Penn Entertainment
Spotlight Carousel
Conceived and built Spotlight Carousel from scratch — a CMS-driven, full-width homepage feature that surfaces curated betting events with a direct bet-to-betslip flow. During March Madness 2026, Spotlight was the origin point for 50%+ of all bets placed on featured games. Now live across eight sports.
Making the Homepage a Betting Surface
The homepage has always been the most visited surface in a sportsbook. For most products — including ours — it was primarily a navigation layer. I built Spotlight Carousel to change that: a curated, full-width card experience that puts the most important bettable content of the day front and center, with a direct path to bet placement without leaving the screen.
Context
In late 2025 Penn Entertainment initiated a major homepage redesign. The strategic question underneath it was straightforward: if a user lands on the homepage, what should happen next?
The existing answer was browse — find a league chip, navigate to a sport, find a game, place a bet. That's four steps minimum before a bet touches a slip. For high-intent users arriving with a specific game in mind, it worked. For everyone else, it was friction.
The opportunity was to collapse that funnel. Identify the most important events of the day, surface them immediately, and let users bet directly from that surface. The homepage stops being a menu and starts being a destination.
That was the thesis behind Spotlight Carousel.
The Build
The concept emerged from the broader homepage redesign effort I initiated in October 2025. I ran the full product development cycle — 10% review in October, 50% check-in in November, 90% review delivered asynchronously in late November, engineering handoff before Thanksgiving 2025.
I owned the feature end-to-end: product concept, functional spec, CMS configuration design, user-facing interaction model, KPI framework, and post-launch analysis across every major deployment.
How it works:
Spotlight sits at the very top of the homepage — above the league chips — in a full-width swipeable card format. Each card is built around a single market, configured by ops through a dedicated CMS workflow. Cards surface team colors as gradient backgrounds for team sports, curated visual assets for individual sports like golf. Users tap an odds box to add directly to their bet slip, or tap the card body to navigate to the full matchup page.
The carousel supports up to six cards per region, auto-advances every ten seconds, and persists carousel position between sessions — a user who left on card three returns to card three.
Launch: Super Bowl 2026, iOS only. Phase 2 expanded to Android. Phase 3 added golf and individual sports. As of April 2026, Spotlight is live across NFL, UFC, NCAAB, MLB, NBA, NHL, WNBA, and Golf.
What It's Driven
March Madness 2026 — The Defining Deployment
67 games across four rounds. This was Spotlight's largest deployment and the clearest validation of the product thesis.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Total tournament bets on featured events | ~393,400 |
| Spotlight bet attribution (R64/R32) | 50–64% of all bets on featured games |
| Spotlight bet attribution (Final Four/Championship) | 44–51% |
| iOS bettor engagement (peak day) | 56.46% |
| Bet type mix — iOS | ~60% parlay, ~30% straight, ~10% SGP |
More than half of all bets placed on featured March Madness games originated from Spotlight. The homepage became the primary betting surface for the tournament's most important games — not just a navigation layer.
NBA/NHL Playoffs — Week 1 (April 2026)
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Spotlight bet capture | 25.9% of all bets on featured events |
| Average bettor engagement | 35.8% |
| Direct bet rate | 88.5% |
| Bet type mix (high-volume days) | 70–78% parlays or SGPs |
NHL outperformed NBA on every engagement metric — 42.2% user engagement vs. 32.3%, 96.2% direct bet rate vs. 84.3%. Capture rate held flat at 25–28% regardless of slate size, which is an important signal: Spotlight scales linearly with content volume rather than cannibalizing itself on heavy days.
The Masters 2026
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Spotlight bet capture | 11.7% of event total |
| Spotlight users | 26.7% of all bettors |
Golf underperformed relative to team sports — 74% of Spotlight-sourced golf bets were straight bets, which suppresses hold significantly. The structural issue is that golf outright markets don't naturally drive parlay construction the way team sport matchups do. The operational recommendation coming out of Masters: redeploy golf within mixed-sport carousels rather than as a standalone use case, or explore a final-round-only activation model.
The Android Problem
The most important structural finding across every Spotlight deployment is the iOS/Android performance gap — and it's not subtle.
Android lacks auto-scroll on the carousel, and chip placement puts Spotlight lower in the viewport relative to iOS. The result: 88% of Android engagement activity never leaves card one. On the peak March Madness day, Android hold ran below 2% while iOS held above 10% on the same feature, the same games, the same odds.
This isn't a margin-of-error difference. It's a structural ceiling on Android Spotlight value — estimated at approximately $400K per day in unrealized handle during peak events.
The fix is the Android BFF homepage refactor, which addresses both the auto-scroll and viewport issues. Until that ships, the gap persists. Identifying, quantifying, and escalating this was as important as anything in the initial build.
What's Next
In Q2 2026 — during NBA/NHL Round 1 — Spotlight's first holdout A/B experiment goes live. The design: 85% of users see Spotlight, 15% see the pre-Spotlight homepage. User-level persistent assignment, three-week minimum duration, iOS and Android tracked separately.
The primary question the test will answer: is Spotlight driving net-new revenue, or redistributing bets that would have happened through other surfaces? All data to this point is observational. This is the first causal measurement of the feature's revenue impact.
Results will update this case study when the experiment closes.
What I Learned
Homepage position is a monetization decision. Putting Spotlight above the league chips wasn't a UX call — it was a statement about what the product believes users should do first. That decision cascades into every interaction model, every KPI, every operational workflow underneath it.
The Android gap taught me to instrument platforms separately from day one. The gap wasn't visible until post-launch analysis. Had I set up platform-segmented reporting before Super Bowl rather than after, we'd have caught it earlier and the BFF refactor conversation would have started sooner.
Not every sport fits the same surface. Golf's underperformance wasn't a failure of the feature — it was a signal about bet type mix and how different sports drive different betting behaviors. The right response wasn't to force golf into a template designed for team sports, but to rethink the activation model entirely. That's a product decision, not a content decision.
Carousel depth matters more than carousel presence. The data from later March Madness rounds — where the gap between iOS and Android narrowed only because card count dropped, not because Android improved — was clarifying. The feature's value scales with content depth. A six-card carousel with strong events is a fundamentally different product than a two-card one.