Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Kalshi says three out of four of its users don't trade
A Kalshi spokesperson gave WIRED that figure while arguing the informational use of its odds is the popular one. Both exchanges are now licensing those odds to large media companies with the legal fight over what they are unresolved.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Polymarket mails a daily newsletter that summarises the day's top stories and links each one out to a corresponding market, with recent subject lines including "BREAKING: Trump Unveils Green Energy Beam."
- Polymarket has partnerships with Dow Jones and Substack, while Kalshi has signed deals with CNN, CNBC and Fox Corp.
- WIRED reports that none of those agreements facilitate trading; they are mainly data sharing, because the outlets want to show what people are putting their money on.
- A report cited by WIRED found prediction markets integrated into a quarter of the top 20 companies listed in the S&P 500's Communications Services sector.
- The markets and the federal government call these venues financial services, many state authorities and regulators call them gambling platforms, and WIRED reports the fight could end up in the Supreme Court.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A publisher putting an odds widget on a page is serving an audience that, on the exchange's own count, mostly never opens an account, so account signups will not tell that publisher whether the integration worked.
- exposure An outlet that embeds the feed becomes the place a reader saw the number and inherits the job of correcting it, and the record already includes a New York Times finding of false and misleading information on Polymarket's newsy accounts.
- decision Anyone signing one of these data deals is picking placement and labeling before the courts have said whether the counterparty is an exchange or a gambling operator.
- contradiction Kalshi tells WIRED it is not a media company while its spokesperson argues the informational use case deserves to be taken seriously, and Polymarket recruits staff to build the new front page of the internet, so partners are working from two accounts of the same product.
A reader gets to the bottom of a story on a CNN page, sees a percentage attached to the question of whether the thing will happen, and files it away as a fact about the world. The reader never opens an account. According to the exchange supplying the number, that is the ordinary case. "And three out of four users don't trade, which suggests the informational use case is popular enough to be taken very seriously," Kalshi spokesperson Jack Such told WIRED [10].
Take the figure as given and it is three non-traders for every trader [11]. It is Kalshi's own count, and WIRED's account does not define what counts as a user or over what period [22]. It is also the only usage figure in the story, and it says who the media deals are built for: people who read odds. Boosters call the products "truth machines," better at revealing public sentiment than polling or traditional reporting, according to WIRED [19].
Polymarket has been the more willing of the two to take the media label. Founder and chief executive Shayne Coplan has called the company's partnership with X "News 2.0" [14]. Its careers page invites applicants to "Become the new front page of the internet" [16], and in 2024 the company recruited for an editor in chief to lead "content and data journalism" efforts, a hire it never made [15]. Nate Silver came on as an adviser later that year [17]. Kalshi turns the label down. "We see ourselves as a financial exchange," Such said [18]. That sentence is also the legal position the industry is defending. Polymarket declined to comment to WIRED [12].
A quarter of twenty is five, so five of the largest companies in that S&P 500 sector carry one of these integrations [6]. Financial data firms have taken this route before. Bloomberg began with market data and financial analytics and added journalism products later [20]. Robinhood, now a Polymarket competitor with its own prediction market offering, ran a media subsidiary called Sherwood and wound it down [21].
For whoever has to decide on Monday whether an odds module goes on a page, two tests sort it. First, whether the number changes what the reader does in the next minute or sits beside the story as decoration. Second, whether the page survives having carried the venue's data if a court decides the venue is a gambling platform. A module that fails the first test and passes the second is filler with a maintenance bill attached. One that passes the first and fails the second is worth running only with a removal clause agreed before launch.
What to watch
- Whether the financial-services-or-gambling question reaches the Supreme Court, and what the media partners do with live embeds if it does.
- Whether Kalshi publishes a trading versus non-trading account breakdown that someone outside the company can check.
- Whether Dow Jones, CNN, CNBC or Fox Corp renew these data deals once the legal status is settled.