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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Betting fatigue will set in, more states will legalize and the hype will settle. Disney might want to look longer term as in 2-3 years these investments will lose their "shine" and might be a liability. I could be wrong, but as an avid sport fan (and watcher of ESPN) I'm sure sick of the betting ads and I'm not alone.

I believe it will be similar to legalizing cannabis. In my local region, there was massive hype around the first stores and now there's too many to support the market, and the weaker stores are struggling.

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A key difference here is that cannabis marketing is limited by rules similar to the rules around sale of alcohol.

Gambling lacks most of those key controls. For example, betting organizations are allowed to offer free trials of their product, you see a lot of that advertised on billboards. Get $100 free when you create an account.

Also, gambling mechanics can be integrated into other products. App Store gaming is a good example here, too.

In the UK, alcohol is sold as a loss leader by grocery stores. https://www.ias.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rp05062008... and their rate of alcoholism is 150% of the USA's rate, where similar tactics are forbidden. I'm not saying that alone is responsible, but using it as an example of how looser regulation leads to more effective marketing and more participation.

I believe we'll see similar tactics, maybe something akin to bundling, with gambling here. Get $50 free betting credits a month with your subscription to Disney plus. Get $200 free with your ticket to Disneyland. Epic Games holiday sale with $10 gambling credits with every purchase.

The goal will be to integrate gambling with daily life enough that anyone with a problem will constantly have opportunities to spend, and for everyone else it becomes a normal hobby, one tap away on their phone at all times.

And this is a market where behavioral targeted advertising will really shine.

Hmm, I wouldn't say alcohol is a good example of something well regulated.

There should really be cancer warnings on every bottle to really whack people over the head that scoffing at smokers exposing themselves to lung cancer while drinking cancer juice is majorly stupid. People are mostly naive to how much risk they're taking by drinking. Less than smoking - but still a pretty decent amount.

Smoking is something that's well regulated.

I doubt it. Betting is very addictive to a lot of people and many won’t quit until they are cut off. When the sports book is in their phone, they will have a hard time resisting the temptation.

And the problem gamblers have leagues of sycophants that will happily yell at you that gambling is entertainment and it's fine and don't look at how bad gambling is in places like Australia that liberalized gambling and have pokies in the gast station and had certain people ARSON BOMB A GODDAMN YOUTUBER FOR TALKING ABOUT THE CORRUPTION IN THEIR GOVERNMENT

I don't understand the comparison. With cannabis companies, did the overall sales go down or did certain companies capture the market?

Because if it's about certain companies capturing the market, I'd put money on Disney

Yea, you're making a few bad assumptions here.

Just in imaginary numbers lets say the gambling market goes from 1 billion to 10 billion dollars per year, but 100 billion dollars of investment money comes in. Those groups with bad capitalization plans are going to fail to earn a return, but make no mistake the market has made more profit than ever before. The weak competitors eventually lose leaving a few mega companies raking in the profit.

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