Genius Sports Launches Prediction.com, an Oddschecker for Event Contracts

The site compares equivalent contracts across Kalshi, Polymarket, Novig, Underdog, FanDuel Predicts, Fanatics and five others, with a cross-venue engine for multi-leg positions and Genius's live game data underneath. It runs on Legend, the media business whose $1.2bn purchase in February sank the shares. Mark Locke says most prediction-market demand "appears new".

• Genius Sports launched Prediction.com on 17 September, a consumer site that lets users "discover prediction markets, compare equivalent event contracts across multiple platforms and follow how market probabilities change as events unfold", the company said
• The site currently shows data from 11 apps including Kalshi, Polymarket, Novig, Underdog, FanDuel Predicts and Fanatics, SBC News reports, and adds "a proprietary cross-venue, multi-leg pricing engine" for the multi-leg segment
• It is built on Legend, the consumer media and comparison business Genius bought for $1.2bn in February, a deal that drew a share-price fall the company blamed on the market reading Legend as "a simple affiliate business"
• For sports markets the site pairs Genius's official live game data with real-time contract pricing, so users can follow play-by-play alongside moving probabilities; Genius already supplies data and integrity services to prediction platforms
• Chief executive Mark Locke wrote this week that prediction markets are a "net benefit" for Genius: "I believe they create more businesses to supply, more ways to monetise the same sports activity and more competition for the customers we help operators win. Most of the demand they have surfaced appears new"

A Comparison Site for a Market That Says It Is Not a Betting Market

Genius Sports has launched Prediction.com, a consumer platform that aggregates markets and prices from the major prediction exchanges into a single destination, the company announced on Thursday. Users can "discover prediction markets, compare equivalent event contracts across multiple platforms and follow how market probabilities change as events unfold", it said; the site "brings markets and pricing from major prediction platforms into a single destination, allowing users to see how equivalent contracts are priced across different venues". For the fast-growing multi-leg segment it adds "a proprietary cross-venue, multi-leg pricing engine". SBC News, which likened the product to Oddschecker, the price-comparison affiliate for licensed sportsbooks, reports that the site currently displays data from 11 apps, including Kalshi, Polymarket, Novig, Underdog, FanDuel Predicts and Fanatics.

The platform is a product of Legend, the consumer media and technology business that Genius acquired for $1.2bn in February. That deal was received badly by the market, with a fall in the share price that Genius's leadership attributed to investors misreading Legend as a simple affiliate business; Prediction.com "builds on Legend's existing consumer and comparison technology while creating a new flagship brand for the rapidly expanding prediction market category", the company said. For sports markets it combines Genius's live game data with real-time contract pricing, so that a user can follow play-by-play action alongside changing probabilities, prices and market signals. Genius already provides official data and integrity services to the leading prediction platforms.

The company describes the consumer experience of prediction markets as "fragmented" and the site as the fix. "For prediction market platforms, Prediction.com provides a new destination through which consumers can discover markets and compare the information available across platforms," it said. "For Genius Sports, it creates a direct consumer presence at an increasingly important point in the prediction market journey: where users discover markets, compare contracts and pricing, follow live events and track outcomes." Coverage, functionality and partner integrations will expand "as the global prediction market ecosystem develops".

Locke's Case for the Category

Chief executive Mark Locke set out the company's view in a note this week, SBC News reports, describing prediction markets as a net benefit for Genius while acknowledging that the sector is waiting on regulatory decisions. "I believe they create more businesses to supply, more ways to monetise the same sports activity and more competition for the customers we help operators win," he wrote. "Most of the demand they have surfaced appears new." The category's growth has drawn in Genius's data rival too: Sportradar sells Polymarket 300,000 matches a year. The launch comes in a week when the Ninth Circuit called Kalshi's sports contracts Class III gaming on tribal land, Connecticut ordered nine platforms to stop offering them, and the Senate rejected the CLARITY Act.

An Odds Comparison Site Is the Most Betting-Like Thing You Can Build

Prediction markets' legal position rests on the claim that a contract on a game's outcome is a commodity, not a wager. Genius has just built for them the exact tool that the betting industry uses to shop prices: a comparison site, a multi-leg pricing engine for what a sportsbook would call parlays, and live game data so a user can follow the action while a position moves. The product is useful precisely because the contracts behave like bets, and every state attorney general litigating that question now has a screenshot. Genius has been careful with the vocabulary, "contracts", "venues", "probabilities", and SBC News was not, calling it Oddschecker in the headline. Both are right, which is the problem for the exchanges.

Legend Was Bought for This

The share price fell in February because investors thought Genius had paid $1.2bn for an affiliate. Prediction.com is Genius's answer: the comparison technology that Legend runs for sportsbooks, pointed at a category with no incumbent, before Oddschecker's owner or anyone else builds one. If prediction markets keep growing, a neutral-looking comparison layer that can take a referral on every click is the best seat in the house, and it is a seat Genius could not have bought later. If regulators shut sports contracts down, it is an affiliate site for a product that does not exist. Locke's "net benefit" is a bet on the first outcome, and this launch is the stake.

The Data Supplier Has Become the Shop Window

Genius supplies the official data that prices these contracts and the integrity monitoring that polices them, and now runs the storefront where consumers choose which exchange to trade on. That is a lot of the value chain for one company to hold, and it mirrors what Genius already does in betting, where it sells data to the books and traffic to them through Legend. The exchanges welcomed a data partner; they now have a channel partner that decides which of them a customer sees first. In sportsbook affiliate economics, that partner usually ends up with the pricing power.

Genius Sports has put a price-comparison site in front of a market that insists it is not a bookmaker. The customers will use it like one.