Netflix’s push into the betting world is happening on two fronts at once — its ad business is now actively courting gambling brands, and its documentary arm is turning the cameras on the very prediction-market boom fueling that industry’s growth, a coincidence of timing that captures just how central wagering culture has become to the streamer's strategy.
Netflix has brought in its first executive dedicated to working with real-money gaming brands as the company pushes to expand advertising beyond its traditional subscription business. The hire is Ian Hunter, who joins Netflix’s London operation after more than eight years at Snap Inc., where he held senior commercial roles spanning account management, client partnerships and sales leadership. Hunter isn’t new to gambling, either — he previously worked at The Stars Group as Global Digital Marketing Manager between 2017 and 2019, before the company merged with Flutter Entertainment in 2020.
Hunter described Netflix as a business with major commercial momentum, citing its expanding live programming and large global audience, and said his new role will focus on introducing advertisers to Netflix’s growing ad platform.
The move fits a broader pattern at Netflix. Advertising has become one of the company’s biggest strategic priorities since it launched a lower-priced, ad-supported plan in late 2022, and while membership revenue generated roughly $42 billion of Netflix’s $45.3 billion in total 2025 revenue, executives expect ad revenue to roughly double by 2027 as inventory expands across entertainment, live events and sports. That expansion has leaned heavily on live sports — Netflix now carries Major League Baseball, Christmas Day NFL games, and the FIFA Women’s World Cups in 2027 and 2031 — the kind of real-time viewing that advertisers, betting brands included, prize most.
The timing isn’t without friction. Hunter’s appointment arrives as gambling advertising faces tighter oversight across Europe, with regulators enforcing the EU Digital Services Act pushing large platforms to strengthen controls over gambling promotions and targeted advertising — a climate that has already produced major enforcement action, including a penalty exceeding €120 million against X.
Just two days after the Hunter news broke, Netflix put the spotlight on the wagering world itself. At the end of July, the streamer released “Instadocs: The Prediction Games,” a rapid-turnaround documentary examining the explosion of prediction markets — platforms where more than $5.6 billion was wagered on the World Cup final alone through Polymarket and Kalshi. The film features interviews with Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, and Michael Selig, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and asks a pointed question: when bettors harass war reporters to manufacture fake news, or hackers fake Spotify streams to win payouts, has reality itself become a target for manipulation?
The documentary is the second installment of “Instadocs,” Netflix’s quick-turnaround documentary series designed to arrive at the height of a story’s news cycle, following its debut on the Alex Murdaugh case. It’s produced by Words + Pictures, with Steve Yaccino as showrunner.
Taken together, the two stories point in the same direction: betting-adjacent industries are becoming a meaningful part of Netflix’s identity, both as an advertiser category and as programming that reliably draws an audience.
With a market value of about $310 billion and more than 300 million subscribers globally, Netflix has the scale to make betting brands and betting culture a fixture of its business on multiple fronts at once.
