How did prediction markets get so big?
The Global Story
BBC
3.8 • 666 Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On prediction markets such as Polymarket people are placing sometimes huge wagers on questions ranging from the sublime (‘will Jesus Christ return by the end of the year?’) to the very serious (‘will the US invade Iran?’).
Gambling is restricted across many US states but prediction markets are not classified as gambling. Their rapid rise over recent years speaks – some say – to an increasing nihilism among young men in particular, who feel they may as well try to profit from world events they cannot control.
Supporters say prediction markets are a smart way to make money. Critics say they are enabling insider trading. So what is the truth behind their rise? We speak to senior business journalist at the BBC, Mitch Labiak.
Producer: Hannah Moore
Mix: Travis Evans
Executive producers: Richard Fenton-Smith and James Shield
Senior news editor: China Collins
Photo: Polymarket logo appears in this illustration. Credit: Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.9 | As the US bombed Iran, thousands of miles away behind their screens, people were placing bets. |
| 0:13.9 | Would the US invade? Would there be a nuclear detonation? Would Iran's supreme leader be ousted or killed? |
| 0:21.5 | They placed hundreds of millions of dollars of bets in total, |
| 0:25.1 | perhaps as much as $2 billion, according to NBC. |
| 0:28.2 | And some of these people won big. |
| 0:31.3 | This was conflict as financial opportunity, or even entertainment. |
| 0:38.1 | Welcome to the world of prediction markets, where you can bet on anything from the |
| 0:43.6 | silly is the earth flat, who's the sexiest man alive, to the sinister. |
| 0:49.6 | Advocates of these markets say they make more accurate predictions of what's likely to happen in the world |
| 0:54.9 | than politicians or polls or the media. Their critics say they're enabling insider trading |
| 1:01.6 | and encouraging people to gamble money they don't have. From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman. |
| 1:10.2 | And today on the global story,'m Tristan Redmond. And today on The Global Story, The Truth About Prediction Markets. |
| 1:24.4 | Nice to meet you. How's it going? |
| 1:26.1 | Yeah, it's going all right. It's very exciting to be in a studio like this. I like the design you've got here and the wood paneling. The room where it happens. Mitch Labiak is a senior business journalist at the BBC, and he's been looking in-depth in prediction markets, how they work, who's using them? So I've been looking into this for several months, and I suppose I wanted to get a sense of, in the first instance, who's using them? So I've been looking into this for several months, |
| 1:44.8 | and I suppose I wanted to get a sense of, in the first instance, who was using them, |
| 1:48.4 | and it turns out to be overwhelmingly young men. |
| 1:50.8 | So just over a quarter of American men aged 18 to 24, |
| 1:55.2 | say they've used a prediction market in the last month |
| 1:57.5 | compared to 14% of the general population, |
| 2:00.3 | according to a poll by the American |
| 2:02.7 | Institute of Boys and Men and Ipsos, there's also sort of a lot of circumstantial evidence |
... |
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