Davryn McDuffie didn’t know people could bet on reality TV until a Kalshi ad for “Love Island” trading came across her social media feed.
Out of curiosity, the 21-year-old college student from Palos Verdes decided to place her first-ever bet on the winning couple, putting $10 on the leading contestants, Bryce Dettloff and Trinity Tatum.
“It’s honestly not in my nature to bet on things. I was tempted by ‘Love Island’ because it’s what I’m consuming multiple times a week,” McDuffie said. “So that’s what I know a lot about.”
When the finale aired on Peacock Sunday night, nearly $24 million was riding on which couple would take home the prize in Kalshi’s “Love Island USA S8: Winning couple” market.
The trading volume underscores how prediction markets have found their next growth engine in pop culture and reality TV in particular — with its fandoms, daily episodes and constant turnover of contestants. This year, Kalshi’s entertainment trading volume has topped $600 million, up from $300 million in 2025 and just $43 million in 2024.
Kalshi began opening markets on “Love Island” in late May, marking its biggest foray into the reality TV genre.
“The whole premise of our platform is to be able to trade on any future event,” said Clarissa Bronfman, Kalshi’s lead of culture growth. “The point is to be able to trade on anything that you’re an expert in, and there are fandoms around reality TV and celebrities.”
But the same features that make “Love Island” so bettable — audience voting, a cast that’s aware of the cameras, a plot that unfolds in something close to real time — are also what make it hard to regulate. Culture betting has already produced instances of accused market manipulation. There is no watchdog for any of it, notes Timothy Fong, co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program.
“We’ve normalized putting money on entertainment, and now juiced up our entertainment experience,” Fong said. “None of these [trades] are regulated activities, [not at] the state level, and not at the federal level. There’s been zero positioning to say ‘This is how we’re going to protect from insider trading when it comes to popular culture contracts.’”
A platform betting on fandom
Kalshi, launched in 2021 after approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, describes itself as the largest prediction market platform, with millions of traders historically concentrated in sports and politics.
The trading platform ignited a debate about the ethics of prediction markets earlier this year when people began betting on the fall of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, before he was killed in a U.S. airstrike. Kalshi was sued by its traders after it initially refused to pay out winnings, citing its policy against “assassination” bets.
The New York-based company’s move into pop culture began in earnest at this year’s Super Bowl, when users traded roughly $113,000 on which song Bad Bunny would perform first — at the time, the platform’s largest culture market ever. Kalshi also opened markets on “Dancing With the Stars,” “Love Is Blind” and “The Traitors.”
For its culture markets, “Love Island” was the natural next step, Bronfman said. Because the show airs six nights a week and constantly cycles contestants in and out of its villa, it generates a steady stream of new markets: who wins, who gets eliminated each week and which couples land in the Top 3.
Justin Manzano, an L.A.-based photographer who joined Kalshi to bet on the NBA finals and has since wagered on 60% of World Cup matches, said the appeal of betting on “Love Island” is obvious, even to a sports bettor. “You invest so much time [in the show], so if you can get something out of it, I can understand why people want to bet on it,” he said. “It makes it more fun.”
NBCUniversal’s Peacock declined to comment on how trading culture is affecting the show.
Who’s actually placing these bets
The audience Kalshi is attracting is different from its typical trader base, which skews heavily toward males. Two of every three new “Love Island” traders are women, and the platform says there are three times as many female traders in “Love Island” markets as in its other categories.
Tia Gregory, an avid “Love Island” viewer who posts about the show online, said she hadn’t heard of Kalshi until she started seeing dozens of ads for it on TikTok.
“Women drive the market more often than not,” she said. “We’re big consumers.”
But Gregory worries that, because the show depends partly on live audience voting, the new wave of betting-driven viewers may itself be shaping who survives each week — traders watching to protect their position, not just to enjoy the show.
“It’s such a weird thing to take part in,” Gregory said. “Why does there have to be money made in every possible way?”
The trust problem underneath it
Some gambling experts share concern about blurring the lines between “watching” and “playing.”
Prediction markets have already run into trouble with pre-taped shows like “Survivor” and “The Bachelorette,” where cast and crew know the outcome months before the air date; on both Kalshi and rival platform Polymarket, markets for those shows have at times moved sharply toward the correct result well before anything aired publicly.
Robert Denault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, said in a statement on X that the company investigated for insider trading and found no “definitive evidence” of it, attributing the moves instead to traders following public rumors, mirroring early bettors or simply doing good research.
Kalshi’s culture markets have run into other credibility problems too. Earlier this month, Spotify pulled 500,000 artificial streams from Malcolm Todd’s TikTok hit “Earrings” after the song unexpectedly surged up the charts — a boost that followed suspicious trading activity tied to a Kalshi market on the track.
“The fourth wall of gambling is now removed,” said UCLA’s Fong, adding that traders start to believe they can influence the outcome of their own wager. Unlike sports or elections, he said, there’s no regulator keeping watch over whether a reality show market is being run — or gamed — fairly.
“Everyone wants a fair game,” Fong said. “But sometimes people don’t mind playing a game that’s rigged only because they just want the action.”
For McDuffie, who made $5.78 profit from her “Love Island” wager, the risk hasn’t dampened the appeal. Her $10 on Bryce and Trinity was less about earning a large lump sum and more about getting heavily invested in the show.
“It’s not really about the monetary prize for me,” McDuffie said. “Just knowing that I was right in my bet is more satisfying for me, and [makes the show] more interesting to watch.”
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