William Hill buys TomWaterhouse.com

William Hill has purchase the Australian online sportsbetting business TomWaterhouse.com for $34 million.

He may know what punters want, but Tom Waterhouse definitely doesn’t know (or care) what the general Australian public wants. If he did he would have stopped appearing incessantly on TV during game broadcasts to spruik his business a long time ago.

Waterhouse’s aggressive marketing campaign has been a pretty hot topic of conversation down under, serving to further polarize an already divided public on the place (if any) online betting should have in this country.

His methods have also been openly criticised by other local betting firms for the unwelcome attention they have brought to the industry.

Most industry analysts doing the numbers were confident the business was spending far more on acquiring customers than it could possibly be making. It seemed pretty clear from the outset that the Waterhouse strategy was to build a brand and customer base with a view to selling to one of the majors for a big payday. That payday has now come…but I suspect it is far less than was originally expected.

Rumours of interest from Ladbrokes earlier in the year ($500 million was the one of the numbers being bandied around!) turned out to be just that after Ladbrokes denied any interest.

According a report in today’s Age newspaper the William Hill deal came after lengthy negotiation during which Waterhouse was looking for $100 million for a 50% stake. Given where negotiations finished, Waterhouse must have been a very eager seller which speaks to his view of the real health of the business. It also suggests William Hill were well aware of the negative sentiment attached to the Waterhouse brand.

Under the terms of the deal, Tom Waterhouse stays on as managing director of tomwaterhouse.com and joins William Hill Australia’s management team. So we haven’t necessarily seen an end to one of the most annoying advertising campaigns in history of Australian TV. But hopefully…

From the William Hill side of things, this is their second Australian acquisition after buying Sportingbet Australia earlier this year for $660 million.

The development will have no effect on William Hill’s live casino.