“Advertising Brings a Player Once, Actually Paying Winners Brings Them Back” — Helabet Representative Says

Nigerian iGaming sector has undergone a seismic shift over the past eighteen months following the Supreme Court’s late-2024 ruling that decentralised the industry and secured state-level regulatory authority. In this interview with Yusuf Lawal, Helabet representative Olajay discusses how the company is handling the regulatory chaos, shares a few internal user-growth figures, outlines plans for advertising strategy changes, and even explores the possibility of sponsoring a Nigerian football club.

Your company has been in Nigeria for a while now. How big is Helabet in 2026? By our internal figures, we had 2.5 million active users by the third quarter of 2025. That’s a hard number from our player database audit — [shows a smartphone screenshot of the dashboard to showcase the number and the relevant description that proves it, but concealing the rest of the data] — but it is not for publishing; I can only share it like that, sorry.

We have probably added a few hundred thousand since then. But I won’t make assumptions a couple of months before the upcoming annual audit. And besides, raw numbers don’t matter that much to us. We are even pivoting our advertising strategy towards spending less. And this has already attracted more players than during our usual marketing campaigns.

A bold statement, considering Nigeria is one of Africa’s most competitive betting markets and other operators are fighting tooth and nail for every bit of visibility. Care to explain? Visibility still matters, yes. Not going to pretend ads do nothing; they bring impressions and let Nigerian players know Helabet exists. But the economy is not the same as six or even two years ago.

Just an example that dozens of millions of my compatriots can relate to: in September 2019, $1 was ₦360. In September 2026, $1 costs around ₦1,325. The exchange rate has dropped by 3.7 times. And while today the local player wagers more in naira than in 2019, in $ the growth does not compensate for this drop. But a lot of CAC operations [Customer Acquisition Cost, total expenses needed to attract a new customer] are tied to the $.

Marketing costs more in $ in 2026 than in post-COVID-19 2021, when we were just starting in Nigeria. Some channels became too expensive due to increasing competition or rising compliance costs. Others became irrelevant due to legal changes and, again, compliance. You do not even need to dig into staff and digital infrastructure support costs to see that burning money in the budget race is an unsustainable strategy, even short-term.

When these changes were only looming, we asked ourselves a simple question: what does advertising actually buy? It brings a player to Helabet once. How long they stay depends on the product, payouts, rewards and support. A positive gaming experience, paying winners on time and solving their problems builds our brand reputation and reduces churn [percentage of players who stop depositing and betting over a specific time period, usually measured in periods between 7 and 90 days].

Fail their trust — and funds invested in CAC are gone with your reputation. Helabet is all about building trust by giving players exactly what we promised during sign-up. This is the policy we have entered the Nigerian iGaming market with. Or any other African market we operate in. But in the new circumstances, we chose to double down on this policy.

And redirected even more money from marketing into customer experience assets: bonuses, localisation, our team, payouts… Oh yes, Nigerian bettors have some very public arguments about not getting their winnings. How are you going to tackle this growing lack of trust towards sportsbooks? This might sound new to some, but often sportsbooks withhold payments because they lack sufficient operational balance to suddenly pay out a large single win or a volume of winning bets placed on a high-odds event.

And they fail to notice that even a single complaint going viral over tens of thousands on social media from a customer denied their legitimate funds will destroy their previous marketing investments. And trust. So continuing to build and protect trust with our players by paying out winnings on time is our best bet, pun intended. That is why part of our funds went into operational balance.

So any bettor at Helabet could be assured that if they legitimately win a large sum, they will promptly receive their money upon request. But paying winners is a bookmaker’s basic obligation. Should that really be counted as a competitive advantage? It should be basic. But reality bites. The local betting industry is at a stage where players compare sportsbooks based on whether they trust the payout to happen or not.

Open any betting discussion on social media, and it is all complaints about delayed and missing payments, frozen accounts. There is even an ongoing case of ₦900 million in unpaid winnings. I will not call names because everyone already knows who you are. The best Helabet can do is lead by example,