Read time 6 minutes
Optimove Pulse. The iGaming Industry Benchmark Tool
Explore Optimove’s iGaming Pulse to instantly benchmark your performance against the rest of the industry.
Why it matters:
By reading this post, marketers will understand how rising competition, heavier promotional spending, new valuation benchmarks, and AI are reshaping prediction markets, and how to move beyond simply acquiring traders to identify customers who create lasting value, prioritize retention investments, and use better data to improve those decisions earlier.
Key takeaways:
I've had a version of the same conversation with a dozen operators over the past few weeks. Here's what's moving, and what each of these changes about the marketing problem.
IG Group agreed to buy Underdog at the end of July for up to $1.3 billion.
The number is not the interesting part. The timeline is. Underdog was a daily fantasy company that added prediction markets in September 2025, and inside of a year it was the third-largest US venue by regulated volume, behind Kalshi and Robinhood. Then it sold to a FTSE 100 broker.
That's the first real exit this category has produced. Before it, the question in operator meetings was whether prediction markets were a durable business. Now there's a price on one.
What IG actually bought is worth noting. Not primarily an audience, but a license stack. Underdog controls the full trade lifecycle under CFTC oversight, which is scarce and slow to build, so IG bought one rather than building it.
What it changes for marketing: It sets a valuation logic, and that logic runs on multiples of net revenue. Underdog's upfront price was roughly 2.4x net revenue for the trailing year. Once a category has a comparable, marketing performance stops being measured only against internal targets. It starts being measured against what somebody would pay for the book. That tends to shift attention from volume of signups toward the durability of the revenue underneath them, because one of those moves a multiple and the other doesn't.
A year ago you could count the serious platforms on one hand. A dozen more have appeared since, and the ones that matter didn't arrive empty-handed. Robinhood brought a trading base. Underdog brought fantasy players. The sportsbooks moving in bring everything they already have.
What it changes for marketing: the cost of a trader goes up and the tolerance for losing one goes down. When entrants arrive with distribution they already paid for somewhere else, they can afford to be aggressive in a way a standing-start competitor cannot. It also compresses the window on product differentiation. Feature parity arrives faster in a crowded field, and when the product stops being the reason someone picks you, the relationship has to be.
When these platforms launched, there was real hesitancy about bonusing. Free trades, deposit matches, any of it. The reasoning was obvious: the category has spent years arguing it's a market rather than a sportsbook. Nothing undercuts that argument faster than a welcome offer.
That hesitancy has disappeared. Kalshi is running trade-and-get offers. Polymarket is matching deposits. There are laddered promos that grow as you hit milestones, referral programs paying both sides, and large contests built around the Super Bowl and the World Series.
It happened in about eighteen months. Sports betting took considerably longer to get there.
What it changes for marketing: promotional spend becomes a cost of entry rather than a differentiator. Once everyone is running an offer, the offer stops winning anything and simply has to be matched. It also changes who walks through the door. A trader acquired on a $50 deposit match is different from one who arrived on their own, with different value and a different reason to stay, and that gap widens as offers escalate. Anyone measuring acquisition without separating the two is looking at a blended number that describes nobody.
The fourth thing, and it isn't specific to prediction markets.
Every marketing team in this industry now has AI in the workflow somewhere. Drafting, summarizing, analysis, campaign copy. That happened over about a year, mostly from the bottom up, with individual marketers using whatever they had access to.
What's become clear since is how much depends on what the tool can actually see. An AI agent working from a pasted summary writes a competent campaign. An AI agent with access to the real customer history is answering a different question. The distance between those two is a data problem, not a model problem. Many marketing teams found that out after they'd already adopted the tool.
What it changes for marketing: it moves the bottleneck, and the new bottleneck sits directly on trader value.
Trader value is a forecast. What someone is worth depends on how long they stay, how often they come back, and what they do when a competitor's offer lands in their inbox. Every one of those is a prediction, and predictions are only as good as the history behind them. A platform that can see a trader's full record across products, across the whole relationship rather than the last thirty days, can tell early which new accounts look like the ones that stayed last year. A platform seeing fragments is guessing, and it finds out whether it guessed right about six months after the money was spent.
That distinction gets expensive in a category running heavy welcome offers. Two accounts open the same week on the same $50 match. One is worth defending with a retention offer and one will take the bonus and leave regardless. Knowing “which is which” is what determines whether promotional spend builds a trading base or rents one. It is a data question before it is a marketing question.
Measurement has the same property. Optimizing toward the wrong number produces confident, well-executed movement in the wrong direction. AI makes that happen faster than a human team ever could.
Football season is the first real test with promotional budgets behind it. Prediction markets are heading into it with acquisition spend that looks a lot like what sportsbooks were doing in 2019 and 2020.
Anyone who worked through that period knows what the open question is. It isn't how many accounts get opened in September. It's how many are still trading in December, and whether the platforms can tell the difference between those two groups before the money is already spent.
We'll know by the new year.
Increasing the Value of New Online Gaming Players
Download the report and discover proven methods to increase new player deposits, retention, and lifetime value when empowered by Positionless Marketing.
Jeff Laniado has led iGaming sales for Optimove in the US and Canada for over four years, working with top operators in sports betting, iCasino, DFS, sweepstakes, and lottery.
He is responsible for managing many of the US-focused iLottery partnerships. Jeff has more than a decade of experience in sports, gaming, and promotional marketing strategy and sales.
