Snap-e Helps South African Brands Turn eMedia Airtime into Measurable Leads
'Snap-e doesn't just track viewer interest — it converts it' — Alon Raz, Qapture CEO
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, July 3, 2025 / EINPresswire.com / -- Snap-e, an interactive TV engagement solution brought to you exclusively by eMedia Holdings, is showing South African advertisers that television can do more than build awareness — it can generate leads, sign-ups, and conversions in real time.
Snap-e is built on Qapture's advanced visual code technology and enables viewers to scan branded, colorful codes directly from their TV screens — no zooming, clicking, remembering a number to SMS, or fiddling with URLs. With just one scan, viewers are taken to an optimized experience: a game, signup, special offer, or purchase — all while the ad is still running or during a program. Snap-e is turning passive airtime into measurable business results.
Snap-e vs. QR: Not Just a Code — A Performance Engine
Skeptical about QR codes on TV? You're not alone. Most QR campaigns underperform because they rely on outdated assumptions:
* QR codes aren't made for TV — they often require zooming in or pausing the screen
* They look generic, so viewers have no clue what they'll get until after they scan
* The journey after the scan often needs extra clicks or loads a page viewers abandon
* And there's lingering trust issues — many viewers don't scan unknown QR codes on principle
Snap-e fixes all of that.
* It's designed for TV — with long-range scanning, even from across the room
* The codes are custom-shaped (like a shopping cart, heart, or even your logo) — making the intent clear before scanning
* The experience is instant and action-driven — with no friction and no guesswork
* And because Snap-e runs through the eMedia ecosystem, the viewer already trusts it
Real Results — Already Happening in South Africa
Recent Snap-e campaigns on eMedia have delivered:
* Thousands of live scans during prime-time slots
* High-intent leads, verified conversions, and ecommerce actions
* Engagement rates up to 4x higher than traditional QR-code experiences
* >80% conversion rate
'Snap-e doesn't just track viewer interest — it converts it,' said Alon Raz, Qapture CEO. 'If you're running ads on eMedia, you don't need to change your media plan — just activate Snap-e and let the results speak for themselves.'
Ready to turn your airtime into leads? For a limited time, eMedia advertisers can activate their first Snap-e campaign with 10% off — making it even easier to test the results for yourself.
To request your custom Snap-e campaign mockup, visit https://qapture.co/en/snap-e .
Cathy Yagur
Qapture
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Under the hood In South Africa the sector has spawned an effective duopoly, with the behemoths Betway and Hollywoodbets cornering between two thirds and three quarters of the market according to our rough estimates - hoovering up something like R27 billion per year of the R40 billion in gross gambling revenue referred to above. Find the full responses to our questions from these two companies here and here. We'll explain our reckoning further down. According to survey-based data from consultancy Reveal, the national lottery still leads in terms of the number of people gambling. But in terms of actual money spent, the two private sector giants dominate even while smaller players have also proliferated wildly. Which is not to say that all the other platforms are insignificant. MultiChoice owns 49% of Kingmakers, a Nigerian online gambling company that had revenue of R2.6 billion in its last financial year. 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READ | High Stakes | Online gambling 'rife' at some private, wealthy public schools, says child protection activist The second is the extent to which the company's immense gambling revenue from South Africa ends up in the hands of a tiny clique of South African expats. The group's CEO is Neal Menashe, a University of Cape Town alumnus, while its chief financial officer is Alinda van Wyk, a graduate of Stellenbosch University. Although he stepped down in February this year, the group's president and chief commercial officer throughout its massive expansion into South Africa was Richard Hassan, another ex-Capetonian, while the board also features Merrick Wolman, another South African expat. But looming large is the enigmatic Martin Moshal, an expat who, as mentioned, has lately become better known in the country of his birth as a prolific funder of opposition political parties. 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Super Group emphasised that 'Mr Moshal is not a shareholder of Super Group (SGHC) Ltd but is a beneficiary of a trust which ultimately holds an ownership interest in Super Group.' Follow the money While Betway is deeply rooted in South Africa, its profits leave little trace locally. First off, how much money does Betway make in South Africa? According to the latest financial statements of the parent company Super Group (for 2024) Betway's revenue in South Africa came in at €544-million (just shy of R11 billion) and that has been escalating massively. In response to our questions, the company asserted that it can 'categorically say that your figures are incorrect'. The reason given is that it only reports results 'per region, not per market. So, the figures that we think that you may have extrapolated are from all the markets we operate across the continent, not only SA.' But the company's annual report states unequivocally that 'revenue from external customers for the year attributed to … South Africa is €543.9 million (2023: €317.3 million), (2022: €181.0 million)'. [extract from the annual report: 'The Group's performance can also be reviewed by considering the geographical markets and geographical locations where the Group generates revenue. The Group has not provided geographic information regarding its non-current assets as this information is not available and the cost to develop would be excessive. Revenue from external customers for the year attributed to Canada is €568.1 million (2023: €514.0 million), (2022: €541.2 million), South Africa is €543.9 million (2023: €317.3 million), (2022: €181.0 million) and the United Kingdom is €183.3 million (2023: below 10%), (2022: below 10%). India is below 10% in 2024 (2023: below 10%), (2022: €144.5 million). No other country accounted for more than 10%'] Compared to official figures for the whole sector, Betway's South African revenue seemingly represents nearly a third of the entire country's betting industry. Supplied/Amabhungane Cost-wise there is no geographical breakdown, but Betway's global operations as a whole ploughs an astonishing 31% of expenditure into marketing - not exactly the stuff of broad-based industrialisation. What about profits? Dividends paid by Betway's parent company in New York last year amounted to €46 million (just shy of R1 billion, of which 67% or R670 million would have gone to the trusts linked to the South African expats). This year the dividend target is €81 million or roughly R1.7 billion, largely destined for the South African clique's offshore trusts. But it does not end there. Betway leases its sportsbook platform software and 'a significant portion of the casino games available for play across all our websites and apps' from a company called Apricot Investments. Apricot provides Betway's bespoke-developed flagship sports betting system on an exclusive-use basis as well as the Player Account Management system utilised for the majority of Super Group's operations. Apricot also provides a significant portion of the casino games offered by Betway. Moshal is the named individual beneficiary of trusts which are the ultimate controlling shareholders of Apricot. Super Group has announced that it will this year simply buy out the IP for roughly €100 million (R2 billion) after having spent millions more funding Apricot's development of software. In colloquial terms, Betway is printing money for its ultimate beneficiaries and in particular Moshal. Hush money Betway told us via a spokesperson that it 'has a good story to tell'. But at least one back-story behind this 'good story' reveals a shocking instance where the company paid what arguably amounts to R150 000 in hush money to a gambling addict who had laid complaints against the company with the authorities. The story emerged in a court case from 2022 where Betway South Africa sought an urgent interdict against former customer Claude Gouws to stop him from making public allegations against the company. The judge upheld only part of the interdict, precluding Gouws from asserting that Betway was 'committing crime' or 'participating in corruption and making payment to government officials'. However, Judge Daniel Thulare pointedly declined to grant any injunction against accusations that the company was 'causing youth and other persons to become compulsive gamblers and addicts' or that it was 'refusing to uphold responsible gambling'. He said this would be inappropriate if merely based on the papers and without referral to oral evidence when there were real disputes of fact. 'The dispute between the applicants and the respondent is a matter of national importance in my view… Did the manner in which the applicants conduct business arise the addict in respondent, the youth and other persons? After damaging people through squeezing them to their last cent and having them hooked to dry on gambling, do the applicants dump these people ostensibly to be picked up by South Africa's welfare system or if not lucky by a mortuary van after committing suicide? A court must have answers to these questions in order to determine if there was defamation…' The judgment also questioned Betway's behaviour leading up to the interdict application. The genesis of the matter was when Gouws requested that a promotional 'cashback' offer received by him be increased. These offers for so-called VIP customers are already controversial and when specifically requested they amount to a red flag for gambling addiction. Betway declined and Gouws then closed his account - another red flag indicating someone had basically run out of money to gamble. Betway then intervened and increased the cashback offer to Gouws, which prompted him to resume gambling. According to Betway, the adjusted cashback offer was made 'with the aim of offering him an improved betting experience'. Gouws, however, kept asking for new cashbacks and after a number of successful requests Betway declined one which led to the gambler raising the possibility of him suffering from problem gambling. Betway then closed his account and referred him for so-called permanent exclusion from gambling. Then things took a darker turn. Gouws complained that Betway had not done enough to protect him and lodged a complaint with the Western Cape Gambling and Racing Board, the provincial licensing authority which oversees licensees like Betway. Betway's response: a 'settlement' of R150 000 to withdraw the complaint. Gouws later tried to renege on the settlement and pay back the money because, he said, there was no provision for gambling addiction treatment. In response, Betway referred him to the hotline number of the National Responsible Gambling Programme and indicated that the company was under no obligation to pay for such services. The judge said he did not understand the papers to say that Betway denied that it was through their products and how they conducted his account that Gouws became a compulsive gambler and an addict. He said: What I understand them to deny, is accountability for the costs of his counselling assistance and rehabilitation. Per judge Thulare: 'When the respondent indicated that he sought treatment for his addiction and that the settlement agreement did not provide for his treatment at the applicants' costs, they [Betway] shouted 'extortion' and ran to court.' We asked Betway whether it had ever paid similar settlements to other complainants but the company ignored the question in its response to us and instead said, 'This is a without prejudice, confidential matter. We do not, as a matter of policy, comment publicly on individual cases.' It added that 'responsible gambling is at the core of our operations'. Peas in a pod? To reiterate, Betway is being singled out simply because it is the major South African player for which the best data is available. Locally, it may very well be trailing the equally ubiquitous Hollywoodbets, which is a private group controlled by its founder, Owen Brian Heffer. 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The view from the top However, when it comes to online gambling, few gamblers are likely to understand the multinational nature of offerings on their smartphones and in particular how these are increasingly directing their money to a shrinking coterie of truly gargantuan industry giants. Practically all online gambling sites provide access to a common suite of popular casino-type games. Online gamblers will likely all be familiar with Aviator or Gates of Atlantis and their multitude of imitators. These are licensed from a relatively small set of huge companies which practically all online gamblers indirectly pay money to. These include Habanero Systems, which is responsible for many of the casino-type games South Africans find on all the local platforms. It is owned by Dutch magnate Marcel Boekhoorn and his Ramphastos Investments. Another dominant player is Pragmatic Play, owned by Veridian in Gibraltar. The largest player on which much public information is available is Evolution, a truly staggering operation which has been gobbling up smaller competitors through acquisitions. The Malta-based company last year reported profit of R25.7 billion and paid out a R11 billion dividend to its parent company in Sweden. Anyone playing casino games online likely contributed to the bottom lines of these companies. Our best estimate of how much money flows to companies like these again comes from Betway. Its royalties payments to providers of games amounted to 18% of all costs. That's a big chunk of the money being leeched out of the country. Asked about funds being sent offshore, Hollywoodbets told us that its contracts with service providers are private but that it is 'important to emphasise that a substantial proportion of our online product offering is created by ourselves and/or local service providers'. This is however not the case with many smaller providers who seemingly offer very little apart from locally licensed platforms for these imported games. Unlike Betway, Hollywodbets says that it has no international shareholding and 'accordingly, no profits are distributed outside of South Africa'. Born to lose Online gambling does not simply represent traditional gambling moving onto digital platforms. Even though the mainstay of the sector remains 'sports betting', this bears little relationship to the old tradition of bookies fixing odds before games. Instead, the sector has come to rely on a kind of super-charged sports betting which is, according to some researchers, practically designed to foster problem gambling. It's called live or 'in-play' betting where gamblers rapidly bet on things like which team will score the next goal or which tennis player will win the next set. It basically turns sports betting into a video game where any rational appraisal of the odds (house edge) is practically impossible and players are encouraged to make rapid repetitive bets. A wide-ranging review of research published late last year in The Lancet canvased all the ways in which the industry has become a major public health hazard, including these in-built design features. This encouragement of rapid repetitive betting has been called 'addiction by design'. It represents an entirely new category of gambling that is only really possible at scale online with vastly more destructive power that has left many regulators across the world reeling. Already years ago in 2018, one of the world's largest online gambling groups, Bet365, reported that 80% of its sports betting revenue (that is, gamblers' losses) came from in-play bets. In-play betting is in fact the only kind of game specifically mentioned in the annual report of Betway's parent company Super Group. The company lists the possibility of this specific kind of betting getting banned in various countries as one of the distinct 'risks to our business' and coyly notes that 'in recent years an increasing percentage of sports betting wagering has been derived' from this more frenetic form of sports betting. The non-sports offerings that resemble casino games and increasing so-called 'crash games' (like the popular Aviator) likewise activate very specific forms of what researchers call 'dark nudges' that encourage fast repetitive gambling. Betway told us that the alleged additional harm caused by online gambling was unproven: 'This is neither correct nor has this been proven to be correct. What we do know is that gambling, as a leisure pursuit, has existed throughout human history. Humans have consistently found ways to gamble. The responsible way of approaching it, therefore, is through responsible regulatory/licensing regimes.' Pre-historic regulation South Africa's gambling law is painfully outdated, with the 2004 National Gambling Act pre-dating the entirety of the rise of the online gambling industry as we know it and in fact predating the introduction of the first real smartphones. There have been a few false starts to update the regulatory regime, starting with a 2008 amendment bill that never got signed into law. The impulse behind that bill was however expressly to 'protect society against the stimulation of the demand for gambling'. In 2012 regulations were proposed that would outright ban advertising online gambling - something that has been instituted in many countries and, for instance, partially in Kenya where it is forbidden to promote gambling using celebrities or social media influencers. Similarly, in 2016, the Department of Trade and Industry (as it then was) produced a policy paper that advised against permitting online gambling. The point of departure with 'new forms of gambling' was to ensure that the industry 'does not grow in such a way that may exacerbate social harms associated with gambling'. Added to that the reasoning had been that online gambling produces very little employment or actual investment. Neither the bill, regulations,not the policy paper were never translated into law. The lack of meaningful job creation is tacitly acknowledged by Hollywoodbets, which told us that 'we hold the view that licensees who operate solely in the online space are missing the opportunity to make a significant contribution to job creation'. This is a swipe at competitors who do not, like Hollywoodbets, maintain a large network of physical branches across the country. The company as a whole has 6 685 permanent and 1 099 part time employees, it told us. Betway told us it maintained 2 500 jobs in South Africa. But the most recent regulatory development takes a different tack and comes from the opposition benches. The DA first produced a draft Remote Gambling bill in 2015 which was reintroduced last year practically unchanged and published for comments. This means it is already 10 years behind current industry developments. The draft bill proposes a new category of licence called a 'remote gambling licence' with its own set of rules. In response to questions the DA's spokesperson on trade, industry and competition, Toby Chance, told us: it should be noted at the outset that [the bill] has not yet been introduced to the National Assembly and has only been published for public comment… Accordingly, the bill is not in its final form, should not be taken as such. It is just as well since the bill, on a plain reading, makes problematic proposals that will seemingly provide a massive boost for 'online-only' gambling companies like Betway, compared to those who also have physical infrastructure. This is because it proposes two different paths to getting a remote gambling licence. Companies that are currently 'online-only' can simply convert their bookmaker licences. Companies with a physical presence, however, would need to apply from scratch and have their applications subject to 'economic and social development issues' as well as competition concerns. The relative free ride proposed for companies like Betway seemingly creates a massive discriminatory barrier to favour online players. The DA told us that 'we have received several comments from various stakeholders regarding these points during the public comment period and are in the process of engaging with the same'. Hollywoodbets is not impressed by the bill. It told us that it 'did not submit comments on the Remote Gambling Bill as respectfully, we considered the bill to be so flawed in terms of its drafting that we preferred to defer our comment until the next inevitable draft is made available'. Betway did submit 'comprehensive' comments on the bill but added that the regulatory regime is, in its view, not at all outdated. 'The business has grown substantially within the context of the current regulatory regime over the past decade,' it added. Concerning the fact that Betway's major stakeholder is also a DA funder the DA told us, 'Mr Moshal was not consulted in the design of the bill nor did he influence the timeline of the bill. The bill was initiated by Mr Geordin Hill-Lewis (then MP) as far back as 2015 …This does not take away from the fact that Mr Moshal is free, as any private citizen, to comment on the bill through the ordinary public participation processes, and such comments will receive equal attention to any other submission of this nature.' Fightback Current proposals to combat the spectacular rise of online gambling include advertising restrictions as well as some variant of 'sin tax' like that faced by the tobacco sector. This follows trends across the world. The DA's bill, for instance, proposes a ban on daytime advertising on TV or radio and opens the door for any further restrictions on advertising the minister of trade, industry and competition may want to introduce through regulations. Considering the ubiquity of sponsorship for sports and billboard advertising there is scope for radical interventions. Gambling companies are unsurprisingly opposed to restrictions and their main argument is that these would simply increase the illegal part of the sector to grow at their expense. There is, however, another possibly more fundamental issue which is that the bill entrenches what is currently arguably a significant perverse incentive for provincial licensing authorities to actively promote online gambling. Province vs province South Africa has a fragmented gambling tax system, with each of the nine provincial licensing authorities imposing its own tax on the industry. This is generally 6.5% - well shy of anything that might be considered a sin tax comparable to what the tobacco sector faces. It is fairly self-evident that for users it makes little practical difference in what province an online operator is licensed. Gamblers will be able to access its platform from anywhere. The reason it does matter is that the province where the operator is licensed is the one that rakes in the taxes - and the one tasked with regulating the licensee. Neither is trivial. There is an undeniable incentive to be the province that licenses and collects taxes while the harms caused in other provinces are their problem. The National Gambling Board told us that it 'has consistently advocated for a harmonised national regulatory approach to prevent regulatory arbitrage or 'forum shopping' by operators.' The Western Cape and also to a lesser extent Mpumalanga are known as the premier issuers of licenses for online operators. In fact, the recent surge in gambling activity has largely been limited to licensees in these provinces. These two provinces do not have meaningfully different regulations but have rather proven to be far more proactive when it comes to clearing the regulatory path for online gambling companies. The sunny side The online gambling industry is quick to defend itself against the main criticisms it faces - a lack of economic benefit and the encouragement of destructive problem gambling. Hollywoodbets and Betway told us that their (and by extension the sector's) expenditure on sponsorships is no small thing, with Hollywoodbets calling the inference that it makes little economic contribution 'unfortunate'. 'It needs to be said that our business contributes massively to the provincial and national fisci. 'Ignoring icon brands like the Hollywoodbets Sharks and the Hollywoodbets Dolphins, we are particularly proud of our support for development teams in a myriad of sports, and particularly our support of women's sport … In addition, we play a leading role in our sector in the promotion of SMMEs through our Bambelela Business Awards programme.' Hollywoodbets also pointed to its significant funding of horse racing, which would otherwise potentially have been a failed sector. The massive marketing spend is also a lifeline for broadcasters and other parts of the media industry, it said. Betway likewise holds up its sponsorship of the Springboks, the SA20 cricket tournament, and the Premier Soccer League among its major contributions while also pointing towards the activities of its philanthropic Betway Cares Foundation while Hollywoodbets likewise highlights its Hollywood Foundation. Given the enormous scale of what is essentially unproductive spending which creates few jobs and big problems, the real question is whether the companies' social spending is not simply a cosmetic plaster on a gaping wound.
