Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
July 29, 2024, 12:53 p.m.
Business Models

There’s a 77% chance you’re gonna see more news betting in your news reading

Are prediction markets “the best tool we have to fight back against bullshit, clickbait, and propaganda” — or “just a euphemism for online gambling”?

Betting isn’t just for sports anymore.

Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market startup that hired Nate Silver as an advisor a couple weeks back, is beefing up its editorial offerings ahead of the 2024 election, Semafor noted last night. Substack users can now embed Polymarket predictions into their posts, and Polymarket has also launched its own newsletter, The Oracle, which promises to “comb through the 1,000+ individual markets on Polymarket to find insights about the news you might have missed. It will look at how the political judgment of pundits and experts stacks up to the wisdom of traders from all around the world.”

Comments on the Substack announcement are, so far, overwhelmingly negative: “This feature risks transforming authentic opinions into market-driven narratives, potentially compromising the integrity that makes Substack valuable,” one user claimed. Another: “Isn’t prediction markets just a euphemism for online gambling?” Another: “This is supposed to be a site supporting writers, not market speculators, gamblers, false prophets and snake-oil sales persons.”

Polymarket claims, though, that news prediction is actually a misinformation fighter: “Prediction markets are the best tool we have to fight back against bullshit, clickbait, and propaganda,” the company wrote in the first issue of its Substack newsletter. “They work by rewarding participants who make good predictions, and punishing those who don’t.”

Within Nieman Lab, opinions on the usefulness of Polymarket news predictions vary. For my part: I lean pro! I have no plans to put money on the news myself (and I’m conflicted on whether newsrooms should let journalists do that, at least for the topics they directly cover), but I find it useful to check in and see where consensus is settling — on the question, for instance, of who will be the Democratic VP nominee. I’m also intrigued by the barebones format of prediction with punditry entirely stripped out, and I like scrolling Polymarket for news-about-news–related predictions (like the one illustrating this post, predicting there’s a 66% chance that OpenAI reaches a settlement with The New York Times, which is suing it, by the end of this year).

Neel, though, feels differently: “I’m on the anti side myself. Polymarket seems to essentially be an avenue for people who are either extremely online or extremely into gambling to bet on the outcomes of news events, and I’m not sure that really gives us any particularly useful information of the type we’re used to with polls. Then again, we’ve learned that polls are kind of broken too.”

As for the “77% chance” in the headline of this post, I made that up, but…I think it’s a safe bet.

Chart from Polymarket

Laura Hazard Owen is the editor of Nieman Lab. You can reach her via email (laura@niemanlab.org) or Bluesky DM.
POSTED     July 29, 2024, 12:53 p.m.
SEE MORE ON Business Models
Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization
A new Pew Research Center report also found nearly 40% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from news influencers.
The Onion adds a new layer, buying Alex Jones’ Infowars and turning it into a parody of itself
One variety of “fake news” is taking possession of a far more insidious one.
The Guardian won’t post on X anymore — but isn’t deleting its accounts there, at least for now
Guardian reporters may still use X for newsgathering, the company said.