DraftKings launched out of Boston as a daily fantasy sports company on April 28, 2012, and from that day to present, for more than 14 years, FanDuel has been its chief rival. From the DFS wars, to the sportsbook wars, to both companies operating online casinos in a handful of states, to them both launching prediction products within three days of each other last December, it’s been DraftKings vs. FanDuel, head-to-head, toe-to-toe, mano-a-mano, for nearly a decade and a half.
This week, however, DK began picking a fight that makes one wonder if it doesn’t perceive FanDuel as its greatest rival anymore. Or, at least, that it doesn’t perceive FanDuel as its greatest threat.
First flagged Monday on social media site X by the account @DataBasedBets, DraftKings is taking very specific aim at Kalshi as the new NFL season gets underway — with a particular emphasis on alleging that making withdrawals from Kalshi is a slow and painful process.
In one spot, negative reviews of the Kalshi app are shown while a skeleton waits and waits and seemingly dies (even though skeletons are already dead, but let’s not get bogged down in the plot holes) waiting for its withdrawal:
And in a second ad, a spokesperson reads negative Kalshi app reviews aloud:
Some of the immediate reaction on X pushed back on the premise, with @Zach202_ saying, “Withdrawals have always come extremely quick and easy for me on Kalshi even in six figure amounts. So so many things to criticize and they pick one of the things Kalshi does the best imo,” and @aenews replying, “Lol weird angle, withdrawal speed is easily the most flexible part of the big pms.”
But the significant story here is not DraftKings’ approach to targeting Kalshi. It’s the fact that DK is naming and shaming Kalshi at all. It’s how telling it is about the state of the sports gambling (or trading, or predicting, or any other euphemistic term) industry as the 2026 NFL season gets rolling that DraftKings is so deliberately picking a fight with an upstart prediction market operator.
States and statements
DraftKings’ primary ad campaign this football season, starring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas and airing pretty much everywhere gambling commercials are shown, focuses on the fact that, thanks to the addition of DraftKings Predictions, one version or another of the DraftKings product line is now available in all 50 states:
For all the short-term and long-term legal uncertainty surrounding sports event contracts on prediction markets, DK is very clearly leaning into the vertical (just as Underdog increasingly is). The saying may be, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” but DraftKings’ strategic emphasis and advertising indicates they’ve both joined Kalshi and are placing a priority on beating Kalshi.
And as far as the old DraftKings vs. FanDuel rivalry goes, well, to bust out another cliché, that may be turning into a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation.
You can’t blame the old-guard sportsbooks (and by “old guard,” we mean operators that date back to 2018) for feeling threatened by the wave of prediction markets offering sports contracts. Especially in the wake of LeBron James wrapping up his partnership with DraftKings and revealing a new one last weekend with Polymarket — about as pronounced a representation of the shifting winds as you’ll find.
Predictable uptick
While DraftKings puts Kalshi directly in the crosshairs with its commercials, the rest of the prediction market world is, unsurprisingly, stepping up its advertising volume as football season commences.
In Aldrin Research’s measurement of prediction market ad volume trends, which tracks specifically the ad placements on Meta-owned social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, the ad blitz (pun partially intended) has been cranked up since football season began.
On Aug. 11, total prediction market ad volume across Meta was 1,065 placements, and the highest number it reached in August was 1,626 on Aug. 29. But volume broke 2,000 on Sept. 3 (2,059, to be precise) and skyrocketed on the official first day of NFL season, reaching 2,572 on Wednesday, the day of the Seahawks-Patriots kickoff game.
Kalshi is not, however, leading the way in active ads. As of Thursday mid-day, Betr was tops with 650 active ads, followed by PrizePicks (430) and Fanatics Markets (304), then Kalshi (270). Still, that Kalshi number from Aldrin Research is nearly as much as DraftKings Predictions (180) and FanDuel Predicts (140) combined.
A little over a decade ago, DraftKings and FanDuel were the two key players in the DFS advertising wars. The battleground has shifted several times since. But DraftKings and FanDuel remain in the trenches. They just have different primary targets now.
