How Polymarket and Kalshi actually acquire users
Everyone says Kalshi buys ads and Polymarket seeds Twitter. Both are true. Neither explains the growth. Here is what the public record shows instead.
The channel story is real and it is not the growth story
If you watch prediction markets from a distance, the split looks clean. Kalshi is the advertiser. It runs creative on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and search, buys stadium boards and billboards, and signs athletes. Polymarket is the social play. It lives on X, its people are extremely online, and its content spreads because other people post it.
That description is accurate. It is also the part of the machine that is easiest to see, which is exactly why it gets mistaken for the engine. When Interconnections pulled the demand data behind both companies, the ad programs and the social programs turned out to explain the spikes. Something else explains the floor.
Events buy attention. Distribution is what converts attention into a habit. The two get confused because they happen in the same quarter.
Create a market for the live moment
The event dominating attention becomes a tradable probability and an indexable page.
Package the odds as breaking news
One named event, one sharp number, published while the conversation is still moving.
Echo through creators and clippers
Paid creators, whitelisted ads and clipper networks carry it off owned channels.
Convert through links and referrals
Affiliate links, referral tiers, offers and app installs turn attention into a funded account.
Generate trades, profit and controversy
Positions, wins, losses and disputes all produce screenshots worth posting.
Recycle outcomes into fresh content
Resolution and argument become the raw material for the next market.
Polymarket’s search demand fell 99.3% in a single month
The 2024 United States presidential election was the largest attention moment in the category’s history. Polymarket reached an estimated 1,632,309 monthly United States organic search visits in November 2024. In December 2024 that figure was 12,026.
This is estimated organic search traffic and nothing else. It does not include app installs, direct visits, paid traffic, in-app activity or trading volume, and it is an Ahrefs estimate rather than a company figure. It is a proxy for how much of the public was actively looking for Polymarket, not a measure of the business. We use it because it is the only demand signal published consistently for both companies across the same period. Treat it as a curve shape, not a scoreboard.
How small a slice is it? Third-party estimates put Polymarket at roughly 40.76M total visits in July 2026, with about 56.59% of that arriving direct and only 27.29% coming from the United States. Direct is the largest channel by a wide margin, which is what you would expect from an app-led product with a referral programme and a partner network. So organic search is a minority channel measured on a minority geography, and the honest way to use the curve is as a barometer of public curiosity rather than as a traffic report.
Visit and channel-mix estimates: Semrush and Similarweb, July 2026. Vendors disagree on session metrics. Directional only.
- Nov 2024 Polymarket peaks at 1.63M on the US election
- Dec 2024 it falls to 12K, a 99.3% drop in one month
- Sep 2025 Kalshi steps up 7.8x and holds for a year
- Mar 2026 Polymarket peaks again at 1.43M, then decays
site-explorer/metrics-history, pulled 2026-08-12. This is estimated search traffic, not users and not spend.Kalshi fell too, from 624,960 in November 2024 to 54,656 in December, a 91.3% drop. Neither company converted the biggest news event of the decade into a durable audience. Both went back to roughly where they started and stayed there for most of 2025.
The interesting part of this chart is not the mountain on the left. It is the dashed line. Kalshi steps from 17,425 visits in August 2025 to 135,877 in September 2025, and then holds a band between roughly 275,000 and 644,000 for the next twelve months. That is not a spike. That is a floor moving.
September 2025 is the start of the National Football League season and the period when Kalshi’s sports contracts became reachable inside a brokerage app rather than only on Kalshi. We cannot prove causation from traffic data. We can say the step change does not line up with an advertising burst, and it does line up with a distribution change.
Kalshi ships ads at the speed of the news cycle
Kalshi’s chief executive Tarek Mansour told CNBC in July 2026 that he personally leads marketing strategy, and described the operating principle plainly: the most important thing is to enable creativity based on what is happening. He also gave the number that matters. One World Cup advertisement featuring retired professional players was conceived, produced and released inside twenty four hours.
That velocity shows up in the public ad record. Google’s Ads Transparency Center lists Kalshi creative written per market rather than per brand, including an ad whose entire headline is a single race.
- Predict NYC Mayor Winner. Join Kalshi’s market: Will a Democrat win the NYC mayor’s race? Resolve Nov 4.
- Bet on the Election, Get $20. Bet on election predictions. $20 free for new users.
- Put $$ on Football. Kalshi is a regulated exchange & prediction market
- Trade Real World Events. Kalshi is a regulated exchange & prediction market
Polymarket’s public search and display presence is the opposite shape. It is one brand line, repeated.
| Google Ads Transparency Center, United States | Polymarket | Kalshi |
|---|---|---|
| Ads listed on the domain | 8 | 14 |
| Distinct advertiser accounts | 1 | 3 |
| Formats | Display banners only | Video, search text, display |
| Message architecture | One brand line, repeated | Per market, per event |
| New user offer in creative | None | $20 free for new users |
Captured 2026-08-12. Counts reflect verified advertisers only and represent creative variety, not spend or reach.
The creator layer is still running, inside the ad account
The seeded creator content did not stop after the investigations, it moved into paid media where it is at least visible. Meta labels a whitelisted ad by naming both parties, and Kalshi has them running now. One reads ShaunsTake Picks with Kalshi, a fantasy football creator’s page carrying an ad Kalshi is paying for, in the creator’s own voice and format.
Look at where the disclosure sits. The copy ends #fantasyfootball #fantasyfootballtips #fantasyfootballadvice #nfl #kalshipartner. The relationship is disclosed, technically, as the fifth hashtag in a row of five. That is the exact practice the National Advertising Division was asking about when Kalshi declined to participate, and it is running today in a library anyone can open.
The Google view was misleading, and Meta shows why
Google’s transparency records made Polymarket look like a company that barely advertises. The Meta Ad Library says otherwise. Searched on brand keyword in the United States, active ads only, Kalshi returns about 460 results and Polymarket about 250. Both run the same five placements, both are buying app installs rather than site visits, and both dangle a twenty dollar new-user offer. Polymarket’s runs with a promo code, FREE20, which is a sportsbook mechanic down to the syntax.
So the real difference is roughly two to one on volume, not the order of magnitude the Google view implied. Any teardown that had stopped at Google’s transparency centre, including an earlier draft of this one, would have got the shape of Polymarket’s paid programme wrong.
None of these counts are budget comparisons and we are not presenting them as one. Neither company discloses spend, and the United States has no advertising transparency mandate that would force them to. Meta's keyword search also sweeps in affiliates and unrelated advertisers who mention the brand, so both totals overstate each company's own output. They are directly comparable to each other, which is the only claim we make from them. What the record shows is shape: Kalshi runs more formats, more variants and more event-level messaging, on roughly twice the active volume. Both are buying app installs: the visible destinations across the sampled Kalshi ads are the Apple App Store and Google Play, with Install Now and Download as the calls to action. We looked for an attribution wrapper such as an AppsFlyer OneLink in those destinations and did not find one, so we make no claim about the measurement stack behind the click.
One more detail worth noticing, because it is the kind of thing only a media buyer looks for. A third advertiser, unrelated to either company, runs templated ecommerce search copy pointed at Kalshi’s domain, promising worldwide shipping and inviting you to view its inventory. That is affiliate or arbitrage traffic riding a hot brand, and it is a reliable sign that a category has become profitable enough for middlemen to farm.
The winner content was manufactured, and a regulator noticed
Anyone who spends time near this category has seen the genre: a young person on camera explaining how much they made this week on a prediction market. The intuition that this content is seeded turns out to be correct, and it is now on the public record in unusual detail.
A Wall Street Journal investigation reported that Polymarket paid creators roughly $2,000 to $3,000 per month to produce videos showing wins that were not real, and asked them not to disclose the relationship. The Journal reviewed 1,105 videos made between December 2025 and mid-May 2026. Around 70% depicted betting activity. Across 118 of them, creators promoted close to $900,000 in winnings that did not exist, against roughly $1.9 million in fabricated wagers. The campaign drew more than 140 million views across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission confirmed an investigation in June 2026. Senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis jointly asked for a federal probe. Polymarket has since restructured its marketing team, rewritten its promotional partner guidelines, run internal training and retained a third-party firm to monitor partner content.
Kalshi is not a bystander in the disclosure conversation. Slate reported in June 2026 that both companies run sponsored content that is undisclosed or barely labeled, describing a Kalshi placement where the branding sat on a microphone and a dancing robot’s jersey and read as organic at a glance.
The seeding thesis was right. What nobody predicted is that the cheapest acquisition channel in the category would turn into its largest legal liability inside eighteen months.
The posts were built to read as news, and the timing gives it away
Two details from the payment analysis matter more than the totals. Roughly a third of the matched creator posts framed the odds as breaking or new, which is not how enthusiasm talks, it is how a wire desk talks. And on the day Polymarket announced its xAI partnership, eight paid creators amplified it within hours of each other. One creator later said the suggested copy and the instruction to post urgently came from Polymarket. A spokesperson characterised the creator relationships as standard business practice.
That is the part worth internalising if you build growth for a living. The programme did not buy endorsements, it bought the appearance of independent reporting, on a schedule. Which is exactly why the disclosure question became a regulatory one rather than an aesthetic one.
The structure did not go away, it moved somewhere with a flair system
The creator programme was the part that got investigated. The community programme is still running, and it is not hidden. Polymarket’s subreddit describes itself in its own sidebar as the official community for Polymarket. Its pinned highlights are company announcements, one of which offers to pay users to test the Android app. Posts carry an official Whale Alert flair, and the accounts filling that flair every day carry a contributor tag the subreddit calls Polymaxxer.
The content in that flair is the same emotional product as the paid videos, with one lawyer-friendly difference. Nobody claims their own winnings. They narrate somebody else’s: a $421,000 position landing on an Iran market, a scalper turning $1.3 million of losses into $311,000 of profit during the World Cup. The aspiration survives. The personal claim, the thing the Journal could check, does not.
Kalshi ran the same play through a badge system
It would be easy to read everything above as a story about one badly behaved company. It is not. Kalshi built the same creator layer, and its version came with something Polymarket never had: a formal status marker issued by the platform itself.
Kalshi operated an affiliate badge programme on X, which attached a visible mark to accounts in its network. That is a stronger instrument than a payment, because the badge conferred apparent endorsement on everything the account posted. Which became the problem. In December 2025, Front Office Sports documented badged accounts pushing fabricated college basketball stories, with one keeping its badge until December 8 despite the posts drawing wide attention. Kalshi separately cut ties with affiliates posting antisemitic content.
In February 2026 Kalshi removed every affiliate badge on X after the platform banned promotional content tied to sports betting. The company’s own explanation to Front Office Sports is the most instructive sentence in this entire teardown: it had become too difficult to police, and people were confusing badged accounts with Kalshi-endorsed messages.
| When | What happened | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2025 | Badged affiliates spread fabricated sports news | An account carrying an official Kalshi affiliate badge posted multiple false college basketball claims. The badge stayed on until December 8. Kalshi separately cut ties with affiliates posting antisemitic content. | Front Office Sports |
| Feb 2026 | Kalshi removes every affiliate badge on X | After X banned promotional content tied to sports betting, Kalshi pulled the badges, telling Front Office Sports it had become too difficult to police and that people confused badged accounts with Kalshi-endorsed messages. | Front Office Sports |
| Mar 2026 | The campus layer surfaces | Both companies paid student influencers and student athletes to post about winning, mostly without disclosure. Kalshi sponsored a Duke poker club prize pool and a Yale competition; Polymarket paid a Columbia fraternity $30,510 in two weeks through referrals and seeded a Chicago club with $20,000. Kalshi had signed a 15 year old streamer the previous September before reversing. | Wall Street Journal |
| Jun 2026 | NAD refers Kalshi to regulators | The National Advertising Division examined whether material connections with influencers and affiliates were clearly and conspicuously disclosed under the FTC endorsement guides. Kalshi declined to participate, so NAD referred it to regulatory authorities including state attorneys general. | BBB National Programs |
| Aug 2026 | New York City opens a category-wide inquiry | The City Council wrote to four platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket among them, about deceptive marketing and the targeting of minors. | NYC Council |
Each row verified against the named outlet.
The June 2026 entry deserves its own sentence. The National Advertising Division, the advertising industry’s own self-regulatory body, opened an inquiry into whether Kalshi’s connections to influencers and affiliates were clearly and conspicuously disclosed under the Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides. Kalshi declined to participate. NAD then referred the matter to regulatory authorities including state attorneys general. Declining a voluntary industry review is a decision, and the referral is what that decision costs.
The campus layer is where both companies converge most uncomfortably. Reporting found each paying student influencers and student athletes to post about winning, mostly without disclosure. Polymarket paid a Columbia fraternity $30,510 in two weeks through referrals and seeded a Chicago student club with $20,000. Kalshi sponsored a Duke poker club prize pool and a Yale competition, and had signed a fifteen year old streamer the previous September before an employee reversed it.
Because a teardown that only prosecutes one company is marketing, not research. Polymarket’s programme was larger and its fabrication was more brazen, and the Journal documented that in detail. But Kalshi ran a creator network, issued badges that read as endorsement, chased the same campuses, and is the one that walked away from the industry’s own review. Both companies reached for the same lever.
Third-party trackers put Kalshi’s sponsored creator footprint at roughly 318 creators, 3.8K posts and 180.5M views, and its July 2026 traffic near 19.4M visits with about 55.14% arriving direct and 84.22% coming from the United States. Treat all of those as directional estimates rather than audited figures, in the same way as the Polymarket numbers earlier.
The programme had a price list, and one of them was a personal PayPal
The most useful thing about this category is that the acquisition machine is itemised in public. You do not have to estimate the budget. You can read the rate card.
| Mechanism | Price | What it bought | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| UGC League, per video | $35 to $2,850 | Public creator listing. Five to seven short videos a week on a newly created account, paid on organic performance. | Polymarket UGC League listing |
| Paid through the CMO’s personal PayPal | $2.5M+ | Politico: chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber sent more than $2.5M to over 800 people between January 2025 and February 2026. | Politico |
| Traced to social creators | $350K+ | Roughly two dozen creators posted about Polymarket around 490 times without disclosing payment. | Politico |
| Referral fee share | 10% / 5% | Qualified users earn 10% of direct and 5% of indirect referral net trading fees. New user must sign up within 30 days. Effective May 28, 2026. | Polymarket referral terms |
| Affiliate bounties | $0.01 / $10 | Public affiliate portal prices one cent per click and ten dollars after a first deposit, pricing two different funnel steps. | Polymarket affiliate portal |
Each row verified against the named outlet or the live public listing, not a secondary summary.
Two words in that brief carry more weight than the money. The programme asks for videos posted on a fresh social account, and it pays on organic performance. An account with no history reads as a person rather than a campaign, and paying on reach rather than on delivery makes the creator optimise for looking native. The output was engineered to be indistinguishable from enthusiasm before a single video was filmed.
Read those five rows together and the architecture is obvious. The UGC League buys raw volume from accounts with no history, priced on how well the video performs rather than on who made it. The referral tier turns every existing trader into a commissioned salesperson with a second-order cut. The affiliate portal prices the funnel explicitly, one cent for attention and ten dollars for a funded account. Nothing here is exotic. It is a performance marketing stack, and it is the same one any performance marketer would recognise instantly. What makes it unusual is only that a federally regulated exchange was running it.
The Politico reporting is the part that separates aggressive from reckless. Its finding was not simply that Polymarket paid creators, which the rate card already tells you. It was that more than $2.5 million moved to over 800 people through the chief marketing officer’s personal PayPal account, with at least $350,000 reaching social creators who then posted roughly 490 times without saying they had been paid.
$2.5 million is not a large marketing budget. Routing it through an executive’s personal account is the actual finding, because it means the spend had no invoices, no vendor records, no disclosure workflow and no compliance review. The lesson for any operator is unglamorous: the control that would have prevented this is not a bigger legal team, it is paying creators through a system that generates a paper trail.
The typical account made 46 trades and lost two dollars
Every number in the section above describes content showing people winning. Here is the population that content was aimed at. The Pew Research Center analysed 11,989 publicly visible Polymarket accounts across six weeks of activity between May 7 and June 19, 2026, and published the result in July.
Pew Research Center, published 2026-07-22. 11,989 accounts, May 7 to June 19 2026.
The median account traded 46 times, staked about $6.50 a trade, spent a little over $600 in total and finished down less than two dollars. Fifty eight percent landed within $100 of break even in either direction. Seven percent cleared $1,000 of profit and nine percent lost more than that.
The fabricated campaign advertised roughly $900,000 in winnings to an audience whose median member was down two dollars. That gap is the whole story of the category’s marketing problem.
This is the number Interconnections would put next to any winner story in this category. Exceptional outcomes can be completely real and still be wildly unrepresentative, and a profit screenshot is only honest when the reader can see the distribution it came from. Every regulator now looking at prediction market marketing is asking a version of this question.
Both brand accounts are news desks, not brand accounts
Look at either company’s main account on X and you will not find product marketing. You will find a wire service. Both post breaking news all day, in the same format, with the same two-word opener.
| X profile, captured 2026-08-12 | Polymarket | Kalshi |
|---|---|---|
| Handle | @Polymarket | @Kalshi |
| Followers | 1.8M | 450.4K |
| Posts | 36.3K | 14K |
| Joined | May 2020 | December 2018 |
Put side by side, the two feeds are the same product. Same opener, same cadence, same absence of anything resembling an advertisement. The only difference is the beat: Kalshi covers markets and Polymarket covers everything.
Kalshi extends the same play into vertical accounts. Its politics account posts odds as news items, in the voice of a wire desk rather than a brand. Polymarket runs the general assignment version of the same desk at roughly four times the follower base.
Polymarket’s growth organization is also unusually legible, because X publishes the company’s affiliated accounts. Travis VanderZanden, the founder of Bird and a former Uber and Lyft executive, joined as chief growth officer in August 2026 and oversees marketing. The growth lead most people in the category recognize is William LeGate, who describes himself as a professional situation monitor and has posted more than 193,000 times. His pinned post is a Drake lyric that names Polymarket.
A brand that becomes a news source gets distribution every day for free. A brand that becomes a lyric gets something no media plan can buy. Neither is a campaign, and neither shows up in an ad library, which is precisely why the ad library understates Polymarket and overstates the gap.
Both companies bought their way inside somebody else’s product
The channel comparison misses the thing both companies actually competed for, which is a surface inside a product people already open. Kalshi’s contracts trade inside Robinhood, and reporting has put the Robinhood channel at roughly a quarter to a third of Kalshi’s overall volume, with about $1 billion of event-contract trades in the second quarter of 2025 alone. Kalshi odds appear inside ChatGPT search results, the first prediction market deal OpenAI has done, and Perplexity ran a similar integration for March Madness.
Polymarket took the mirror image. It became the official prediction market partner of X and xAI in June 2025, which puts its prices inside the feed where the argument is already happening and feeds its data into Grok’s answers. Google surfaces both companies in Search and Google Finance.
There is one more distribution surface that is easy to miss, and it is disclosed at the bottom of the coverage itself. CNBC appends a line to its prediction market stories stating that CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment. A business news network is simultaneously a shareholder, an acquisition channel and the outlet covering the category.
Kalshi is inside a brokerage and an AI assistant. Polymarket is inside the feed and the model that reads it. Those placements, not the creative, are what moved the floor.
| Surface | Whose | What the placement does |
|---|---|---|
| X and xAI | Polymarket | Official prediction market partner; Grok annotates markets |
| Both | Probability surfaces in Search and Google Finance | |
| Yahoo Finance | Polymarket | Exclusive prediction market provider |
| Dow Jones | Polymarket | Modules across WSJ, MarketWatch, Barron’s and IBD |
| Robinhood | Kalshi | Event contracts inside the brokerage; ~25-35% of Kalshi volume |
| Webull | Kalshi | Kalshi markets inside an investing app |
| Phantom | Kalshi | Prediction markets inside a crypto wallet |
| CNN | Kalshi | Probability presented as live news data |
| NHL | Kalshi | Official league partnership, which buys legitimacy rather than clicks |
| OpenAI | Kalshi | Kalshi odds inside ChatGPT search results |
| CNBC | Kalshi | Disclosed commercial relationship including customer acquisition and a minority investment |
Compiled from company announcements and disclosed relationships.
Line them up and the pattern is that neither company is really competing for clicks any more. They are competing to be the number that appears when a probability is quoted, inside search, finance pages, news modules and AI answers. When a probability shows up in one of those places, the company gets the impression even when it does not get the visit. That is a fundamentally different asset from an ad, and it does not decay when a campaign ends.
Most exchanges cannot separate the demand their newsroom created from the demand an event handed them. Until you can, every post-event retention number is a guess.
Separate themNeither company ranks for its own category
This is the finding that surprised us most. Nobody arrives at these sites by searching for a prediction market. They arrive by searching for the news, which means the category's real search competitor is not another exchange, it is the polling and odds coverage already ranking for those questions.
| Top organic keywords by traffic | Volume | Traffic | Pos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kalshi · la mayor race polls | 322,000 | 30,209 | 4 |
| Kalshi · heisman odds | 58,000 | 5,734 | 6 |
| Kalshi · nl mvp odds | 27,000 | 4,931 | 3 |
| Polymarket · world cup predictions | 63,000 | 13,351 | 4 |
| Polymarket · clarity act polymarket | 9,000 | 6,391 | 1 |
| Polymarket · lebron odds | 14,000 | 5,963 | 2 |
Ahrefs, United States, 2026-08-11. Volume is monthly search volume.
Kalshi’s single largest organic keyword is a polling query with 322,000 monthly searches. Its second and third are awards odds. Polymarket’s biggest is a predictions query about the World Cup. Both companies rank as sources of answers to questions people were already asking, and monetize the visit. That is demand capture built on news, not on category intent.
The link data says the same thing from another angle. Polymarket grew referring domains from 1,283 to 23,821 between January 2024 and August 2026, and Kalshi from 616 to 14,769. Both curves are smooth and monotonic, with no single-month spikes, which is the signature of earned press rather than bought links. These companies became citable, and citation compounds.
| AI assistant citations | Polymarket | Kalshi |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 231 | 79 |
| Perplexity | 95 | 50 |
| Grok | 82 | 56 |
| Google AI Overviews | 5 | 5 |
| Gemini | 0 | 16 |
Ahrefs ai-responses-count, United States, 2026-08-11.
Polymarket earns roughly three times Kalshi’s ChatGPT citations while Kalshi holds the formal OpenAI integration. Being the answer and buying the placement are different assets, and the earned one is currently larger. This is the same dynamic Interconnections works on for clients through SEO and AI visibility, where being cited by a model is now a distinct discipline from ranking in a list of links.
The marketing says betting while the legal filing says otherwise
Kalshi’s public position, which it has taken to court against several states, is that its event contracts are regulated derivatives rather than sports betting. Its own advertising, published in Google’s transparency records, uses the verb bet and offers new users twenty dollars free, which are sportsbook mechanics in both language and structure.
Users complete the triangle. In the Kalshi community on Reddit, people describe their activity as bets, slips, legs and parlays, discuss combo payouts, and argue about resolution disputes. That is not what a derivatives trader sounds like. The same community contains the cost side of a three million user acquisition wave, including posts from people describing chasing losses during the World Cup and quitting after significant personal damage.
The regulators arrived, and not only for Polymarket
On August 12, 2026, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin sent seven-page letters to four prediction market platforms, including both Polymarket and Kalshi, demanding answers within fourteen days to more than three dozen questions about their local advertising and whether it targets young New Yorkers. The letters name undisclosed influencer marketing, videos depicting trades that never happened on lookalike domains, profitable wagers that would in fact have lost money, and the promotion of insider trading.
That timeline is worth holding in view. A Wall Street Journal investigation in June, a confirmed federal inquiry the same month, Politico’s payment records, a consumer advocacy lawsuit, and a municipal probe covering the whole category by August. The fastest acquisition engine in consumer fintech collected four separate investigations in roughly ten weeks.
Because acquisition messaging is now legal evidence. A regulator or a state attorney general reading Kalshi’s ad library sees the same thing we did, and Polymarket’s creator program has already produced a federal investigation. In this category the creative brief and the compliance exposure are the same document.
How to build this engine without the investigations
Everything above is a working acquisition machine. The compounding parts are genuinely excellent and worth copying. The parts that produced a federal inquiry, a referral to state attorneys general, a consumer lawsuit and a municipal probe were never the growth engine, they were shortcuts bolted onto it. Here is how an event contract exchange gets the first without buying the second.
Keep the newsroom. It is the actual moat.
Publishing a probability as breaking news is the single strongest thing either company does, and it is entirely defensible. It costs nothing in compliance terms, it produces distribution every day, and it compounds into the citation and link positions that later make you the default answer. If we were handed a new exchange tomorrow, the owned newsroom would be the first hire, not the creator programme.
Run the creator programme through a paper trail, not a personal account
The Politico finding was not that Polymarket paid creators. Paying creators is normal, and its own public rate card prices it openly. The finding was that the money moved through an executive’s personal PayPal, which meant no invoices, no vendor records, no disclosure workflow and no review. Pay through a managed roster, require the disclosure in the creative rather than the bio, archive every post at publication, and be able to produce the whole roster on request. That single change removes most of the exposure while leaving the reach intact.
Never let a badge imply endorsement you cannot police
Kalshi’s affiliate badge was the most efficient trust transfer in the category until badged accounts started posting fabricated sports news, and its own explanation for killing the programme was that policing had become impossible. Status markers scale faster than moderation does. If you issue one, cap the roster at the size you can genuinely monitor and revoke it predictably.
Publish the base rate beside the winner
Pew found the median account down under two dollars while the marketing showed $900,000 in winnings. A winner story with the distribution printed next to it is still persuasive, and it is the version that survives a regulator, a journalist and a screenshot. This is the cheapest credibility available in the category and almost nobody is taking it.
Buy surfaces rather than clicks
The durable step changes in this teardown line up with distribution deals, not ad bursts. A probability inside a brokerage, a search result, a finance page or an assistant answer earns the impression without paying for the visit, and it does not stop working when a campaign ends. Partnerships are slower to sign than a creative test and they outlast every creative you will ever run.
Treat creative velocity as an operating capability
Kalshi’s chief executive described taking an ad from concept to live in twenty four hours. In a category where the product is the news, that clock is the competitive advantage. The constraint is almost never production, it is the approval chain, and fixing it is an operations problem rather than a creative one.
Everything on this page comes from public sources collected on 2026-08-12 and is reproducible. Search demand, referring domains, AI citations and keyword data come from the Ahrefs v3 API. Ad data comes from Google’s Ads Transparency Center. Platform metrics come from X and Reddit directly. Base rate figures come from the Pew Research Center. Visit and channel-mix estimates come from Semrush and Similarweb. Creator pay, referral and affiliate prices come from the companies’ own public listings and terms. Reporting is attributed inline to CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, Slate, Media Matters, Forbes, Axios and the New York City Council’s own press release.
Four limits worth stating plainly. First, Ahrefs traffic is an estimate of organic search visits, not users and not revenue. Second, ad transparency counts reflect verified advertisers and are a measure of creative variety, never of spend. Third, Meta Ad Library counts come from its keyword search, which includes affiliates and unrelated advertisers mentioning the brand, so they are comparable to each other but are not a clean count of either company's own ads. Fourth, causal statements are marked as our read rather than presented as measurement, because correlation between a distribution deal and a traffic step change is suggestive and not proof.
Disclosure. Interconnections has run paid media inside this category, and that work is described in our prediction markets case study. Nothing on this page draws on it. Every figure here comes from a source anyone can check, and no confidential, client-sourced or non-public performance data appears anywhere on this page.
Frequently asked
- How do Polymarket and Kalshi actually acquire users?
- Both acquire users through three layers rather than one channel. The visible layer is paid: Kalshi runs event-specific ads across search, video, social and out-of-home, while Polymarket runs a narrower brand campaign. The second layer is seeded content, where paid creators and community contributors produce win-narrative content at volume. The third and most important layer is distribution, meaning Kalshi inside Robinhood and ChatGPT and Polymarket inside X and Grok. Interconnections found that the distribution layer, not the ad layer, lines up with the durable step changes in each company’s search demand.
- Does Kalshi spend more on advertising than Polymarket?
- Nobody outside either company can answer that, and any published number is an estimate. Neither company discloses spend, and the United States has no advertising transparency mandate that would force disclosure. What is verifiable is shape rather than size: Kalshi runs more ad formats, more creative variants and per-event messaging, while Polymarket’s public ad presence is a single repeated brand line. Interconnections deliberately reports the shape of each program and does not estimate budgets.
- Did Polymarket pay influencers to fake winning bets?
- A Wall Street Journal investigation reported that Polymarket paid creators roughly $2,000 to $3,000 per month to post content showing wins that were not real, reviewing 1,105 videos produced between December 2025 and mid-May 2026 that together drew more than 140 million views. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission confirmed an investigation in June 2026, and Polymarket has since restructured its marketing team, rewritten its promotional partner guidelines and hired a third-party firm to monitor partner content. Interconnections treats the reported findings as the record and the remediation as ongoing.
- What is the real growth channel for prediction markets?
- Events create the spike and distribution keeps it. The 2024 United States election was the largest traffic month either company ever had, and Polymarket gave back 99.3% of it within a single month. The durable step changes arrived later, when Kalshi reached traders inside Robinhood and ChatGPT and Polymarket reached readers inside X. Interconnections reads that as the central lesson: a moment buys attention, but only a distribution surface converts attention into a habit.
- How should a prediction market run creator marketing without regulatory exposure?
- Pay through a managed roster rather than an executive’s personal account, so every payment leaves an invoice and a vendor record. Require the disclosure inside the creative rather than in a bio or a reply. Archive every post at publication so the roster can be produced on request. Cap any badge or status programme at the size you can genuinely monitor, which is the specific failure Kalshi cited when it removed its affiliate badges. Interconnections builds creator programmes to that standard because in this category the creative brief and the compliance exposure are the same document.
- Who is Interconnections and why write this teardown?
- Interconnections is a growth agency that has run paid media inside prediction markets, and that work is published as a case study on this site. This teardown uses no data from that engagement. It exists because almost everything written about prediction market growth is written by finance reporters rather than by people who have bought media in the category, and the difference shows in what gets missed: the rate cards, the referral economics, the distribution deals and the base rate.
- What actually works in prediction market user acquisition?
- An owned newsroom that publishes probabilities as breaking news, distribution deals that place those probabilities inside products people already open, and creative velocity measured in hours rather than weeks. Those three compound and none of them carry legal risk. The seeded winner content that both companies reached for produced enormous reach and then a federal inquiry, a referral to state attorneys general, a consumer lawsuit and a municipal probe. Interconnections would build the first three and refuse the fourth.