I think most of us here are Sportsbook dabblers. I promote VIP also with some success (not huge money) and would love to learn more about how to make money with this market segment.
My thoughts are its VERY competetive and unless you have a wealth of live game data and stats analysis on your site it probably won’t be popular with real sports bettors. I looked at licensing the necessary data feeds and an analysis package that was robust enough to be competitive and sticky with players and it ended up pricing out at something like $10k-12K in launch costs with an ongoing license fee of aprox $6500 per annum. This was WITHOUT a dedicated server with enough bandwidth to host this pig plus the time factor of maintenance and support and then advertising costs which are similar to casinos if not worse.
Because I have never realized more then $2000 – $3000 in a calender month with sports books I couldnt pull the trigger. I figured for the same investment in advertising of my casino portals I would see higher returns (at least I could project profits, the devil you know is better then the one you dont).
My two cents