It’s clear to anyone who watches television in a state where gambling is legal that gambling ads are becoming more common. But new numbers show just how quickly they have grown.
The cost of television ads for online gambling and gambling services jumped to $725 million in 2021, up from $292 million in 2020, according to Nielsen. To put that into context, gambling companies now spend three times as much on ads as cereal companies do.
And there’s still quite a bit of room to grow. Gambling-related ads are about 1% of the total TV ad market and are dwarfed by the auto industry, which spent $7.9 billion last year, according to Nielsen.
