Bombs Away

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In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Keurmerk Verantwoorde Affiliates (KVA), the Dutch casino affiliate quality mark, voiced concerns about the role of Google search in directing Dutch consumers towards illegal online gambling sites.

The group highlighted potential risks posed by Google’s organic search features beyond paid advertising, which include autocomplete and suggested queries. 

Using data collected primarily through Chrome’s incognito mode to exclude personalised search histories, the KVA identified several autocomplete and pre-fill search queries that directly suggested illegal gambling platforms to users.

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The investment banking and capital markets firm Jefferies said in a September report that sports had become prediction markets’ “most important liquidity driver”, with combo and parlay-style contracts accounting for an increasing share of activity. But the analysts cautioned that prediction markets are scale businesses with relatively low revenue yields, leaving their economics dependent on sustained liquidity, engagement and trading activity.

James Monk, founder of sports data and streaming provider Catalist Sports, has witnessed that dependence directly. Catalist supplies ITF tennis data to Kalshi and Polymarket and has an exclusive US sports-streaming agreement with Kalshi.

The company must also provide data to the firms making markets on those events.

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Funds held in customer accounts also declined sharply. Operators held £886.6 million ($1.19 billion), down 13.9% from the same point a year earlier.

Retail betting diverged significantly from the wider market, with non-remote betting GGY falling 3.3% to £2.4 billion ($3.2 billion). The number of betting shops dropped for a 12th consecutive reporting period to 5,617 premises—a 3.6% annual decline (down 208 shops from March 2025).

Other retail sectors performed better. Bingo GGY increased 8.2% to £703.8 million ($941.8 million), while arcade GGY rose 10.7% to £800.1 million ($1.07 billion).