Study Links Gambling Ad Volume to Spikes in Addiction Help Searches

Online gambling advertising spending tracks spikes in searches for gambling addiction help more closely than the legal status of betting does, according to a University of Colorado Boulder study published this month in the journal Policy & Internet.

The paper, "From Ads to Addiction: The Role of Online Gambling Advertising Spend in Problem Gambling Search Trends," was written by advertising professor Chris Vargo and Toby Hopp of CU Boulder's College of Media, Communication and Information, with Harsha Gangadharbatla of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It pairs a decade of advertising expenditure data with search trends across 41 states and with the passive digital records of 419 individuals.

The authors are careful about what the findings mean. The study is correlational. It identifies associations between advertising and behavior, not proof that a given ad caused a given bet, and it does not establish a threshold of exposure below which gambling advertising is harmless.

What the researchers actually measured

Two datasets sit underneath the paper. The first is quarterly gambling advertising spending from 2014 through 2023, matched against Google search volume for 116 distinct gambling addiction help queries across 41 states.

The second is more unusual. Working from a YouGov/RealityMine panel that combines survey responses with passive digital trace data — website and app visits, video plays, searches, social media activity, and the advertising each person was served — the team narrowed to 419 users and watched what happened around the ads they saw.

Vargo said the state-by-state legalization of sports betting from 2018 onward functioned as a natural experiment, because advertising arrived in each market at a different time. "We thought it might be like marijuana — it becomes legalized, it takes a little time and then takes off," he said. "And while that's true here, it's really the introduction of advertising in each of these states that clearly signals the growth of sports betting."

That sequencing is the study's central claim: the advertising rollout, more than the legal change itself, lines up with the rise in help-seeking searches.

The pause that advertising interrupts

The most concrete finding concerns what the authors call clean exposures — 24-hour windows in which a person's digital record shows no gambling activity at all.

Across those windows, 8.3 percent of advertising exposures were followed by some gambling touchpoint by the same user within 24 hours. In plain terms: someone who had stopped betting for a day was pulled back roughly once in twelve times an ad reached them.

"These sites are targeting these gamblers who've stepped away, to nudge them back in," Vargo said. He compared it to retail retargeting — the toaster that follows a shopper around the internet after it sits in a cart — with a different consequence, because the product being re-sold is the one the person is trying to stop using.

Exposure is heaviest where risk is highest

Vargo's team found that heavy exposure clustered among the people most likely to be harmed by it. "No surprise that people that self-reported as being gamblers were the ones that were seeing most of the gambling ads," he said, "but what was most problematic was that those that self-reported to us that they had a problem with gambling were actually the ones that were seeing the most ads."

Some panel members were served 50, 100 or more gambling advertisements in a single week. The study could not identify a safe level of exposure because it did not find one — the relationship ran in the same direction across the range the data covered.

Platform controls are the obvious counterweight, and they largely do not exist for this category. Social platforms let users hide alcohol advertising, Vargo noted. "But I don't know of any that allow you to hide gambling."

When the ads arrive

Spending and help-seeking searches rose together around predictable calendar events: the NCAA Division I basketball tournament, the Super Bowl, and the end of a sports season or calendar year — the last a period Vargo associates with people trying to recoup losses before a cutoff.

The study also covered casino games, lotteries, skill-based games and financial betting, not just sportsbooks. Among the non-sports products the authors flagged are prediction market platforms, which have expanded the range of events people can wager on and which have drawn regulatory attention of their own as states argue over whether they are gambling at all.

Colorado legalized sports betting in 2020, becoming the tenth state to do so; nearly 40 states now permit some form of athletic wagering. Colorado regulators tightened advertising and deposit rules in August, a change Vargo said could matter, particularly for push notifications, which he believes exert a stronger pull than display advertising.

What the paper implies for policy

The authors do not propose a specific ad ban. Their recommendations run toward structural limits — caps and rules around free bets and other enticements, stronger platform oversight, and counter-messaging aimed at the moment of activation: a search for a betting app, a social feed serving a betting ad.

For people already struggling, that last point is the practical one. Gambling disorder treatment works through the same channels as other behavioral health care — outpatient counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, and in severe cases residential programs — and the study's finding is essentially that the marketing environment works against the moment a person decides to look for it.

Vargo said he is now mining Reddit for a follow-up project, using several thousand self-identified gamblers who have posted for at least three years, to test whether gambling correlates with divorce, financial harm and other long-term outcomes. That work will face the same limitation as this one: observational data can show what moves together, not what causes what.

Regulators are approaching the same problem from the account side rather than the advertising side. New Jersey this week made behavioral triggers mandatory for licensed operators, requiring account-level intervention when play patterns cross state-defined thresholds. Colorado's own August rules tightened advertising and deposit limits, though the state has not published the numeric thresholds involved. Anyone in Colorado seeking help can call or text 1-800-GAMBLER, the state's gambling helpline.