Prediction markets widen the affiliate brief

Prediction markets are not simply another source of customer acquisition activity and revenue. Across Better Collective, Grandstand, Genius Sports and Catena Media, the category was already extending the role that an affiliate can play: referring users, supplying audiences, comparing contracts, carrying live data, serving market makers and, in some cases, building consumer products of its own.

Still, the revenue contribution remains at an early stage albeit with the major names describing activity that was already visible in their results. Better Collective said North American CPA revenue rose 50% to €5 million in Q2, “primarily driven by strong momentum within prediction markets”.

Grandstand said growth in partner-audience monetisation and North America, including prediction markets, helped offset weaker organic search and international marketing revenue. Genius Sports said prediction markets made an incremental contribution to a quarter in which its media revenue increased 193% to $78.2 million, including two months from Legend. Catena Media, meanwhile, described prediction markets as “a strong alternative in the sports vertical, accessible nationwide”.

For Better Collective, the immediate affiliate proposition was conventional performance marketing. Prediction market agreements were “currently structured on a CPA basis”, co-CEO Jesper Søgaard said, meaning that strong new depositor volumes produced revenue at once rather than over the customer’s lifetime. Prediction markets were the main reason for the sequential increase in CPA-based new depositing customers, although the World Cup also contributed.

The category was nevertheless being distributed through more than a traditional search-and-click model. Better Collective said its approach included its own media brands, social-first content, product integrations and paid media. Søgaard described the opportunity as an extension of an audience the group already served: “This expands our addressable market and increases the monetisation potential of the high-intent sports audiences we already reach.”

The company began 2026 with one active prediction market partner in the US and added another during Q2. “Increasing competition among prediction market operators is supporting demand for efficient distribution and high-quality customer acquisition,” Søgaard said. He also told analysts that the effect was not confined to direct prediction market revenue. “This is overall driving a change in market dynamics. So it’s not just a direct impact from prediction market; it also spills over to our sports-betting customers in their behaviour.”

Grandstand described a similar addition to the buyer base. “Prediction markets are starting to ramp acquisitions, so we have a new partner in the market to work with,” CEO Kevin McCrystle said. Later in the call, he was more explicit: “Grandstand is not cannibalised by these prediction markets. It is really the opposite. They are providing an additional participant in the market looking for users.”

That marketing demand was still too new for Grandstand to quantify. The company expected the NFL season to provide a better measure because it would be “the first NFL season with a full push” from prediction market operators. But McCrystle said the activity was already moving beyond the area in which Grandstand had previously discussed the category. “We have historically primarily talked about prediction market in terms of our data business, and that is still going strong,” he said. “We are, though, doing more on the marketing side than we were previously.”

Covering the bases

The reverse movement was also taking place: a performance marketing group was finding new buyers for its B2B sports data. Grandstand’s OpticOdds business was selling to market makers and quantitative funds entering event contracts. “There is a new buyer of data,” McCrystle said. Grandstand also presented Rollcard, its planned high-limit debit card for sports betting, casino and prediction markets, as a product supported by the group’s existing gaming audience and operator relationships. In that case, the value of the audience was being applied to a payments product rather than only to a referral.

Adam Small, co-founder of Third Planet Media, said prediction markets were becoming central to his own affiliate business. “We’re moving our focus heavily toward prediction markets and expect them to be our number one source of income for the immediate future,” he said. He had seen CPAs “rapidly on the rise”, surpassing daily-fantasy-sports rates and moving closer to regulated-sportsbook levels.

Small said at least part of the audience overlapped with sportsbook customers, citing Kalshi billboards carrying NFL odds as evidence that operators were presenting themselves as an alternative for regular sports bettors. He had not yet seen sportsbooks respond through higher affiliate CPAs but said they were again facing well-funded competition after several tighter years.  

The underlying commercial arrangements could also develop differently from online sports betting. “Most of the deals I’ve seen are either traditional CPA deals or ‘order flow’ deals, which pay third parties for individual trades they facilitate,” Small said. “I think the latter could be the lion’s share of spend for the time being, and maybe for the foreseeable future.” In that model, the affiliate opportunity extends from introducing an account holder to helping facilitate continuing activity.

Small cautioned that reliable lifetime value and retention comparisons were not yet available, especially for operators other than Kalshi, and said the position might be clearer after the football season. He also expected pronounced seasonality. Sport would remain the main source of activity, with politics another important but seasonal category. For the longer term, he was most interested in educational content and market data, while describing third-party trade facilitation as “a huge opportunity”.

One industry source, speaking off the record, likewise viewed the present marketing budgets as an early customer-building phase rather than a permanent level of spending. The source expected CPAs to normalise once the leading platforms had established market share and a larger proportion of prospective users already held an account. Affiliates, on that view, could not prevent the adjustment. The more durable response would be to use the current opportunity to build products, first-party customer relationships and coverage beyond sport, supported by a multichannel mix of domains, apps and social distribution.

Owning not renting

Genius Sports’ Q2 comments placed that broader model inside one company. Its May acquisition of Legend added a portfolio of consumer destinations and comparison technology to a business already supplying official data, pricing, integrity services and media. CEO Mark Locke said the combination meant Genius did not have to keep buying the traffic it sold to customers. “We do not rent the audience, we own it,” he said.  

Locke divided the prediction market opportunity into three layers: data supplied to platforms; data and models used in market making; and the audience used to acquire customers. “We are sourcing new customers for prediction market operators in a very significant volume,” he said. “With our organic media platform, now turbocharged by Legend, we own many of the destinations where those customers are acquired.” Genius had also signed direct agreements with Kalshi and Polymarket covering official data and customer acquisition. Locke summarised the position on the earnings call: “Our role in this market is infrastructure.”

After the reporting period, Genius added a consumer-facing expression of that strategy. Legend launched Prediction.com as a destination for discovering markets, comparing equivalent event contracts across venues and following changing probabilities. It combines live sports data with prediction market prices and includes a proprietary cross-venue engine for comparing multi-leg combinations. Genius said the product gave it a direct presence at the point where users “discover markets, compare contracts and pricing, follow live events and track outcomes”.

Prediction.com therefore sits closer to a comparison and engagement product than a simple affiliate landing page. The company said the consumer experience remained fragmented and that the new service would bring multiple venues into one destination. It also said the platform would expand its coverage, functionality and partner integrations as the ecosystem developed.

In a subsequent shareholder letter, Locke set out how Genius expected the structure around that consumer activity to change. “Prediction markets will remain a meaningful part of US sports trading, but I do not expect today’s structure to survive unchanged,” he wrote. His distinction was between confidence in demand for wagering and confidence in any one current platform model.

For Genius, that demand can produce revenue at several points. It supplies official data, settlement and integrity services to platforms; sells data and pricing to the market makers providing exchange liquidity; and uses Legend and its wider media operation to acquire customers. Locke said a market maker could form a price from public information, but settlement required an agreed, authoritative answer to what happened. “Pricing tolerates approximation, because the market corrects it,” he wrote. “Settlement does not, because it is final and it pays.”

Catena Media’s PlayPicks offers a smaller-scale indication that other affiliates are also testing products specific to the category. CEO Manuel Stan called it a “fully agentic build” and said the beta launch formed part of Catena’s effort to prepare its sports products for the first NFL season with widespread prediction market access.

Taken together, the companies’ reporting describes an affiliate market that still gets paid for a referred customer but is increasingly building around the full path to that customer: the media brand that attracts the audience, the data that explains and prices a market, the comparison layer that helps select a venue, and the product that keeps the user within an owned environment.