The fight over prediction markets is usually described as a legal one: are Kalshi and Polymarket financial exchanges, as they and the federal government argue, or gambling operators, as a growing list of state regulators and attorneys general insist. That question is working its way toward the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, both companies have spent the last two years becoming media organisations. As Kate Knibbs writes in WIRED, that may matter more in the short run than any ruling. Media partnerships don’t have to settle what the product is. They just have to make it familiar.
What the deals actually are
Polymarket has partnerships with Dow Jones and Substack. Kalshi has deals with CNN, CNBC and Fox Corp. None of the arrangements facilitate trading; they are mainly data-sharing agreements, with newsrooms wanting to know where customers are putting money and the exchanges happy to supply it.
The effect is a straightforward transfer of credibility. A prediction market that supplies odds to a cable news chyron is no longer only a place to place a wager — it is a source. WIRED notes the partnerships have given both firms “much-needed boosts in credibility” and a low-friction introduction to a mass audience. When a newsroom treats the odds as newsworthy, it also validates the industry’s marketing claim that markets reveal public sentiment more reliably than polling or reporting.
A Roosevelt Institute report cited in the piece found prediction markets integrated into a quarter of the top 20 companies in the S&P 500’s Communications Services sector — a deeper level of entrenchment than the editorial side projects most tech startups run.
The output is editorial now
The companies also behave like publishers directly. Their social accounts post like news outlets — a mix, per WIRED, of PopCrave’s frenzy and Bloomberg’s coverage areas. A New York Times analysis earlier this year found Polymarket’s news accounts published “false and misleading information.” CEO Shayne Coplan has described the company’s X partnership as “News 2.0,” and its careers page invites applicants to “Become the new front page of the internet.”
Kalshi’s spokesperson Jack Such tells WIRED the company does not consider itself a media company: “We see ourselves as a financial exchange,” he says, conceding only that the markets have “quasi-media” attributes because they follow the news. He also offers the industry’s standard defence on harm — “three out of four users don’t trade” — which is worth holding next to a strategy built on pushing market questions into news feeds.
Polymarket has launched a weekly podcast, What Are the Odds?, with the podcast network Dear Media, and partnered with a prediction-markets media startup called Eventual, whose backers include early Polymarket investor Bryan Goldberg. “Polymarket’s role in shaping media narratives was always a big piece of the puzzle,” Goldberg tells WIRED.
Where the cost lands
Paid influencer content is where the marketing and the product meet in public. WIRED cites podcaster Amanda Hirsch, one of the What Are the Odds? hosts, creating paid content for Polymarket promoting wagers on the outcome of the Lindsay Clancy trial — a case in which a mother was tried over the deaths of her three children. The backlash was severe enough that Hirsch apologised.
Not every outlet is signing. The New York Times scuttled a potential Kalshi partnership with its sports subsidiary The Athletic after its union pushed back — evidence that the entrenchment is contested internally at the places being asked to distribute it, not just by state gaming regulators.
Who this is for
Precedents exist on the finance side: Bloomberg moved from market data into journalism; Robinhood ran a media arm called Sherwood before shutting it in summer 2026; Hunterbook runs an investigative outlet alongside a hedge fund that trades on its reporting. The pattern is that data businesses buy editorial function when they need legitimacy and distribution.
For the companies, the calculus is legible. Editorial output doubles as marketing, diversifies risk away from trading fees, and gives them a hand in shaping their own coverage while discovery in the courts continues. The costs — normalisation of wagering among audiences who arrived for the headlines, and the reputational risk that lands on the individual creators fronting the ads — sit with someone else.
Meta’s reported interest in buying Kalshi, first covered by NPR, points the same direction. That a social platform would consider owning a prediction market is less a signal about trading than about media: markets as content, questions as feeds, and the odds as the new thing to check.
Commentary on reporting by Kate Knibbs in WIRED, 16 September 2026.