Kalshi hasn’t been particularly subtle about sucking young users into its gambling empire.
Now, new reporting from the Wall Street Journal describes how the prediction market has been handing out sponsorships to college-aged social media creators like candy, in the hopes they’ll promote the company to their audiences.
Some of its affiliates, strikingly, are even younger than that.
In September, Kalshi signed up a 15-year-old video game streamer, who goes by the handle vert1d, to promote the platform on X.
It didn’t pan out. Just a week later, Kalshi terminated the partnership for reasons that do not appear to be related to ethical considerations.
“Yo brother, legal team confirmed that we can’t work with minors rn,” a Kalshi employee wrote vert1d in a eyebrow-raising message viewed by the WSJ. “Kinda sad tbh.”
(The bio on vert1d’s X account now states, “dont take sponsored deals.” In a November post, the user clarified “i still like kalshi and have nothing against them.”)
Though the partnership was torn up, it illustrates the lengths that Kalshi and other prediction markets are willing to go to bring in young users, and especially students. Polymarket, Kalshi’s main rival, has targeted college frats by offering to pay thousands of dollars for “epic parties” in exchange for signing up users, per the WSJ. In September, Kalshi announced an initiative to sponsor college campus clubs, including by providing prize money.
“College campuses are the best place to spark new financial movements and will play a key role in bringing the next 100M users to prediction markets,” the company wrote in a now-deleted post on X.
Kalshi claims it no longer has active partnerships with student groups. But it hasn’t stopped recruiting young users to shill its services.
One undergrad Kalshi brought into its sponsorship fold was 19-year-old Jay Liang, a sophomore at the University of Waterloo. Liang hired a classmate to make a TikTok that racked up more than 50 million views, becoming one of Kalshi’s most viral pieces of social media marketing, according to the reporting. At no point did the TikTok disclose the sponsorship.
Liang claimed a Kalshi supervisor told him to target students because they “spend money recklessly.”
Kalshi denies this. “That is outrageous and made up,” a spokesperson told the WSJ.
Even so, it doesn’t take a genius to recognize the logic behind partnering with teenagers and young adults.
“It’s more relatable, advertising-wise, when someone your age or in your situation talks about something,” Norton Yang, a 19-year-old NYU sophomore who claims he was paid by Kalshi to create TikTok videos, told the WSJ.
Prediction markets’ bet on young users seems to be paying off. A January survey found that millennials and Gen Z were more aware of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi than older demographics — while the opposite tended to be true for traditional sports betting sites.
More on prediction markets: Polymarket Quietly Takes Down Bet On Nuclear Detonation
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