HANA — I tried to leave a comment on your related post, but it doesn’t seem to have appeared. Basically, I just wanted to say thanks for the link, and that pursuing open and low cost data is a great goal for the Horseplayers’ Association. Making data more widely available will free up more money for handle from existing customers and remove one of the biggest obstacles to enjoying racing faced by new customers.

It also is about transparency. If you’re new to the sport and you have to pay to find out basic information about what happend in a race 6 months ago, some might believe that not only is that info proprietary but maybe also subjective. It’s an image issue for a sport that already has too many negative images.

You want to market racing as a sport?

What new fan is going to put up with that?

How did us old fans ever get this far?

Because it’s a great game. Imagine what would happen if you introduced someone new to this game and they didn’t have to jump through hoops to find out what happened? Imagine the kind of interest that could be generated, for nothing, when you unleash this data?

Basic PP data and historical info should be the very definition of a loss leader in this industry. This is common sense. This is the utility that keeps the money in the game and brings in new money by itself without any marketing.

We complain about the industry marketing itself but you have to wonder where are you marketing new people to? What are we selling that is so great? Once you get past the bias that bloggers obviously have for the sport, I don’t really see much that we should all be excited about to market at the moment. Marketing is empty without a good product. It’s a trick that the target of your marketing finds out about and then NEVER comes back under any circumstances.

We have a sport that is already very complicated to understand and follow, made doubly more so by the huge walled off garden of data that you would need to understand this complication. That’s the barrier to selling this sport to newbs.

We have several members that spend thousands on data, and are serious about racing. They tell us that the $4000 or so they spend can be put to much better use – in the wagering pools.

Better distribution of data in a better and more cost effective way to the horseplayer, and potential new fan is one of the original planks. We think, I think like you do, that this can spin-off into handle gains and new fan growth for the sport. Commission Junction is a reseller of so much, and is a success. The Internet is full of resellers. There is football betting software, fantasy football software (all sports really) with people using free stats to promote the game. We want to see similar in racing. Thousands of resellers, using our data to be a voice for racing and promoting it to other gamblers, and other sports fans to hopefully pull them to this game we feel is a very worthwhile pursuit.

Unleash the data virus.