--- title: "Sydney Sweeney’s Ad Annoyed the Athletes, and Novig’s Deposits Tripled" description: "A prediction market found that ‘no betting on wars or deaths’ is a sales pitch, and that outrage is also a sales pitch" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-03T13:30:48Z modified: 2026-10-03T17:55:43Z url: https://rews.cc/a/sydney-sweeney-s-ad-annoyed-the-athletes-and-novig-s-deposit-fa2884 language: en tags: ["prediction-markets", "sports", "advertising", "regulation", "sydney-sweeney", "business"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Sydney Sweeney’s Ad Annoyed the Athletes, and Novig’s Deposits Tripled *A prediction market found that ‘no betting on wars or deaths’ is a sales pitch, and that outrage is also a sales pitch* By Nate Ledger · October 3, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/sydney-sweeney-s-ad-annoyed-the-athletes-and-novig-s-deposit-fa2884 ## In brief - Novig launched as a federally regulated sports prediction market in August and ran a Sydney Sweeney ‘Just Sports’ ad from September 9 - Sweeney took an undisclosed equity stake after liking the platform’s no-war, no-death, no-politics stance, per co-founder Jacob Fortinsky - Trading volume rose nearly 94% and first-time depositors jumped more than 218% around the campaign, CNBC reports - Some female athletes criticized the ad; Fortinsky said Novig has ‘nothing to apologize for’ - The Wall Street Journal says Novig is raising at a $2 billion valuation, up from $500 million at its February Series B There is a well-known problem in the prediction market business: how do you, a federally regulated upstart that launched a sports event-contract platform on August 4, attract users away from Kalshi and Polymarket, which are bigger and earlier and also sell sports? You could compete on fees, or product, or liquidity. Or you could hire Sydney Sweeney. Novig hired Sydney Sweeney. The 29-year-old actress fronted a racy ad campaign, “Just Sports,” unveiled September 9, in which she explained the platform’s differentiating policy: “No betting on wars or deaths, and no politics.” Novig, unlike its larger rivals, sticks to sports event contracts. And here is the part of the story I find genuinely charming: according to Novig co-founder Jacob Fortinsky, it was this bit of positioning that got Sweeney interested — she approached Novig about taking an equity stake in the company because she liked that it didn’t offer markets on wars, deaths or politics. The company wouldn’t tell CNBC how big the stake is. Consider the celebrity-influencermarketing complex: we are now at the point where a star endorses a prediction market by becoming a shareholder in it, which aligns the incentives nicely, and then the ad is about the markets the company refuses to list. Did it work? Fortinsky shared the numbers exclusively with CNBC. Comparing the 20 days before the campaign with the 20 days after, trading volume rose nearly 94% and first-time depositors surged more than 218%. Active users climbed 96% month over month and 260% year over year in September, and app downloads jumped more than 187%. A 218% rise in first-time depositors means more than three times as many new money-arriving users as before the ad. Fortinsky says he did not expect the ad plus the start of the NFL season to pull in that much volume or that many first-time users. One suspects the we-hired-a-movie-star forecast models priced in quite a lot, and reality came in above. The ad also drew backlash from some female athletes, who argued that the way Sweeney delivered the message undercut progress on how women in sports are perceived. Novig, a platform whose entire brand is that it respects sports enough to only take bets on sports, was accused of disrespecting the people who play them. Fortinsky’s response is worth reading closely, because it is a kind of masterpiece of the genre: the ad’s purpose, he said, was not to represent female athletes but to drill down what Novig provides; he respects the opinions circulated; he and his team are fans of women’s sports. And then: “Ultimately, I think we have nothing to apologize for and are very proud of the work that we did. We honestly were very happy with … how positive the overall reception of the campaign was.” “We have nothing to apologize for” is, of course, the rational statement when the metric you are actually managing is first-time depositors, and those are up 218%. The people upset about the ad were giving the ad its second and third news cycles. The ad worked twice: once as an ad, and once as a controversy about an ad. Novig’s wider strategy has the same energy — pick fights you can afford, decline revenue on principle where it buys brand. Shortly after launch, the company sued multiple states to assert that states cannot regulate its sports event contracts, on the theory that a federally regulated prediction market answers to Washington, not to state gambling commissions. This is the live legal brawl of the moment: a [federal appeals panel just ruled the other way](https://rews.cc/a/appeals-court-rules-states-can-enforce-gambling-laws-against-84ee69) for Kalshi, holding that states can enforce their gambling laws against sports event contracts, and [New York has sued Polymarket](https://rews.cc/a/new-york-sues-polymarket-calling-its-prediction-market-unlic-734764) as unlicensed gambling. Novig has also limited its own platform to users 21 and older, even though it admits that costs it revenue by shrinking its user base; Kalshi and Polymarket US take users 18 and up. Raising your own minimum age while suing to stop states from regulating you is an interesting two-handed posture — “we are more responsible than the law requires, and also, please stop making laws about us” — but as positioning it is entirely coherent: the customer you want is the one who believes sports contracts aren’t gambling. Fortinsky framed all of this as culture. “We have to be willing to take outsized risk relative to the size of the company, doing that in a responsible way, of course,” he said, adding, “I think we will continue to embody that aggressive risk-taking culture.” Aggressive risk-taking is a good phrase for a company whose product is, strictly speaking, other people taking risks. The market seems to be rewarding the culture. The Wall Street Journal reported Novig is raising funding at a $2 billion valuation; in February it raised a $75 million Series B at a $500 million valuation, per Forbes. If both numbers hold, the company’s paper value has quadrupled in about eight months, which is a decent return on launching a platform, hiring an actress and getting yelled at. Novig declined to say how much it is raising or from whom. (One disclosure from the source material: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship including customer acquisition and a minority investment — the prediction-market beat is a small world.) Anyway. The sum of the strategy is this: a sports book that won’t take your action on elections, won’t take your action if you’re 20, and won’t wait for a state attorney general to sue before suing first. It turns out there is a large market of people who find that pitch credible — or at least who will download an app to look at Sydney Sweeney explain it. The line between finance, sports and entertainment has been dissolving for years; Novig’s contribution is realizing you can hire the entertainment outright.