Sports gambling ads everywhere

For the Washington Post, Jeremy B. Merrill, Jonathan O’Connell, and Luke Connors built an AI tool to estimate the ubiquity of sports gambling ads in broadcasts and in arenas.

For its analysis, The Post chose 50 games across a variety of sports leagues, venues and networks, and randomly selected a one-hour segment during each of those games. The selected segments were then divided into one-minute intervals, and the analysis counted how many contained at least one reference to betting. By that measure, 27 percent — or 1 in 4 minutes — included at least one gambling reference.

Betting references were most frequent in hockey, appearing in 60 percent of the one-minute segments across eight hours of broadcasts. NCAA football had the least, with references in 6 percent of the segments across five hours of footage.

Gambling and sports broadcasts used to remain separate for at least an air of legitimacy in competition. It seems the networks just needed more money thrown in their direction.