By this point, I have now watched an astonishing amount of “Love Island USA,” which airs six nights a week (yes, six — it’s a commitment!) on Peacock during June and July.
To complement this, I have also consumed nearly as much screentime guzzling down TikToks about about the show.
This means I have seen more than one fan edit pairing clips of a contestant who wronged someone on the show with photos and videos of Saddam Hussein. (If you’re watching, you know why fans would make that comparison to KC, Sincere, and Kenzie.)
It also means I’ve been bombarded with ads for the prediction market Kalshi.
It’s not new that Kalshi advertises on TikTok and social media through partnerships with small creators — but this is a new targeted campaign directed at female “Love Island” fans like me.
Kalshi /TikTok
This is the first summer that Kalshi has had “Love Island-” related markets you can wager on. It appears that the new markets for the show, which has a mostly female audience, are working.
Barron’s recently reported on the “Love Island” bump, citing an Apptopia report showing that Kalshi’s female weekly active mobile users increased by 106% from the week of June 8 to June 28, while male users grew by 54%.
Elisabeth Diana, a spokesperson for Kalshi, told me that the World Cup is definitely a factor in the recent influx of female users, but that new prediction markets for “Love Island,” which has continued to grow its audience from last year and topped the reality ratings category for early June, are helping. (The betting markets on Kalshi aren’t associated with Peacock or the show itself.)
The TikTok ads I’ve been seeing are similar in concept to other Kalshi ads from creators: normal people posting about how, they say, they made easy money by winning bets on Kalshi.
One ad had women jumping in celebration with the caption “how our tuesday nights look ever since we started making money every time Kayda and Zach stay safe.” (Kayda, who fans call “The New Hampshire Grim Reaper,” and Zach are one of those couples where the fans love the girl and hate the guy; it’s complicated.)
Kalshi’s official account posted an ad where someone celebrates winning on a bet about keeping KC and Aniya safe (this was before Casa Amor, of course).
The ads aren’t all going over so well on TikTok. It seems that some young women are somewhat skeptical about prediction markets, and I saw a fair number of videos complaining about the ads and about Kalshi in general.
“So they got the men to bet on sports. They got them to spend all of their paychecks betting on sports,” one woman says in a video. “So now there’s ‘Love Island’ betting constantly on my For You Page? That’s a recession indicator.”
There’s another hiccup with betting on “Love Island.” There’s a day or two lag time between filming and the episodes airing, which means there’s a slew of people (production staff, hotel workers, the cast themselves) who know who got kicked off that week before the show airs, which could create an insider effect. One TikTok I saw was complaining about this because it effectively means prediction markets could “spoil” reality shows.
Currently, the Kalshi odds are strongly in favor of Trinity and Bryce winning (but anyone watching could’ve told you that). Right now, the market is just under $10 million, and the finale airs July 12.
May love triumph in the hearts and wallets of fans.
