Polymarket, the prediction market platform, is paying social media users to quote-retweet content from its branded esports accounts. The program includes over 800 participants, according to posts by a Polymarket representative in an internal Discord, and offers rates ranging from $10 to several hundred per post, paid in crypto.

Paying social media users to engage with content is not illegal, and the Polymarket program has robust guidelines around disclosure and the kinds of quote retweets the company is looking for. But the slight “Paid partnership” tag on X — a common sight on the app, and the only public indication that there’s money changing hands — belies the scale and sophistication of Polymarket’s esports operation, which has more than doubled in size since August. And all the while, in the Discord, Polymarket representatives have repeatedly reminded participants in the program to write posts in a way that should appear “organic,” in what one expert said was an effort to ingratiate the prediction market with esports fans and casual observers.

“Literally this needs to look organic and if your X profile looks like Polymarket billboard that looks absoutely [sic] awful,” wrote one Polymarket rep in the Discord.

Polymarket offers two products: Polymarket Global, which is inaccessible to bettors in the United States, and Polymarket US, which is subject to U.S. regulations. In esports — a growing market for the company — Polymarket offers lines around the outcomes of major events and matches, player statistics, as well as novelty bets, including some relating to the teams that players might transfer to in the off-season.¹

The prediction market company’s esports outreach is something of an open secret in the esports world — with an emphasis on “open.” Some social media users have expressed dismay over the increasing prevalence of gambling and betting-adjacent companies in the esports scene, having previously been burnt by “here today, gone tomorrow” attention from deep-pocketed crypto companies and venture capital firms. But while elements of the paid marketing program have previously been reported, little concrete information has been revealed until now about the logistical apparatus behind it, the costs involved, and the Discord server from which the program is run — even as the payments by Polymarket to creators have inspired speculation and debate among esports fans.

Emails to Polymarket’s official press line seeking comment, as well as direct messages to numerous Polymarket representatives from the Discord seeking interviews, went unanswered.

A list of participants in the Discord includes prominent esports commentators, current and former professional players, team coaches and managers, media entrepreneurs and content creators, PR professionals, amateur roster reporters, employees of esports tournament organizers, and various social media gadflies.

When figures like that quote-retweet posts like the one embedded below with a sentence or two of commentary, they may be receiving tens or even hundreds of dollars in compensation.

Still, many of the posters paid to quote-retweet Polymarket’s content are virtual unknowns, with low four-figure follower counts on X.

Prospective participants in the marketing program are typically contacted via social media or email. If they show interest in continuing the conversation, they’re brought into a Polymarket Discord server. In that server, dedicated channels for individual esport titles ping users about the tweets they should quote-retweet — which generally focus on some ongoing event or storyline, and the corresponding market on which users can bet, which is linked to in the post.

“New tweet is up: Like + QRT. Replies appreciated,” reads a typical message, which includes a link to the tweet. “Text-only quote from your own account. Counts for the next 24 hours only.” These messages used to also include the phrase “+ Paid Partnership tag,” urging users to disclose their participation in the program. That text has not appeared on the Discord prompts since late August, for reasons that were not immediately clear.

Users are concurrently onboarded to a proprietary tool called PolyTrack, a dashboard into which they can input their tax information, crypto wallet address, and eventually, the quote-retweets for which they will be paid. The platform tracks monthly and lifetime earnings, and offers guidance about the kinds of posts that meet the program’s criteria. 

While this report is exclusively focused on Polymarket’s promotional efforts on X, PolyTrack also includes the option to input video and streaming platforms.

The amount users are paid is negotiated upon entry into the program, and is based on how many views their tweets generally received before entry. The payout is not determined by engagement metrics on the paid quote-retweets. 

“Someone averaging 2,000 views can't ask for $50 per post, and the same logic works the other way,” wrote a Polymarket rep in the Discord last week, when discussing the process of onboarding new posters. “That holds no matter who you are in the scene. The only exception is Tier 1 casters, talent, creators and players, who can get higher rates because of how well known they are.”

Two users who spoke with ReaderGrev showed fees of $45 and $75 per post. Another participant described negotiating a fee in the $200-300 range. One user shared with ReaderGrev a PolyTrack screenshot showing that they made nearly $900 in just one month from approximately a dozen posts.

Two other participants in the program said payouts bottomed out at $10; one of them added that they had heard that $400 was the upper end of the range. Program members are paid in crypto; in a July post in the Discord, a Polymarket rep said the team had phased out an earlier payment method, PayPal, because its accounts kept “getting blocked” due to the high volume of payments.

The program offers users other opportunities to make money. “When you bring someone into the program, you earn 3% of what they make, every month, for as long as they stay in the program,” wrote one Polymarket representative in the Discord.

The program appears to be growing — and fast. At the start of August, one Polymarket representative said on Discord that “300+ creators” were participating in the program. Two months later, a different representative put the tally at “800+.”

Still, the company’s scattershot approach to outreach has on multiple occasions drawn the ire of creators who oppose gambling or betting.

“I don't ever reply to gambling sponsor outreach so I just delete and move on,” said Cloud Sidky, a League of Legends content creator who was approached by Polymarket in September. “I'm personally against sports betting, and even more against prediction markets.”

The exact cost of the program to Polymarket is difficult to estimate. The platform’s four esports accounts on X differ in size, and there are varying numbers of creators in each game’s program. The DotA 2 program has offered just one post for paid promotion in October, one in September, and two in August. The League of Legends, Valorant, and Counter-Strike programs, by contrast, have shared nearly one post per day in the past few weeks, with Valorant activity ramping up around the Champions event that marks the end of the game’s annual competitive circuit. On Wednesday, a Polymarket rep in the Discord server sought to hype up participants in the lead up to Worlds, the year’s capstone League of Legends event, saying they could expect more posts to come up for promotion each day. (He appended a 🤑 emoji to his message, and told users to post “plenty in between so it looks organic if your gonna QRT daily.”)

Polymarket’s total payout to creators per post for the more popular programs likely numbers in the four digits. A conservative estimate — assuming that the bulk of posters are being paid on the lower end of the spectrum — places the payout between $2,000 and $4,000 per post. These estimates are almost certainly an undercount; the figure can swing dramatically based on the number of highly-paid users engaging with any individual post. Just a few creators with a hundred or several-hundred dollar fee can dramatically increase the cost to Polymarket.

Posts linked to the paid quote-retweet program see substantially more engagement — particularly quote retweets — than other posts from the Polymarket branded accounts.

Polymarket’s approach to social media — paying influencers in the space to engage with its content — is a shortcut to reaching an endemic audience without having to build that audience from scratch, said Jake Steinberg, a writer and adjunct professor of social media strategy at Villanova University.

“If I follow 10 esports accounts and all 10 independently appear to be talking about something like Polymarket over the course of a few days or a week, then Polymarket has maybe successfully bought this kind of repeated exposure to me,” Steinberg said. “Even if I don't click anything, that actually does become valuable [to Polymarket], because I am becoming familiar with the name and what the product does, and the idea that Polymarket is relevant in this world that I am interested in.”

“That's a very different effect on me as the viewer” compared to a normal advertisement, Steinberg added.

In a document shared with users during onboarding, Polymarket instructs creators to clearly disclose their relationship with the platform.

“The disclosure must be clear, conspicuous, in plain language, and not hidden,” according to a document titled External Marketing Guidelines. At a glance, many of the quote-retweets of Polymarket-branded esports posts include the default X “paid partnership” disclosure tag.

The document also prohibits users from recommending trades.

“Polymarket’s Consultants are not investment advisors and recommendations from Consultants as to specific trades or trading strategies exposes both Polymarket and the Consultant to legal risk,” the document reads. “A verbal disclaimer that ‘this is not financial advice’ does not solve this problem and such a disclaimer is insufficient to eliminate the risk of legal action.”

The document continues: “A Consultant may discuss his or her own trades (assuming he/she has actually made such trades) and the rationale for making those trades but may never suggest or recommend that others make the same trade.” The bolding and underlining on “never” are present in the document.

PolyTrack, meanwhile, offers guidance around what makes a good post — and what doesn’t.

Post “your own take, reaction, or analysis. One sharp sentence beats a generic line every time,” reads one of the “Do This” bullet points.

“Post in your normal voice and give people a reason to reply,” reads another. “Questions and hot takes start conversations.”

By contrast, users are told to avoid low-effort and off-topic captions: “‘wow’, ‘crazy’, or a row of emojis … underperform and stand out in review for the wrong reason.”

“Staff review every caption,” the guidelines note. “Strong, on-topic captions help submissions get verified faster and maintain a high standard across the program.”

Though prediction markets have drawn scrutiny from some corners, some participants in the program have defended Polymarket’s model.

“I feel fine participating because Polymarket has no house edge or VIG,” wrote Justin “Trick” Sears, a former professional Valorant player, in a direct message, referring to fees charged by bookmakers.

Sears added that he had turned down a $50,000 six-month deal offered to him by another “active company in the space” because the company offered slots on their website. “Prediction markets are PVP thats the way i look at it,” he wrote.

“I’m honestly not sure why people treat this as some sort of scandal. It’s all very above-board,” said another user who has posted content sponsored by Polymarket, and who requested anonymity because they are not a representative for the company. “The quote RTs are all flagged as promotion as is the original tweet. I don’t know how it could be more clear. If there is a complaint it should be on Twitter’s side regarding how paid advertising is handled on the platform.”

Prediction market activity in esports has surged over the past two years, in part because the bigger sportsbooks see esports as a niche and sometimes even unappealing offering relative to traditional sports.

“The appetite was always there for people to bet” in esports, said Ollie Ring, who writes the Lootboxes & Leftovers newsletter, which has covered the intersection of gaming and gambling. “What then came is an influx of people who saw money and went: ‘I need a piece of that.’” 

But when that first wave of interest happened, the product wasn’t ready, Ring said. “The development wasn't there. The data deals, the integrity structure, all of it around it wasn't ready for the amount of people that came in wanting a slice of this proverbial pie. … [Now,] operators are like: ‘I don't want to touch esports because we tried it in 2018, nine, eight years ago and it lost us a load of money.’ … And sportsbooks don't like losing money. They like your typical fluffy NFL parlays where people put 12 teams in an accumulator and then lose their money.”

Prediction markets, by contrast, “offer the first real opportunity to address the market at a national level, and I think there is a lot of overlap, or at least more overlap, [between] prediction markets and esports than traditional betting and esports,” wrote Cody Luongo, a media consultant who authors the Sharpr newsletter, in a direct message. Luongo said the former category leaned “younger, hipper, crypto-native.

Riot Games, which publishes League of Legends and Valorant and runs the two games’ esports circuits, has reportedly held discussions with Polymarket and Kalshi, a competing prediction market company, about esports sponsorship deals.

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