Sports betting advertising spend is the money operators put behind getting an account opened and a first bet placed. The $7 billion figure now circulating under that label is something broader, and the difference matters more than the headline does.
Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin told CNBC that regulated operators could spend as much as $7 billion on marketing, advertising included, as competitive pressure from prediction markets intensifies, as reported by casino.org. His exact words were blunter than the forecast framing suggests: “There was probably $3 billion spent in U.S. betting and gaming last year. I bet you there’ll be $7 billion spent in marketing next year.”
The number Rubin gave, and the number being quoted
Rubin’s claim is a roughly 2.3x jump in industry-wide marketing spend over a single year, from about $3 billion to about $7 billion. He specified that the $7 billion applies to “the overall marketing space” for sportsbook operators, not to media buying alone. He also said the environment “couldn’t be any more competitive,” listing major prediction market operators as he did so.
Alongside the industry number, Rubin has put a figure on his own company. Fanatics could spend as much as $1 billion on betting and gaming advertising next year, close to triple the $350 million it is spending this year.
| Figure | Amount | Attribution |
|---|---|---|
| US betting and gaming spend, prior year | ~$3 billion | Rubin, via CNBC |
| Projected industry marketing spend, 2027 | ~$7 billion | Rubin, via CNBC |
| Fanatics betting and gaming advertising, current year | $350 million | Rubin’s prior estimate |
| Fanatics betting and gaming advertising, next year | up to $1 billion | Rubin’s prior estimate |
One caveat worth holding onto: Rubin said “next year,” and casino.org’s reporting places that at 2027. This is a CEO’s off-the-cuff estimate in a television interview, not an audited market study. He is also an interested party, running a sportsbook that benefits if rivals are perceived as being dragged into an unwinnable spending race.
Myth: a spending surge means the industry is booming
Rubin framed the surge as pressure, not prosperity. He said industry observers are negative on sports betting, that increasing competition means “it will not be a fun next couple of years,” and that his optimism sits on a five to ten year horizon rather than the near term.
Rising marketing spend in a maturing market is usually a symptom of customer acquisition cost climbing, not of easy growth. The same bettors are being bid over by more companies. Rubin named five well-capitalized competitors: DraftKings, Flutter’s FanDuel, Fanatics, and the top two prediction market operators. He said he is “not sure” how much consolidation happens among those five over the next several years, which is a polite way of saying some of this spending is defensive.
Read it as a boom and you misread the direction of travel. Companies that outspend their ability to retain the customers they buy tend to get absorbed, and acquisition-driven churn is exactly what a price war in marketing produces.
What is actually pushing the number up
Three forces, and the first one is the newest. Prediction markets have given sportsbooks a competitor that operates under a different regulatory frame, which pulls attention and volume from the same audience. Rubin’s own framing put that pressure front and centre.
The second is market saturation in the states that legalised early. Once account penetration flattens, growth has to come from poaching, and poaching is expensive. The third is the arrival of entrants with deep balance sheets, which resets the floor on what a credible national launch costs.
Fanatics shows what that looks like from the inside. Rubin pointed out that the company is private, so it is not managed against quarterly investor expectations, and that its apparel and collectibles units could generate over $12.5 billion combined this year, profits from which can be routed into betting and gaming. A competitor who can fund a billion-dollar marketing year out of merchandise cash flow changes the arithmetic for everyone else in the auction.
Where $7 billion of marketing actually goes
Very little of it is the television spot people picture. The bucket Rubin described spreads across:
- League, team and venue sponsorship deals, including naming rights and official betting partner status
- Broadcast and in-game integrations, where odds appear inside the sports coverage itself
- Programmatic advertising and app-install campaigns bid in real time against competitors
- Affiliate marketing, paid per acquired depositor rather than per impression
- Celebrity and influencer arrangements, increasingly in short-form video
- Promotional spend: bonus bets, deposit matches, odds boosts, profit-boost tokens
That last line is the one bettors feel. Promotional credit is a marketing expense on the operator’s books, which is precisely why it scales with the advertising budget rather than independently of it. When the marketing figure doubles, the promo offers get louder at the same time.
Heavier advertising draws heavier rules
Advertising volume is the variable regulators respond to fastest. In several regulated markets, sustained increases in gambling advertising have been followed by restrictions on where and when ads can run, limits on advertising around live sport, constraints on how bonus offers may be described, and mandatory responsible gambling messaging inside the creative itself. The direction is consistent even where the specific mechanisms differ by jurisdiction.
The player-protection argument is simple enough: ad frequency and promotional intensity reach everyone in the audience, including people already betting more than they intended. Expect the push and pull to sharpen as budgets climb toward the number Rubin named. Nothing in his comments suggests operators plan to pre-empt that scrutiny.
What it costs to read the spend war as generosity
The expensive misreading is treating an escalating promotional environment as better value. It is not value, it is customer acquisition cost paid in a form that comes with conditions attached, and none of it touches the mathematics of the bets underneath.
A $1,000 deposit match is not $1,000. It is a bonus carrying a playthrough requirement, usually a minimum odds floor, often a maximum bet while the bonus is live, and sometimes a cap on what can be withdrawn from it. A bonus bet typically returns winnings only, with the stake retained. Odds boosts move a price, they do not remove the margin built into the market. Every offer in that list is priced by someone who has modelled what the average recipient will do with it.
So the practical response to a doubling of marketing spend is duller than the headline: read the terms before accepting anything, treat promo pressure as the acquisition tool it is, and set deposit and loss limits before the offers start arriving rather than after. Deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion exist at every licensed operator, and the moment to use them is when marketing is at its loudest.
Whether the figure lands at $7 billion is genuinely unsettled. Rubin’s own view is that the next couple of years will not be fun and that consolidation among the five big spenders is possible but unquantified. If he is right about both, some of the budgets now being raised will be spent by companies that no longer exist in their current form by the time the money is gone.
