A new study from CBC’s Marketplace and researchers in the U.K. finds that sports fans are exposed to gambling advertisements about three times a minute during a sports broadcast.
I know it has gotten bad in Canada because of our expanded gambling laws but are Americans also bombarded with gambling ads during sports broadcasts?
I don’t watch much in the way of live sports (the occasional Premier League or USL football match, and a couple of MiLB games), or live TV in general.
When sports betting became legal in Connecticut a couple of years ago, for several months it became impossible to avoid ads for the various sports books. Every commercial break there was at least one, and if I didn’t have ad-blocking on my web browser, I would be targeted.
It’s not quite that bad anymore – I think we’re back to mostly pharmaceutical and trial lawyer ads, plus later this year in some markets we’ll be drowning in political ads – but at least on the EPL games we do get exposed to the ads shown on the signs around the pitch.
I think this is what we are experiencing so hopefully it will also run its course here.
Watching football and pretty much every commercial break has either DraftKings or some other gambling thing.
We are largely spared these types of ads in Canada, thankfully.
How else would you know to ask your doctor if Facealoft is right for you?
The sports radio station by me that my son always requests has about 80% gambling, 10% lawyer, 10% Kars4Kids ads. And their evening programming now includes BetMGM Tonight for an hour or two, so that’s effectively one big ad and raises the total to pretty close to 100%.
Yeah, it is a challenge for Canadians as TV ads for prescription drugs are generally prohibited here. Only a few exceptions are permitted. The contrast with the US situation is notable whenever I tune in to CNN.
(In US) I’d say 1 in 5 YouTube ads I get are for gambling, and 1 in 4 Reddit ads. It seems even more prevalent than alcohol ads nowadays. At least in the online space - of course IRL, alcohol ads are everywhere. (Interestingly, I’m also starting to get cannabis ads, even though YouTube doesn’t allow videos to show cannabis being inhaled.)
Makes me wonder how a gambling-addicted friend I cut out is doing. He got his shit together after failing out of college for staying at the casino until 4 AM most nights. Hope he’s stayed clean.
I found this graph illustrating “representation by population” for various countries to be interesting. It shows that the USA does a relatively good job in this regard. Certainly much better than Canada does!
Canadian “ridings” are comparable to congressional districts in the USA. Thus this is just a comparison of the representation in our respective Houses. The Senate picture would be very different!
That is really interesting; thanks for sharing. It’s obviously only looking at the House of Representatives, which is roughly by population as based on the decennial census, but the districts aren’t perfectly even due to rounding and the distinction that a district cannot go into multiple states.
The Senate is just 2 Senators per state so the ratio of biggest to smallest there is the quotient of the populations of California and Wyoming (most & least populous states).
In the past the House has been more lopsided. The Constitution spells out that each state gets at least one representative. That’s not currently relevant… Wyoming would get one even if that were not stipulated. But I believe it has at times been relevant. (If a state is less that roughly 0.115% of the population of all 50 states then when you round they’d be entitled to 0 representatives.)
Without actually checking my guess is that the smallest congressional districts might be the two in Rhode Island. I know RI was right on the cusp of losing their second rep in the last decennial census.
And the largest is likely Montana’s at-large district. They’re on the cusp of getting a second representative, I believe.
Yup. I thought about how a comparable chart for your Senate would look and it would be crazy looking! But the US Senate has never been about representation by population but about representation by state.
When Canada eventually merges with the US, I just hope the US Senate representation approach will apply so that each Canadian province and territory has two senators!
When Canada merges with the US, where will all the people who currently say they want to move to Canada, go?
You can always move to Greenland. 
I read an interesting book, This Cold Heaven, by/about a woman who did exactly that. It did not inspire me to follow in her footsteps!
They would then easily be able to move to the “Blue Provinces” of the former Canada from the “Red States” of the former USA. However the newly enlarged USA will be such a better place to live than the old USA that no one will want to leave.
Of course, this assumes the new USA will have the best of both countries rather than the worst.
I read a Clive Cussler Book (Dirk Pitt) a long time ago about this sort of thing.
The United States of Canada
Thats the name he came up with. I thought the name for a unified country had a nice ring to it.
There will be quite a few refugees from Colorado (and maybe New Mexico).
That configuration works for me.
