdub says it can add traffic to sites and increase engagement, something all online media are seeking.
But its investors must be taking a long view: with the biggest UK sites attracting more than 20 million unique users around the world, a few extra thousand won’t make much difference to traffic, and the big publishers don’t need much help in generating engagement. Still, many news people will like the idea of consequence-free betting on theirs and other people’s stories, and maybe their readers will too.
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