Why Meta Wants Prediction Markets | The $50M Advertising Opportunity Nobody Saw Coming

Prediction markets are rapidly moving from niche platforms into the mainstream—and advertisers are following.

In this episode of Media Monitor, Kelly Sweeney and Sean Wright examine why companies like Meta are investing in prediction market technology, what the rise of platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi signals for the future, and how sports betting has quietly become one of advertising's fastest-growing categories.

Using Guideline's advertising intelligence, they reveal how brands are spending over $50 million annually advertising on betting platforms, why alcohol, telecom, and quick-service restaurants are dramatically increasing investment, and what this shift means for marketers planning future campaigns.

The discussion also covers Meta's new prediction market initiative, OpenAI's reported IPO delay, AI advertising trends, and why advertisers are increasingly treating prediction markets as brand-safe environments.
If you work in advertising, media, marketing, streaming, or digital strategy, this episode offers practical insights into one of the industry's fastest-changing sectors.

In this episode

• Why Meta is entering prediction markets
• The rise of Polymarket and Kalshi
• How prediction markets differ from traditional sports betting
• Why advertisers spent more than $50 million on betting platforms
• Which industries are investing the fastest
• What Guideline's advertising data reveals
• OpenAI's reported IPO delay and AI advertising trends
• Why prediction markets are becoming more attractive to brands

Articles referenced in this episode:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/technology/openai-ipo-artificial-intelligence.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/technology/meta-prediction-markets-app.html

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Welcome back, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome back, Kelly. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:21

I am good. I'm gonna ask a question I feel like I already know the answer to. Did you watch the USA game last night?

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Uh you know the answer to this, and the answer is no. I had a good reason. I had good reason. I was at a uh child's swim meet until uh late, and so that was kind of the entire evening. Understood. Even if honestly, even if it wasn't, I wouldn't have watched.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

I mean, I get it. This last night's game, while they did suffer a loss, was not for it for anything. They've already kind of won their group and they're moving on. So I guess it doesn't matter, but I I did enjoy uh one of the commercials which featured yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

This is now getting closer to my wheelhouse commercials, advertising. So go on.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Speaking your language. So I feel like I'm never or I'm I'm rarely surprised in commercials lately. Like I kind of know who the brand is, I kind of know what's going on, but there was it was a pretty long format commercial, definitely like at least 30 seconds. And it featured I'm gonna say Kanye, but an older it was a Kanye at the time. Sure. So I'm gripped and I'm just watching, trying to figure out who it is, who it is. And it's a polymarket.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Crazy. I've heard Akolji has also been going crazy with advertising on these sports games of late and TikTok.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Yes, yeah. Spoiler alert, we're gonna talk prediction markets and those that run ads and how they're pacing and those that don't and what that might mean. I figured we'd we do our headlines like we've done, but one of them happens to be related to this. So Meta this week announced that they are kind of gonna break into the space. They did this a little bit in 2020. They launched uh it was called Forecast, and it was essentially trying to kind of have people crowdsource and place bets-ish on what was going on with the global pandemic. Went away, it wasn't successful. But this week they announced a new standalone project. Um, so it's not publicly available yet. It's called Arena, and they're getting into the prediction space. It's not for dollars, so it's a points-based system to kind of skirt all the regulations, but it'll be interesting to see what they do. I caught my eye. I I feel like, you know, one of the things that Meta does is they copy people and they end up being pretty good at it. And here they are again.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Here they are again, which is again to me more interesting. We're not going to cover it in today's episode, but like the ever-changing face of Meta is like, okay, uh, when they renamed to Meta to try to be all in on the metaverse, and that didn't really go as planned, and then they tried a hard pivot to AI, and it seems like their most recent models haven't been up to snuff. They tried threads, which uh by some accounts is successful, by some it's not. So it is interesting given their recent track record, is like, are they rapidly becoming uh maybe not a one-hit wonder? Because they did Facebook and that was you know a smash hit, and then they acquired Instagram, which is still arguably probably one of the most popular uh you know social media sites. So like they they had a good track record, but of late it seems like they are making some interesting bets, if you will, pun intended. I'll see we'll see where it goes.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

But yeah, we'll and it it'll be interesting because if you think like threads, I mean, obviously, obviously. I I'm saying obviously it's clearly not performing on its own because of how much of the crossover you see.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 4:12

I'm holding strong, I haven't downloaded it, but there are times when I I want to click in, but I just can't get over that hurdle.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah, I mean, that's like the big critique of it, right? Is that it it is successful because it's kind of like it's forcing stuff within the own existing ecosystem today, which is already massively large. Uh but like as a as a standalone product, it doesn't seem to be doing all that well. So just yeah, interesting thing there. And we're not we're not gonna talk about it, but but my headline is coming off of the last couple of conversations that you and I have had about AI uh weariness, maybe, or maybe there's like diverging paths in the market around AI. Uh mine is that OpenAI has rumored to be pushing back their IPO launch amid uncertainty among kind of the AI giants of when to go public, what it might mean for their business. And I've heard concurrently that they're also switching their kind of ad model over to cost per click, CPCs. Uh, that onto itself is not necessarily kind of correlated, but it is just an interesting, these are things that are all happening at the same time. We've covered that the ad spend is growing, but the actual dollar amounts that we're seeing are less than we would expect. So, like how much this test tells us about the internal mechanisms of their business, I'm not sure, but it is right not there's no fire yet, but there's more smoke in terms of a lot of the conversations we're seeing. So was interested in kind of the New York Times covering that. I think it was yesterday, not at the time at the time we're recording, not yesterday as in when people will hear this.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

So and as always, we'll think we'll link our articles that we're mentioning so that you can dig in deeper and want to just keep you in the loop on our our pulse. And speaking of pulse updates, before we get into the content, I have to let everybody know I am still in third place in my family world cup pool. Thanks, Aunt B, for for administering this pool. She she says she's using AI, but I I think she's putting a lot of hard work in there. And I am still in third. Can't believe it.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Good job, Aunt B. Yeah, like I'm actually doing anything. Yeah. Nailing it.

unknown 6:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

And we talked before, we'll make this a regular occurrence up until uh you're either out or the World Cup is over. Is that I think uh to keep keep the everyone informed at home?

SPEAKER_02 6:29

Yeah, we're kicking out or going to those knockout rounds and kept kicking it.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Then that way you could have done the whole pun thing.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Oh yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

I messed up. Uh you missed it.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Well, you already like nailed the puns.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Like Well, I figure that that could it could be like a theme of our show. It's like how do we one up each other on puns?

SPEAKER_02 6:46

All right, I'll keep that in mind. All right. So let's get to prediction markets. And so like this ecosystem has evolved dramatically in the last call it five years. And so what we wanted to do today was just highlight what we're seeing in our data around prediction markets, kind of talk about where they got their start, how they've evolved. You know, we didn't call them prediction markets back in the day. It was very focused on sports, sports betting. And so we want to talk about who's running ads, what that looks like, how it's growing, um, and and what we think the future will hold. So I'm gonna kick it to you, Sean. What have you seen?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah. So I think just to like kick things off, where we started was like after reading the article about Arena, you and I were like, hi, I wonder, and we were live talking of like, is there actual ad spend that's that's against any of these platforms? Because it's like a unique way in, right? There's a lot of conversation happening right now on kind of the betting markets. Um, and so I was like, let me just look at what we've got, at least in the US. Uh, and it turns out it's not an insignificant amount of money. In 2025, there was around $50 million in other advertisers advertising on these these betting kind of markets. High level, and actually, even on our system, which I didn't realize under kind of a certain dimension, you can filter for all gambling websites and like apps, content, etc. So, like, there's even a way for us to kind of easily access this, um, which I probably should have known. But anyway, so we dug into it. And it's like it's 50 million bucks in 2025, which is not nothing. I I was that's not really not expecting it. Yeah, and and just for clarity too, the at least the platforms that we can see are all kind of the sports gambling ones. So it's you know, you know, FanDuel, DraftKings, Roto, it's it's those players. It's not necessarily like poly market, call she, the like quote unquote prediction markets, uh, which I always thought was pretty funny because it's like they're not really, they're like the it's the betting market for just anything that you want to place a bet on, kind of thing. It's like the the stuff of of like when you were with your friends and you're like uh a buck says you can't do this, or like a buck says this is gonna happen, right? It's like I feel like that they they took that concept and then they built an entire business on it.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

And it's so funny that like I didn't think of this sooner because so you know, I I always I mentioned my husband a lot on the show. He's sports guy, loves like we're not talking big sums of money, but he's he's placing bets on games. Yeah. And my gateway drug to this was the prop bets.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:21

Like the thing that I thought was the most fun was what color Gatorade are they, you know, pouring over someone's head at the end of the Super Bowl. And so I think someone was like, huh, maybe there's something to this.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

This is my hypothesis for how it all began, but like it's way more fun to mine.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

I mean well, because it it's it's sort of random, sort of wild. My exposure to it, as we had talked about, was was I was a big kind of uh 538 uh politics podcast, Nate Silver doing his predictions. And he would always cause the the polymarket stuff was uh largely available in the UK much, much earlier than than in the United States. It's a much more established business. You have, you know, um a lot more kind of sports gambling that's that's legal and and uh everything over there. Uh and he would often refer to them as the Scottish teens, uh, almost as a joke, or I think it was maybe Claire Malone on the podcast. It doesn't matter. But the kind of running joke was that like these prediction markets were just a bunch of teenagers just like throwing money against random stuff. But it turns out that they were actually like pretty good at predicting outcomes, uh, because it's the you know, the law of the crowds. If you source enough opinions about kind of commonplace topics, it turns out that they tend to be pretty predictive. Uh, they've done tests on this uh for cow's weights, all of those things. So bit of a a bit of a detour, but that that was kind of both the exposure that I had to it kind of going up into the 2016 elections. But it is something that is is growing gangbusters here in the US. Um, what's interesting is you look at a lot of these companies and kind of the average revenue growth for them is about 17-ish percent year over year from kind of a total top line revenue. But one of the interesting things that that I wanted to dig into that I thought was relevant for this podcast is the ad revenue growth is growing at 41% year over year. Wow. And from like a Kager, you know, compound annual growth rate, it's actually, you know, uh closer to like 45% over the last five-ish years. So this is clearly which I thought was interesting in kind of the meta hook, right? Because like Meta's basically taking about a third of all of advertising's growth in globally, right? Like about a third of budgets globally are going to meta at this point, which is just bananas, right? And so it's like, is the play here actually to siphon off more ad dollars in a unique and different way, or maybe gamify it? Or so the hook that I thought was like, okay, like if they aren't going to be doing this pure gambling model like the other ones that are out there, is this actually just more a bigger play for even more ad dollars? And my hunch is like, that's actually the sweet sauce, given where we're seeing a lot of the growth here. And more fascinating to me is like for a long time, all of these platforms, or in real life, right? Like, they were considered to be places you didn't want to run advertising, right? Because they were kind of like sketchy, they were maybe less kind of in your face. And what's interesting is going back to our core data, right? Like we work with agencies who represent the world's largest brands who are deeply concerned around brand safety and where brands go. And $45 million is is no small change for folks that are maybe less concerned, or at least at this point, don't feel like these betting markets are no longer or are like are are maybe brand safe now, or at least like brand adjacent to safe, which is to me actually the more fascinating thing in the growth story here.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Hence the rebrand, right? Like gambling, betting, negative connotation predictions.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Predictions. Great.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

I'm just I'm just hypothesizing that's brand safe, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Yeah, for sure, right? Like it's fascinating. And so, like, it's it was yeah, like I was like, whoa, this is a pretty interesting take, given that that's not where I would have expected the numbers to land. Um, and it's also, I mean, sort of to be expected, but sort of different. The single largest category here is alcohol beverages investing. Uh they're probably about 15, 20% of all spend in the sports gambling space. But again, from a caveat, they are not 15 to 20% of the entire market. They're more like seven to eight. Uh, so they're obviously overinvested here. And more interestingly, their kager in this space has been growing about 30% year over year for the past four or five years. Whereas the whole market, I think it was about 1% growth. So there's also like a clear strategy shift on their part of like, well, um, we can still actually be in sports, but a fraction of the cost. So we've actually seen their kind of live sports spend start to dissipate over the last couple of years. They've kind of just flattened it. So they're not growing, they're not declining. It's essentially just the same investment year over year. But clearly they still want to be in sports, but they found a cheaper, more interesting avenue through this sports betting angle.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

They said, what goes better with a bet than a beer, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Nailed it. You should go and maybe pitch then.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

See I go into advertising?

SPEAKER_00 14:12

You've got your tagline. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

I knew, I knew something good was gonna happen today.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

It's your calling.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Well, okay, so alcohol, that makes total sense. Any other notable categories?

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Uh much, much less so. But quick quick serve restaurants, fast food type places are also master, massive investors in the platform. Uh, what's interesting is that we're just about halfway through 2026 and they've already invested uh basically 1.2 times their total investment of 2025. So this is clearly a strategy shift for them as well, where you know, their their total investment basically has clips a full year in just around you know five months of our data. Um so there's clearly a a strategy shift there. Um same thing with telco, you know, wireless kind of you know, phones, etc. is you know, they are massively shifting dollars as well. Uh they spent about seven million bucks this year, sorry, last year, on just sports betting, which again is is pretty interesting because the last couple of years they've been at like three million. So they kind of doubled down last year, which I thought was interesting as well.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

So it sounds like the playbook for whose advertising very closely aligns to live sports, with the exception maybe of autos, because I feel like that's a powerhouse, although we've been talking about the decline in that space.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Auto has been kind of muted this year.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Total that we're seeing is like 25 grand for the for the year so far. Last year was a lot more. Last year was in the millions of dollars, but like 25 grand, uh it feels like more of like a like a test type like uh budget from like five years ago of like, oh, I'll just spend a little bit of money to see what my like you know uh ROS is, and then it's like, oh yeah, it's not that. So it feels kind of silly. But they they are kind of dead last this year in terms of investment.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Wow. So okay. And then I mean, what this says to me, and I'm no like corporate strategist for these production market companies, is that there's definitely money to be made if you run ads on your platform. So 100%. I'm guessing that we're going to see more ads emerge for those who aren't running ads today, or more types of ad units from those who are serving them today, would you think your your line there?

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah, for sure. Right. And that's that's also like the the take that I have for the meta announcement is that like Meta is doing this not for the prediction piece, which is growing. It's for the how do I keep more people on our platform that's tapping into something that's popular, but using the massive machine that it that Meta is to suck up more ad dollars is like my bet on where they go with this. I can only do it twice. It's that's it. Yeah, it's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

You you've maxed out on that one.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Yeah, and I can't even use prediction at this point. That would be exhausting.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Well, the other thing is like time and platform because like, you know, going back to my family pool, I'm looking at odds and how they change. Yeah. And um, you know, I had Ghana in uh the Ghana England game, and there was a 12 when I looked, there was a 12%, 12% odds that it was gonna be a tie. And that's what the outcome ended up being, but I kept kind of like checking back to see like I thought I was definitely gonna lose that game. Yeah. But then I ended up getting in our point structure one point for a tie.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah. Well, it's also fascinating, right? Because like the the further out you go, right, the there's odds. And then as you get closer, they change, right? And then eventually it locks. But like it's also addicting to kind of go back and be like, okay, well, I'm gonna, you know, pay place a long shot bet at like maybe my odds are like one to six hundred or something. And then as you get closer, maybe those odds are you're like, oh no, no, no, no. Like they're evening out, maybe it's like a dead heat. Uh so like there is also, to your point, this like reoccurring, like you want to go back into the platform to check. So it's not just like a one-in-one. It's not like I'm only uh there like once a month. Like if I'm in there and I play something, I'm gonna go on a you know, go in and check on it. Not even on day of, right? To your point, you're like, you go in, you keep checking, you keep checking, and then day of, you're probably refreshing every six seconds. Um so yeah, there is that there is that behavioral element, which you know is addicting and all of those things, etc. But like also, I think part of like Meta's core competency of like how how to build an app that keeps people coming back, right? I think like Meta probably pioneered a lot of that in like the early aughts around like how you get people to keep coming back, you play around, you poke from back in the day, and then like you build, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:51

So I feel like the that's what Instagram's scroll model was built after, it's slot machines.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Yeah, exactly. It's just yeah, it's the the addictive, and like that's what a lot of the lawsuits that you know recently came up were was that it's just so addictive that like it's purposely designed to keep you on platform.

unknown 19:07

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

So like in some ways it's almost like cartoonish that like the next investment they're making is in a literal like gambling platform to keep you engaged. It's like uh it feels kind of funny given all of the lawsuits and the commentary, and they're like, no, we're not that, and then it's like, oh well, what's your next big idea? And it's like just straight up gambling. Yep. Yeah, I love it. So bold.

SPEAKER_02 19:30

Well, I just can't wait to log in and start placing some bets this weekend. You've inspired me.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

I think I'm in a Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. No, please don't say I inspired you. If anything goes wrong, I do not want to be in that mix. No, no inspiration.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

Fair, fair. No, you have you didn't inspire me. You have reminded you led a healthy conversation around a topic, and I will wager a responsible amount of money one time.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

That's that's that's good. I I have uh bet once in my life, and I realized how quickly it could go downhill. I was um at a horse track, and I was like, all right, I'm only gonna spend like 50 bucks. I blew 50 bucks in the first three minutes, and I was like, well, I can't just be here for the next two hours and not bet. This is so like there was there were some mistakes, nothing are you know detrimental to my my financial situation for sure, but there definitely was. I was like, wow, okay, I get it, I get it. Like uh and then like the first time I won, man, it's like, well, now I need to go back because I'm gonna win it all back. I didn't win it all back. But man, man, yeah. Learned your lessons. I learned my lessons. I wanted done for me.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Well, I think we should uh on that.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

I think it's a great stopping point.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

Call it an episode. Always a pleasure, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

You as well. See you next week.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

All right, later.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Bye. That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.