SBC still operates more than a dozen gambling-industry publications, but the company’s most valuable product stopped being the news on those websites some time ago. The actual product is the ability to assemble tens of thousands of operators, suppliers, affiliates, regulators, and investors in the same city, then sell companies exhibition space, sponsorship inventory, and access to that audience. The media operation remains important, though increasingly as the distribution network wrapped around a much larger events business.
The change did not happen through one dramatic acquisition or a strategic pivot announced on a stage somewhere. SBC gradually built a commercial loop in which publishing attracts industry professionals, events bring those readers together, and the resulting interviews, announcements, and conference sessions generate more material for the publications. Each side supports the other, but the economics are not remotely equal. A specialist news website can sell advertising, sponsored content, and webinars; a large trade show can sell stands, stages, lounges, parties, awards, hospitality packages, and premium access over several days.
SBC has spent the past decade moving towards the second model, and it’s not hard to see why.
Founder Rasmus Sojmark started SBC in London in 2009 as a series of informal gatherings for sports-betting professionals. The quarterly meetings attracted roughly 150 to 200 people and addressed a basic problem within the sector: operators, technology suppliers, payment companies, affiliates, and advisers needed places to meet one another outside the industry’s largest annual exhibitions. Sojmark committed to SBC full-time in 2012, turning what had been a professional network into an events and media company.
The company’s early advantage was not proprietary technology or exclusive information. It was proximity. Gambling is a heavily networked B2B market in which operators rarely build every component themselves: sportsbooks need data, trading systems, payment infrastructure, marketing tools, compliance services, and platform software, creating a long chain of vendors competing for relatively few major contracts. Bringing buyers and sellers into the same room could therefore become a product in its own right.
Publishing gave SBC a reason to speak with those companies throughout the year. Its news operation covered executive appointments, market launches, regulation, product deals, and financial results, while newsletters created a direct channel to the professionals likely to attend or sponsor an event later. The audience did not need to be comparable with that of a mainstream business publication. A small readership containing executives who control supplier budgets can be considerably more useful, commercially speaking, than a much larger general one.
The legal structure now reflects the combination. SBC Events & Media Limited was incorporated in 2017 and is registered in the UK for both periodical publishing and conference organisation. The company previously traded as SBC Global and later SBC Events before adopting its current name in January 2025. It remains a privately held small company, which limits the amount of financial information available to anyone outside it.
SBC’s flagship summit shows just how quickly the events side has expanded. The 2022 Barcelona edition drew about 6,000 delegates and hosted 200 exhibitors. One year later, SBC reported approximately 15,000 attendees, 350 exhibitors, and a 38,000-square-metre show floor. Attendance had tripled, while the amount of exhibition space grew by 175%.
Barcelona could not accommodate the next stage of the plan, so SBC moved the event to Lisbon in 2024. The first Portuguese edition spread across 110,000 square metres, with 600 exhibitors and close to 25,000 delegates from 134 countries. SBC reported more than 30,000 attendees in 2025, alongside roughly 700 exhibitors and sponsors. Its target for September 2026 is 40,000 delegates, 800 exhibitors, and more than 600 speakers.
To be clear, those numbers come primarily from SBC itself and should be treated as organiser figures rather than independently audited attendance. Even with that qualification, the trajectory is difficult to miss. Within four years, the summit’s promoted attendance has moved from 6,000 to a target of 40,000, while the exhibition has expanded from 200 companies to more than 800 exhibitors and sponsors.
Ticket sales explain only part of the opportunity. Large B2B exhibitions are structured around the value of the people exhibitors want to meet, so operators, affiliates, and other qualified attendees may receive free or heavily subsidised admission, because their presence makes the floor more valuable to suppliers. For its 2026 summit, SBC is offering eligible affiliates a complimentary pass advertised as being worth €999. Meanwhile, sponsors and exhibitors pay for stands, branding, speaking visibility, and positions near the audiences they’re trying to reach.
The resulting product resembles a temporary marketplace far more than a conventional conference. Panels and keynote speakers help attract attendees, but suppliers generally do not invest substantial sums merely to listen to discussions about regulation or artificial intelligence. They are buying concentrated access to prospective clients, partners, and investors. SBC’s task is to place enough commercially relevant people in the venue to make those meetings possible, then provide companies with increasingly expensive ways to stand out from everyone else attempting exactly the same thing.
Growth also creates a less flattering problem: a 40,000-person event can simply become too large to function efficiently. More delegates produce more potential contacts, but also longer travel distances, congested meeting areas, and more competition for attention. An exhibitor measuring the event by qualified leads rather than total footfall may not consider a larger audience automatically better. SBC’s repeated emphasis on executives, decision-makers, and “budget holders” reveals which metric actually matters to its customers.
Covid-19 briefly removed the entire foundation of SBC’s business by making physical conferences impossible. Rather than suspend its calendar, the company moved several events online. Its first SBC Digital Summit in April 2020 approached 10,000 registrations and included a virtual exhibition, networking areas, and a seven-track conference with 140 speakers. The planned Barcelona summit later became a digital-only event with 100 virtual exhibition booths.
Virtual conferences preserved relationships with sponsors and audiences, but they also demonstrated exactly why the company returned so aggressively to physical events. Online platforms can distribute panels efficiently, yet they struggle to reproduce the informal meetings, dinners, and repeated face-to-face contact that justify large B2B event budgets in the first place. SBC retained digital tools after the pandemic, but largely as support for physical gatherings rather than replacements for them.
Its SBC Connect platform lets attendees examine participant lists, arrange meetings, and plan schedules around an event. The software is useful, though its strategic purpose is less ambitious than building some standalone professional network. It reduces friction inside an increasingly unwieldy exhibition and gives sponsors and delegates more opportunities to identify one another before arriving.
SBC Media says its network publishes more than 100 stories a day across 12 news portals, two magazines, and several podcasts, with an editorial staff of more than 20 writers. The company reports around 200,000 monthly unique users, 290,000 sessions, and 975,000 page impressions across the portfolio. These figures come from SBC’s own advertising material and are not independently verified.
The publications cover different parts of the same commercial market. SBC News concentrates on betting, Payment Expert covers transactions and compliance, Insider Sport follows the sports business, and regional sites target the Americas, Brazil, and Eurasia. Canadian Gaming Business joined the portfolio after SBC agreed to acquire the Canadian Gaming Summit and its associated media assets in 2022.
Rather than relying solely on conventional display advertising, the network sells bespoke editorials, interviews, webinars, podcasts, research projects, directory listings, and video production. SBC’s sales material openly presents the publications as tools for generating leads and promoting suppliers to gambling executives. The editorial operation therefore sits directly beside a marketing-services business serving many of the very companies it covers.
That arrangement is common in specialist B2B publishing, where subscription revenue is often limited and advertisers expect more than banner space. It also creates an unavoidable credibility problem. SBC reports on companies that may simultaneously buy sponsored articles, exhibition stands, award tables, and conference packages. The closer the media and events operations become, the harder the publication must work to distinguish independent coverage from material produced for commercial clients.
SBC has also shown that its media brands are assets to be traded rather than permanent editorial institutions. ClickOut Media acquired CasinoBeats and Esports Insider from SBC for an undisclosed amount in summer 2024. Both domains were subsequently converted towards affiliate-led models, while SBC replaced CasinoBeats within its own portfolio by launching iGamingExpert.
The disposals point to a narrower strategy. Media properties remain useful when they support SBC’s core gambling verticals, regional expansion, or event categories. A publication that no longer fits that structure can be sold, replaced, or folded into another brand without damaging the main events operation.
Lisbon gives SBC a global flagship, but regulated and newly opening markets provide the next layer of growth. The company now runs events covering Brazil, North America, Canada, Malta, and the region spanning Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Each show applies the same formula on a smaller scale: recruit operators and regulators, sell access to suppliers, attach awards and networking events, and use local media coverage to maintain contact between editions.
Brazil offers particularly favourable conditions, because regulation has created demand for platforms, compliance systems, payments, data, and legal advice all at the same time. Canada presented a different route. Rather than build an event from nothing, SBC acquired an existing conference and its associated publishing portfolio, gaining an established audience and industry relationships in one transaction.
The regional strategy also protects SBC from depending entirely on one annual summit. Regulatory delays, travel disruption, or competition from other exhibitions can weaken an individual event, while a broader calendar gives sponsors repeated opportunities to buy from the company. A vendor trying to enter several markets may encounter SBC in Lisbon, Rio, Toronto, and Tbilisi within the same year.
Public filings provide very little detail about the scale or profitability of each division. SBC Events & Media files accounts as a small private company, and its published documents do not offer the segment reporting available from a listed exhibition organiser. Rasmus Sojmark remains a director and person with significant control, alongside director David Knight.
Without revenue split by events, advertising, sponsorships, and advisory services, claims about the exact value of each arm remain estimates. The company’s priorities are nevertheless perfectly visible through its behaviour. Exhibition space has expanded several times over, attendance targets keep rising, new regional shows continue to appear, and media products are marketed partly as channels through which clients can generate leads and amplify their event presence.
SBC’s transformation, then, is not a simple story of an online publication becoming an exhibition organiser. The company began with networking, added media to maintain and enlarge that network, and then discovered just how much more valuable the audience became when gathered in one physical place. Publishing still feeds the system, but the centre of the business has shifted towards selling companies access, attention, and status inside the gambling industry’s professional marketplace.
The model works as long as SBC can keep the different sides in balance. Operators and executives need enough useful content and free access to attend. Suppliers need enough serious buyers to justify spending on stands and sponsorships. Readers need to trust that the publications offer more than paid visibility dressed as journalism. As the company chases 40,000 delegates and an even larger global calendar, preserving those distinctions may prove harder than filling another exhibition hall.
