Off-Season

Why users vanish every summer

At ESPN BET, engagement predictably craters every summer as football and basketball wrap up. In 2025 that pattern held true: monthly active users stayed strong into the NBA and NHL playoffs, then dropped sharply within a couple of months as those seasons ended, per Amplitude. That's not a UX nuisance, it's a direct hit to year-round revenue and retention.

Earlier segmentation analysis had already surfaced a signal worth chasing: a meaningful share of users showed a latent willingness to bet on other sports, they just weren't acting on it. Over 4 months, working alongside product design, product management, and market research at theScore, my job was to figure out why that willingness wasn't converting into behavior, and build a strategy the team could actually act on.

Diagnose first, then ask why

I started with what the data could tell me on its own: Amplitude behavioral analytics. To get the why behind it, I designed a survey sent to roughly 29,000 users active over the past year, split across two behavioral clusters Amplitude had already identified: casual, single-sport bettors with high hold but lower overall engagement, and multi-sport bettors already betting across several sports every week, with the heaviest use of live betting.

That split was the key decision, and it wasn't a guess: the two clusters showed meaningfully different betting patterns going in, a gap wide enough to justify analyzing them separately instead of averaging them into one muddier, less actionable recommendation. 330 people responded, with a reduced base on some questions.

A confidence gap, not a demand problem

The data reframed the whole problem. Users weren't uninterested in other sports: a plurality said they bet just as often in the off-season as during it, and only a small handful stopped betting altogether. Most had already placed a bet on a new sport in the past year, and many had tried to learn about a new sport specifically through betting on it.

What stopped the rest wasn't apathy, it was confidence. Most of the top reasons users gave for hesitating to bet on an unfamiliar sport were rooted in a lack of knowledge, not a lack of interest: feeling unsure how to bet smartly topped the list, followed by wanting more promos or incentives and not knowing the rules or format. Only one reason in the top ranks, simply not following that sport, had nothing to do with confidence.

"I would have to follow the sport and players closely to make an enlightened bet."

That reframing led to a two-part recommendation. A strong majority of respondents said risk-free or promo bets would make them feel more confident trying a new sport, and free bets and a risk-free first bet were by far the most-requested promo types, so promotions became the lever to drive that first, low-risk try.

But a promo alone doesn't teach anyone to read odds or understand a format they've never seen, and most users said in-app promotions and banners were where they discovered new sports in the first place. That made the app itself the natural place to pair the promo with the education that turns a one-time bet into a habit.

What I'd do differently

My primary learning was how to scope research around a business problem, not a UI component.

That meant starting from "why does engagement change seasonally" instead of "how do we improve this screen," which let the recommendation address the actual cause instead of a symptom.

Analytics told me what users were doing. The survey told me why.

Presenting the two together made a far more compelling case than either alone. Amplitude by itself would only have confirmed a drop everyone already knew about, and the survey by itself would have been a stack of opinions with no sense of scale. Together, they turned into a recommendation that paired a short-term lever, promotions, with a long-term one, education, rather than picking just one.