Sports gambling simplified

Sports gambling is the activity of predicting sports results and placing a wager on the outcomes of games. Sports gamblers place the wager through a sportsbook who decides what the odds are for each game. With the legalization of gambling, sportsbooks from around the world have begun creating mobile sportsbook apps. With the click of a button, you can download the app and deposit money into it. Essentially you have a casino open on your phone all day. While using the app the creators of these sportsbooks create what are called “odds lines” for sporting events. This includes the money line (choosing which team will win), total (how many points, runs, goals will be scored during the game), the spread (choosing which team will win by a certain number of points) as well as the ability to bet on individual player props who will participate in the game. The sportsbooks run the game through a simulator using previous data from the teams to determine the odds line for all the possible bets. The odds line determines how much you can win from placing a wager. For example, if there was a game between the Mets and Yankees with the Yankees odds line being at -150 to win that means you would need to bet $150 dollars to win back $100.

RQ1: What does it mean to sports gamble online?

Twitter as an affective space for promotion and community engagement

Firstly, twitter is a popular social media platform, and its versatility helps make it a great space for advertisers. The features that twitter has, allows for a wider range of promotion for sports gambling companies. These features include sponsored post ability, brand collaborations, videos/images, threads, polls, and a feature for audio called twitter spaces. There is data collected by business X that helps showcase how interactive twitter has been with sports gamblers. They say that “Seven out of every 10 sports bettors are on Twitter, and 33% of bettors who rely on Twitter for betting information say they wouldn’t make as many wagers if it weren’t for Twitter. Sports bettors who use Twitter spend 15% more on bets annually compared to sports bettors from other platforms. And 62% of bettors on Twitter place wagers weekly, which is more frequent than sports bettors on other platforms. ” (Epstein, 2023) This helps give insight into how interactive twitter has been for sports gamblers and how it is increasing the likelihood to continue to gamble. 

Another reason other than promotion from these gambling advertisers has been the amount of user generated content. As talked about before, the versatility of tools on twitter allows for communities to form. There are tons of twitter accounts dedicated to posting their best bets of the day to showcase their following. These posts are organic and help spread the normalcy of sports gambling. These posts come from peers, influencers, topic experts that have no ties to these gambling companies yet at the same time are basically promoting them for free and it’s affecting our perception of a potentially dangerous vice in gambling.

RQ2: Why has twitter been an effective space for sports gambling?

The toll that sports gambling is taking on the public

There are multiple impacts from sports gambling that can negatively affect our society. This includes things like debt, mental health, and addiction. Online gambling is becoming responsible for some of these impacts according to a study conducted by the National Library of Medicine they say “In the present study, online casino stands out as being closely related to higher rates of problem gambling and over-indebtedness. The unadjusted percentage who fulfilled either problem gambling or moderate-risk gambling was more than three times higher in recent online casino gamblers than in those neither online casino nor sports live betting during the past month.” (Håkansson A, Widinghoff C, 2020) Ther aren’t definitive answers just yet but speculations to why this may be the case is just how big the online presence of gambling books have become.

Regulations need to be updated to help prevent these effects from spiraling into a health crisis. According to a survey done by Men’s health “1 in 5 bettors have gone into debt caused by sports betting, 58% of those surveyed say that it has taken a toll on their mental health citing things such as increased depression, and anxiety, and 43% say they know someone who has or may have a sports betting addiction.”(Epstein, 2023) These numbers are concerningly high and feel like they are over-matched when compared to the size of this gambling industry. More resources need to be dedicated to those who are affected and will likely be affected in the coming years.

RQ3: What negative impacts does sports gambling have on society?

The design of my project will be a website. The aim of the design is to inform the audience about how online sports gambling works, describe how gambling companies are marketing their product through social media, and the potential harm that it can cause to society. It will also feature resources they can reach out to if they are or someone, they know may be affected by a gambling problem. 

 The website will be effective in presenting my research questions in order that the audience will gain the most insight from. The website helps address sports gambling companies marketing tactics and brings awareness to the audience to help identify them and proposes solutions to those who may need help. 

My website will contain sections that layout my research questions. Each one will include either a video or an image to further elaborate on the question. The first will cover the message design behind sports gambling advertisements. The second section will talk about how social media, specifically twitter, has played a role in the evolution of sports gambling. There will be images in this section to highlight how twitter is creating organic marketing for sports gambling and communities of sports gamblers. Then a section to explain the dangers of problem gambling and resources that can help those who are struggling with a problem. Lastly a quiz section that will ask questions pertaining to key statistics of sports gambling. For example, how much money is sports gambling generating, what sports are being gambled on, what areas of life does problem gambling affect, who is being the most affected by these problems? The idea behind this is to keep the audience engaged and open their eyes to how harmful this industry is.

 There are a couple different storytelling strategies that will help my website. First, the project will emphasize the importance of media literacy. The reason being is that sports gambling companies marketing strategies are designed to get you on the hook. They do so by creating fear of loss with limited time promotions, they also use gain framing by including deposit match, meaning if you deposit a certain amount, they will match that same amount, so you are getting extra money to use. Also, social media like twitter play a role in normalizing sports gambling and unintentionally help promote it. The project aims to tell the audience how to detect these strategies and become more media literate in the landscape of online sports gambling. The overall theme of the storytelling will be like a campaign. It’s important because the rate at which the sports gambling industry has taken off has far surpassed the amount of attention for the problems it may cause, and the resources needed to help.