����

Chris Vargo didn’t need to write a paper about online gambling to illustrate its ubiquity. But it is a reason the advertising expert has become interested in it.

“Sports betting ads are everywhere—they’re inescapable,” said Vargo, an associate professor at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information at the ��ñ����. “And we have a saying in advertising—if you’re seeing a lot of ads for a certain service, they’re raking it in.”

Rather than fixate on the omnipresence of online gambling, Vargo used a blend of Google Trends analytics and individual user data to understand how exposure to online gambling ads influenced user behavior, including the resumption of betting activity after a pause and searches for addiction treatment resources. Sports betting may be the most widely advertised form of online gambling, but he also looked at casino games, lotteries, skill-based games and financial betting. Some of the most visible non-sports examples are the prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi.

The resulting paper was —a different direction for Vargo, who typically submits his work to communication and advertising journals.

Chris Vargo

“This paper is really looking at advertising in a critical way,” he said. “A lot of studies in marketing or advertising journals focus on how to make advertising more effective. Here, we’re saying that this advertising is associated with gambling engagement and help-seeking searches.”

In 2020, Colorado became the 10th state to legalize sports betting; today, nearly 40 states have legalized some form of wagering on athletics. The uneven rollout across the country meant Vargo and his co-authors—Toby Hopp, also of CMDI, and Harsha Gangadharbatla, formerly of the college and now with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—could see the same pattern of help-seeking behavior repeated each time the industry rolled out advertising in a state.

“We thought it might be like marijuana—it becomes legalized, it takes a little time and then takes off,” Vargo said. “And while that’s true here, it’s really the introduction of advertising in each of these states that clearly signals the growth of sports betting.”

100-plus ads a week

The individualized data that Vargo and his co-authors analyzed for this paper comes from a YouGov/RealityMine survey and passive digital trace data, which he narrowed to 419 users. That dataset includes website and app visits, video plays, searches, social media activity—and, of course, the advertising they saw.

While gamblers see more gambling ads—an easy feat for advertisers with digital retargeting tools at their disposal—Vargo found higher exposure to these ads appeared to represent a higher risk for gamblers. While the research does not identify a “safe” threshold for online gambling ads, “some of our people in the survey were served 50, 100 or more gambling ads a week,” Vargo said.

More worrisome, he said, is the activity sportsbooks took to guide gamblers back to their apps and websites. The study’s authors looked for “clean” exposures—24-hour periods without gambling activity showing up in a user’s history.

“Once they hit that threshold, we watched to see if a gambling advertisement would precede their immediate visit to a gambling property,” Vargo said. “The answer is yes.”

According to the team’s findings, 8.3% of clean gambling-ad exposures were followed by some gambling touchpoint by the user within 24 hours.

“These sites are targeting these gamblers who’ve stepped away, to nudge them back in,” Vargo said. If you have alcoholism, for instance, social media platforms will allow you to hide ads that might trigger your addiction, “but I don’t know of any that allow you to hide gambling.

Establishing limits

Vargo hopes his paper helps change the conversation around online gambling—such as requiring advertisers to adopt limits, including rules around free bets and other enticements, or stronger platform oversight. For addiction support, he said, “the strategy is to meet people at the activation moment,” through counter-messaging on search and social media, links to self-exclusion and counseling, and partnerships or pressure on platforms to show support resources when betting ads appear.

While Vargo said he doesn’t have any issues with gambling, “I do find it interesting to look at different problems in society and try to understand them a little bit better.” As a professor, he said he’s seen students who have been sucked into these apps—especially amid widely watched World Cup and NBA Finals games, not to mention prediction market platforms that have dramatically expanded ways they can wager.

“I get it—it does make things more exciting, so you can imagine how young people become addicted by chasing that dopamine high,” he said.

The long-term behavior of gamblers is Vargo’s next project. He’s parsing Reddit to understand whether gambling correlates to an increased likelihood of getting divorced, developing bad habits or becoming more incivil.

“We’ve got around 4,000 or 5,000 people who say they gamble, and have been talking about it for at least three years,” he said, including some users who appear to be encouraging others to not give up the habit. “It’s an interesting dataset, all right.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.