Are prediction markets a side bet or a new front door?

At every conference I've been to this autumn, someone eventually asks me the same thing over coffee: "So, are prediction markets going to eat the sportsbooks?"

I get why. It's a fair question if you run a sportsbook or hold shares in one. But for those of us who sit in the middle of this industry between the fans and the operators, I think it's the wrong question. The more useful one is: who is coming through this door, and where were they before?

Because that's what prediction markets really are. Not a quirky side bet on elections and award shows, and not just a regulatory loophole with good PR. They are a new way into sports wagering, one that looks completely different from the sportsbook most of us grew up with.

Sport is the engine

Strip away the headlines about elections and geopolitics, and the picture is pretty clear. Sport is the engine, accounting for roughly 85% of the $112 billion ever traded on Kalshi. And the 2026 NFL season has pushed it further: in the week of 5 to 11 October, Kalshi and Polymarket together traded a record $22.2 billion, driven by professional and college football, according to Bloomberg.

The incumbents noticed early. Fanatics, DraftKings and FanDuel all launched prediction products in December 2025, aimed largely at states without legal sports betting. When the biggest sportsbook brands in the US build a second entrance next to their main one, that tells you something. They're not hedging against a fad. They're making sure that whichever door a customer chooses, it opens into their house.

This summer, with the World Cup on, the marketing caught up. Kalshi and Polymarket ads filled half-times and hydration breaks on US broadcasts, to the point that NPR dubbed it the summer sponsored by prediction markets.

The format lands with a different crowd

Here's the bit I find most interesting. A prediction market doesn't ask you to read odds. It asks you a question: will this happen, yes or no? The price is simply the crowd's estimate of the probability. Think a team is undervalued at 40 cents? Buy. Changed your mind at half-time? Sell before the final whistle.

For a 25-year-old who manages their savings in a trading app and checks crypto prices before breakfast, that's a natural interface. It doesn't feel like walking into a bookmaker's. It feels like having an opinion and putting a number on it. That's a very different emotional starting point, and it's reaching people. A traditional sportsbook, frankly, was never going to convert.

That's why I call it a front door rather than a side bet. Side bets are something your existing customers do around the edges. A front door brings in people who weren't customers at all.

Regulators can’t slash the demand

None of this means the path is smooth. In the US, the fight over whether a sports event contract is a financial swap or simply a bet is getting louder by the week. Kalshi has lost three appeals court rulings in under a month. On 1 October, the Supreme Court declined to take up New Jersey's case for now. On 9 October, the NFL, tribal governments and former CFTC chair Gary Gensler filed briefs asking the Court to let states enforce their own gambling laws. And on 21 October, Baltimore became the first city to sue Kalshi and Polymarket directly.

Brazil, a market we know intimately, has run the experiment twice this year. In April, the National Monetary Council banned event contracts on sport, elections and entertainment, and the authorities ordered the blocking of 27 platforms, Polymarket and Kalshi among them. The logic was clear: sport belonged inside the licensed betting framework the country had spent years building, not in financial derivatives.

Then, on 25 September, a provisional measure banned online fixed-odds betting and casino altogether. Licensed sites went dark in early October, and their licences expired on 25 October.

But look at what happened next. Polymarket, blocked since April, still drew around US$147 million, roughly R$750 million, on a single contract tied to the presidential election, reached through VPNs and slow-blocking providers. And within four days of the September measure, offshore brands' share of Brazilian iGaming search demand nearly tripled, from 3.4% to 9.9%, according to Blask data. Closing a door doesn't make the demand disappear. It sends people looking for a window, and the window comes with no consumer protection at all.

That, to me, is the real lesson for regulators and for our industry. The appetite for this kind of product is real. The question is not whether people will use it, but whether they do so inside a regulated framework or outside one.

Will prediction markets be another Brazil? 

For affiliates, the shift is already very practical. Because paid search and social platforms restrict much of this advertising, operators are leaning on affiliates, creators and referral channels to reach new users.

But I'd caution anyone who sees this as just another vertical to bolt on. The job is different. Prediction market users need to understand what a price actually means: 70 cents is a probability, not a promise. They need context, explanation and honest framing. That's a content and education job far more than a bonus-code job.

It also means being disciplined about where you play. Europe is a good example: nine gambling regulators, from France and Spain to Germany and Italy, have jointly warned against unlicensed prediction markets. A traffic strategy built on product categories or jurisdictions that are likely to tighten isn't a strategy, it's a gamble of its own. Brazil has just reminded all of us how fast a market's rules can change. Wherever prediction markets are legal and licensed, affiliates have a real role to play. Wherever they aren't, pointing people to the window is not our job.

At MoveUp, we've always believed the most valuable thing an affiliate owns is the relationship with its audience: the trust that comes from being where fans already are and talking football with them every day. That doesn't change based on which product sits at the end of the click. If anything, a new front door makes that trust worth more, because new users arrive with more questions than old ones.

Build for the bettor, not the label

Lawyers will spend the next couple of years arguing about whether an event contract is a swap or a wager. That matters, and the outcome will shape the business. But to the fan on the sofa, it's simply a new way to back their read of the game.

The sportsbook isn't going away. Neither is the prediction market. What's changing is how people first walk into this world, and affiliates have always made their living at the entrance. The ones who treat prediction markets as a side bet will find out, a few years from now, that the crowd came in through a door they weren't watching.