Dodgers player wants racy playoff ads pulled — but the app Sydney Sweeney invested in says new depositors are up 362%

Entrepreneur Taylor Murphy called out Major League Baseball on X with: “Hey @MLB - wanna get more kids watching baseball? Maybe start with the commercials.” While watching the playoffs with his kids, he noted Megan Fox selling erectile dysfunction pills in a red bodysuit and “Sydney Sweeney in zero clothes promoting betting on sports.”

Yet, the sports prediction company Novig — which is already in hot water over its first provocative Sydney Sweeney campaign that drew criticism from female athletes around the world for sexualizing women in sports — is doubling down with a second iteration of the campaign.

That’s because the first campaign saw a dramatic rise in trading activity, according to AdAge.

According to Novig, first-time depositors increased by 361.8%, reports AdAge, with app downloads rising 260.9% since the first ad ran.

Despite their popularity, and despite the marketing hype, prediction markets come with a high amount of risk: 79% of users reported losses in the past year while 51% said they’d used a credit card, personal loan or other borrowed money to fund bets, according to a survey by BadCredit.org.

And more than half (53%) started using prediction markets as a source of earned income.

What’s the deal with prediction markets?

On two of the biggest prediction markets, Kashi and Polymarket, monthly global trading volume has risen from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center data analysis. That’s significantly higher than the money wagered on sportsbooks, which averaged about $14 billion per month in 2025.

Prediction markets allow you to buy and sell event contracts, based on the predicted future outcome of a particular event — typically related to sports, entertainment, economics, politics, business and technology.

For example, an event contract could be related to a game score, award-show winners, new product launches, economic decisions or even international conflicts. Future outcomes are valued between $0 to $1, so if an event has an implied probability of 40%, then the contract would be worth 40 cents.

Prices are typically determined by the probability that an event will happen. Pricing is dynamic and can shift based on factors such as new information or changes in perceived risk. Each outcome in an event contract can be traded, with prices shifting along with supply and demand.

Once the final outcome is certain, “trading of the event contract stops and winning contracts are settled at their payout value, while losing contracts expire worthless,” according to Fidelity.

While event contracts can be traded, Fidelity notes that they differ from traditional investments, like stocks and bonds, where prices “are generally influenced by future earnings, cash flows, company growth, and broader economic condition expectations.”

The risks of prediction markets

Prediction markets come with a fair amount of risk. Either you win or you lose, so there’s no such thing as a partial recovery (like a stock dropping in value and then going back up again over time).

From a regulatory point of view, event contracts are treated more like investments, rather than gambling. But they’re not investments — and they come with a high amount of risk.

Prediction markets are federally regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as financial exchanges (rather than treated as gambling). But there’s still room for market manipulation.

With sports, we’ve already had some indictments involving NBA players. And there have been major cases involving insider trading.

“Since markets serve to aggregate information into a single price, whoever has the most accurate and up-to-date information often stands to win over less-informed market participants, sometimes legally, sometimes not,” according to Max Belyantsev in the Columbia Economic Review. “Thus, insider trading is still a significant concern in this new market form.”

But he says prediction markets should be approached with caution.

“They present the totality of future events as a new asset class and create new peer-to-peer trading opportunities for investors interested in placing their bets on future outcomes,” he writes.

However, “the probabilities displayed on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are not necessarily rooted in fact, can be manipulated by malicious actors and insider activity, and still hold notable risk as investment instruments marketed with trendy headlines.”

Not only are they marketed with trendy headlines, but they’re sometimes marketed with a near-naked woman covering her breasts with a pair of footballs. And the marketing campaigns seem to be working — along with gamification.