Novig Drops 218% Depositor Surge and Declares 'Nothing to Apologize'

The Novig co-founder went on the record with CNBC this week and brought the scoreboard with him. In the 20 days around the September 9 "Just Sports" launch, first-time depositors jumped 218%, app downloads rose 187%, and trading volume climbed 94%, per Bitcoin.com's reporting of Jacob Fortinsky's interview.

"We have nothing to apologize for and are very proud of the work that we did," Fortinsky told CNBC. The platform plans to, in his words, "continue to embody that aggressive risk-taking culture."

The fuller picture runs deeper. Active users climbed 96% month over month and 260% year over year in September. Sports volume grew 136% between August 30 and September 29. Novig's share of the $68.2 billion sports prediction market ticked from 1.5% to 2%, according to The Lines. A new funding round pegged the platform at $2 billion, four times its February valuation.

The Numbers Are Company-Reported. The NFL Was Also There.

Fortinsky acknowledged one complication: he had not anticipated the combined force of the Sweeney campaign and the NFL season kickoff. They launched the same day. IBTimes UK noted that a surge in downloads and deposits immediately following a viral advertisement does not necessarily translate into long-term customer loyalty. The metrics are real. The attribution is contested.

That is the company's own scoreboard, as Fortinsky himself framed it: an "outsized risk" that delivered numbers the campaign team did not expect at that scale.

The Industry Is Asking the Harder Question

Industry veterans are not giving Novig a clean win yet. Tony Kenny, a former communications executive at Paddy Power and William Hill, told iGaming Business that awareness does not automatically mean funded accounts. "This is not a free trial; people have to put in their hard-earned cash," Kenny said. He also noted that Sydney Sweeney remains more recognizable than the Novig product itself.

Kenny's read: attention is easy to buy at the top of the funnel. Conversion from download to depositor, and then from depositor to active long-term bettor, is a different problem. Novig has published the first two numbers. The third has not surfaced.

Novig released additional Sweeney campaign content a month after the original ad, suggesting internal data gave the team enough confidence to keep going. Female athletes including Gracie Kramer, Amy Hunt, Ariarne Titmus, and Tilly Kearns publicly criticized the original campaign for reducing women's presence in sports to sexual display, per iGaming Business. Novig's response was to keep running.

Our read: the backlash was not a side effect of the campaign. It was the mechanism. Fortinsky is not apologizing because there is nothing to apologize for if the controversy was the media buy. What it was not designed to do is retain a customer. That metric will surface quietly, probably in a funding pitch, probably next year.

Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site. No affiliation with Novig, Sydney Sweeney, or any party named here. This piece draws on published sources listed below.

Novig Drops 218% Depositor Surge and Declares 'Nothing to Apologize'

The Numbers Are Company-Reported. The NFL Was Also There.

The Industry Is Asking the Harder Question

Sources & further reading

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