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>“Although the findings relate to direct marketing, I see no reason why the same or similar adverse effects wouldn’t occur for gambling advertising on TV or social media.”
Controlling/banning advertising for Alcohol and Tobacco results in significant health benefits. Sports gambling used to be illegal in many places or limited to specific places. Now that it's available in your pocket, like a pack of smokes or a flask of whisky, why wouldn't advertising triggers, direct or otherwise, be effective at encouraging susceptible people to partake? This is not a surprising result. It's the inaction of most governments that is surprising.
I used to work for a (now defunct) wagering operation. From my understanding even internally the marketing and business guys would’ve preferred the advertisements to be banned. It’s such an effective customer acquisition tool that the only way to compete is to spend insane amounts on marketing, because if you don’t, all of your competitors are and you’ll go bust. A ban would drastically level out the playing field and make things more sustainable.
The only ones that don’t want the ban are the ones selling the advertising slots. No way they’re giving up the gravy train.
The US Supreme Court made it illegal for states to ban gambling ads, as a first amendment issue. I think it was a bad decision.
It's everywhere on YouTube, usually as a 'hidden' ad in the alt-right manosphere (e.g. the recent Nick Shirley video he wears a sweatshirt for a gambling site throughout, with constant name drops of it that aren't over ads).
Disgusting behavior, especially coming from those who often claim their content is to improve things. Hypocrites across the board.
Greater New Orleans Broadcasting Association, Inc. v. United States (1999) makes it illegal for the government to ban advertising of legal gambling in the US.
The legalization and expansion of gambling was a massive mistake and should be undone as soon as possible.
Indeed. I seem to recall reading that among all addictions, gambling addiction had the highest suicide rate. I haven't been able to find a good source on that lamentably, but it seems plausible to me in the sense that many other addictions (alcohol, sex, heroin, etc.) have some sort of end-point built in at which you stop, and typically have only harmed yourself.
With gambling you can gamble away your kid's college savings, or the retirement savings for you and your spouse. Seems that you can wreak havoc beyond yourself even more so than with other types of addiction.
Can't wait to see how this (rather unsurprising yet important finding) is going to get abused for and with AI :
"Hey, I see we haven't chat / you didn't vibe code for few days now, how about you get 1000 free tokens and we just see where that lead us?"
It perfectly aligns with sycophantic interaction and then roulette outcome one gets, sure it might not work 100% of the time but it works most of the time and "I" as a user somehow "get it" more than AI researcher so "I" can get it to work for me.
Brilliant.
You'll enjoy this one:
“Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping from Aircraft: Randomized Controlled Trial.” BMJ, vol. 363, 2018, k5094. https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
Anthropic is already starting to do this regularly with "usage promotions" [0] which is another way of a casino giving free $20 spins to gamblers (vibe-coders in this case) to keep gambling - or in this case, keep spending tokens on Claude.
I brought this up previously [1] and recently [2] it and I made that accurate comparison as a form of gambling and got immediately flag'd despite that being correct.
[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
When online sports gambling started in the US they were offering $500-$1000 of free bets to sign up. Very tempting to sign up, even though I don't gamble anymore than about once a decade, but I decided whoever did that offer was probably smarter than me about who would win out in the end.
I've been around the block long enough to know you never take an 'easy profit' deal from someone who is in the business of making money from them while in their own domain.
I'm in Canada where the promotions aren't quite as aggressive, but I've collected in the ballpark of $10k over the past three years through these free bet sportsbook promotions as well as collecting daily bonuses from this new wave of "sweepstakes" online casinos.
To make the "free" money and not ruin your life, You must have the discipline to look at things from a purely numbers perspective. It has to be mechanical and not emotional. If some action is +EV, and bet sizing is correct relative to variance, then you should perform the action. Never chase losses with a -EV bet.
The terrible thing about gambling is that there is no limit to how much you can lose, and you can also lose way more money than you actually have. It's a dangerous game.
> while in their own domain
There's a certain poker quip which I like to use and apply to other contexts, such as active investing: "If you look around the table can't tell which player is the sucker, you're the sucker."
In other words, beware entering into a game where the rules ensure somebody will be victimized. This is especially true when many of the existing denizens spend much much more time and effort and finagling than you'll ever want to match.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." -- W.O.P.R, War Games (1983)
It was actually free money assuming you had the resolve to stop once you claimed the bonus (presumably most people didnt). As long as you were laying the other side of your bet on an exchange you could extract the full value of your free bets risk free.
I collected a few grand back then, however those sort of promotions are now illegal where I live.
It was truly a wild time. All the books desperate for action in this new online gambling world (US). I went from book to book, took "advantage" of their promos, never collected a dime. When I was up, I bet more. Hit zero? Go to the next book. Their lines were better anyway ;)
“… you never take an 'easy profit' deal from someone who is in the business of making money from them while in their own domain…”
Laura ingalls wilder said it best, in Farmer Boy:
“never bet your money on another man’s game”
Fun fact: gambling companies increasingly also invest in mental health service companies, so that they can profit from both sides.
That's what they mean when they say the house always wins.
Horizontal integration
Crazy how we (the US) just decided as a society that gambling was not only not illegal anymore but that it was perfectly reasonable to integrate it deeply into every sporting event possible in a span of about five years.
We didn't decide that, btw.
And not just sports, but world events where insiders can have the financial incentives to make terrible things happen.
But say that, and the same non sensical asinine crowd that spammed about crypto future or NFTs will tell you that's just to have more accurate information and you don't get it.
And they say crypto has no use cases.
I've always found the marketing around gambling (and most things really) completely disgusting. As a society I think we're far too tolerant of these things.
A lot of the ads basically go along the lines of: 'you could win big and have a great time, awesome! (disclaimer: will probably ruin your life)'.
It should be like it is with smoking - photos of lung cancer patients on the package. People will still do it of course but at least it's not falsely advertised.
So the gambling ads should be things like, that moment where your wife finds out you've drained the family's savings and the house is about to be re-possessed. Yeah.
Just ban it. The only defense for our lives being flooded with advertising is that it helps markets be more efficient.
But the most efficient gambling provider is the one that extracts the most money from its customers. Helping gambling companies be successful is a net loss to society.
south park alcohol commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Cg8klY9JI
And gambling, same as prediction markets, has literally no positive social outcome.
I think an honest gambling ad would include wins and losses at an appropriate ratio and emphasize the excitement as opposed to the payout. I do think the majority of people engaging in gambling engage with it in that way (even if I don't understanding it), and that the people it effects so extremely negatively are a smaller minority. But, a) that smaller minority still likely makes up a very large fraction of these companies income stream, and b) the harm is large enough that banning the advertising is still I think the better option, anyhow.
At this point I question whether they should even be allowed to advertise.
Study seems flawed– it preselects two different audiences (allow/not-allow offers mapping to something like low/high interest in gambling), then attributes the offers as the cause rather than the effect of selecting different audiences.
The second paragraph of the article somewhat misrepresents the study.
There wasn't a group that chose to opt out, and another group that chose not to. Everyone agreed to be in the study, and then a random half of the cohort was removed from the mailing lists.
That’s real interesting - being bombarded with offers is kind of a huge turnoff for me. Wonder if there’s some kind of correlation between that, and my general distaste for gambling/betting.
Isn't it the same for tobacco and alcohol ads?
why can't we have a law that just caps your gambling losses? Everyone gets a federally issued gambling license tied to your ID, if you lose more than X amount the casino is no longer legally allowed to let you play. Casual gamblers can still enjoy, problem gamblers get cut off; just like with alcohol at the bar.
For the same reason it isn't outlawed to begin with. It makes some wealthy, influential people even wealthier. They, not we, control our government.
Someone could create a market where problem gamblers can buy wagering power (the ability to risk more after reaching their own loss cap) from non-gamblers unless you force physical in person gambling with ID checks.
Gambling should return to being legal in Vegas and on reservations, 24/7 gambling anywhere is very problematic.
I like it in principle, but the pathologically addicted already make additional accounts and pay other people to acquire them.
So it may help by stopping some people from getting to that point, but as a safety net, an important chunk of the victims will still punch right through it.
Interesting approach but crack is illegal and still people are addicted to it.
That effectively destroys the industry, since 90% of revenue comes from 10% of customers.
Sounds like a worthwhile use of the taxpayer's dollar.
I hate this kind of research. Or well, I hate that it has any influence at all, that it matters.
This kind of research being that which shows an obvious harm that we all know about. It should have zero influence because it is blindingly obvious. Namely because if the title wasn't true, betting companies wouldn't be spending lots of money on it in the first place. But they are, as everyone who lives in the UK can tell. So we know. So this study shouldn't influence policy in the slightest. But it does.
I hate it because there's by definition a gap of years between A. all of us knowing that a phenomenon is harmful B. the study coming out. And then another gap of many years between the study and actual policy changes.
Here's my request to people in academia who do studies like these - which is admittedly a tiny percentage of academia. Just fudge the numbers and publish it a year earlier. Use LLMs to generate the text. It would be a huge boon to society. We all know it's true, so you're not doing anything wrong. Your quest for honesty is hurting everyone. The actual data is pointless.
It's like gathering real data on whether pigeons will indeed eat sunflower seeds if thrown on the ground in front of them, versus just making it up. Maybe such a study hasn't been done yet, but it literally doesn't matter because we know the outcome. There's zero gain from actually doing the study versus saying that yes, pigeons will generally do so.
This feels like what the Robinhood app does to me
I mean if it didn't make the gambling organizations more money they wouldn't do it. Gambling industry has always been about how much wealth it can extract from the punters without being regulated for it.
Hopefully this research ends up being used to justify more gambling regulations, but governments are addicted to the gambling lobby donations so who knows what will happen.
Super shocking (sarcasm).
Gamblers are the whales of that industry. The industry is well aware of that and well aware of how much harm they can cause. But their paychecks depend on not knowing so they choose not to.
Same as pay-to-win freemium games. Find the whales and milk them for all you can. For every high-spender who can afford it they know full well the other 99 cannot. They know they are ruining some people's lives. They know they use dirty psychological manipulation tactics. Their paychecks depend on not knowing so they choose not to.
If it's so bad for gamblers, why don't they stop?
If gambling orgs do something that you know causes harm, why isn't the a legal sense of responsibility?