Catherine Long

A couple of different ways.

Both companies have worked with college students who are online content creators, influencers on Instagram and TikTok to create content promoting both brands.

They've also reached out directly to college clubs, student groups and fraternities.

At a fraternity at Columbia University, Polymarket inked an affiliate deal with them.

Basically, for every student that fraternity members convinced to sign up for Polymarket's U.S.

app, which is rolling out shortly, the fraternity would get a certain amount of money back in their wallets.

And the fraternity was so successful at doing this that they featured in polymarket marketing material to other fraternities and student groups around the country that the company was trying to pitch on a similar deal.

They said the Columbia chapter raised over $30,000 in a span of two weeks, and it sent them a wooden plaque commemorating them as the inaugural polymarket pledge class.

The companies say they're not gambling, that they're offering financial products, and that the people who use their platforms are trading against each other, not a house, which is different than going to a casino, for instance.

But gambling and addiction experts have raised alarm bells because what we're seeing across the country is an increasing prevalence of problem gambling among young men in particular, people age 18 to 35.

And prediction markets do bear many similar features to online gambling apps.

You can bet on sports.

Kelshi even recently began offering a different way to view the platform that's much more similar to a traditional sports book.

The NCAA has taken a pretty negative tone towards prediction markets.

It's asked the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets,

to try to bar them from offering markets pertaining to college sports.

Its worry is really about the integrity of college athletics.

We've seen that when people are able to bet on college sports, it's possible that there are instances of activity like point shaving and match fixing.

The NCAA is trying hard to prevent that.

It also knows that when people are able to bet on college sports, college athletes come in for abuse if things don't go the way that bettors had wanted them to.