Sportsbooks and prediction markets are bankrolling sports media to a stunning degree these days, but Katie Nolan does not air ads for these companies on her SiriusXM podcast Casuals.
Far from a moral red line, Nolan explained in a recent interview with Semafor that the spirit of Casuals is to draw in, well, casual fans. And reinforcing the pipeline from sports fandom straight to wagering, one that is already so aggressively pushed across the rest of the industry, wasn’t in the show’s best interest.
“Our strategy, and what Sirius has actually been very supportive of, is I said, ‘I don’t want any gambling advertising on our sports podcast,'” Nolan explained on the Mixed Signals podcast. “I’m not even morally opposed to gambling. I don’t do it, but that’s because I wouldn’t be good at it and it would make me more upset by sports than I already am … I just feel like very quickly, as soon as it was legal, everything became gambling.”
As Nolan has remarked before, there are precious few pieces of sports content that are not catered to gamblers these days. Even live game broadcasts can sometimes feel overrun by commercials and promotions for DraftKings, FanDuel and the like.
Polymarket is hyping its official U.S. relaunch with a flashy ad starring the rapper Future, which has aired constantly throughout this summer’s World Cup on Fox.
Nolan stays away from these promotions so that she can keep from “handing off” her audience straight to the gambling industry, especially knowing the dangers of addiction.
“I wanted there to be a space, especially if the idea and the ethos of Casuals was to help bring people into sports, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t immediately handing them off to something that could become a really big problem in their lives,” she said.
“It’s not to say that you can’t gamble responsibly. I know a lot of people who do. It just felt like if it was going to be everywhere and somebody was going to allow me to keep it from being in mine, then I was like, why not? Because if I were tired of hearing it, maybe that would be a reason I would tune into Casuals, because I’d be like, ‘I just am sick of bumping into everything being brought to you by Kalshi.'”
Nolan goes to great lengths on her show to speak to surface-level sports fans or even non-sports fans. She frequently rails against the commercialization and corporate overreach into sports. So it would clash with the spirit of the show to air a bunch of gambling ads in the middle of it.
“It feels like sports and gambling on sports are too quickly becoming the same thing, instead of it being … that you can have a relationship with sports outside of a financial one,” she said.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.