Operators do not publish a single “dollars per depositing player” line item, but their own regulatory filings make the underlying economics traceable. DraftKings spent $1.26 billion on sales and marketing in 2024, equal to roughly a quarter of revenue, while Flutter Entertainment spent $3.68 billion globally in 2025. At the same time, American Gaming Association data show total sports betting advertising volume falling for a fourth straight year. The conclusion supported by the evidence: acquisition spend per active player is not shrinking, but where and how operators spend it is changing fast.
Key takeaways
- DraftKings’ sales and marketing expense grew just 5.3% in 2024 while revenue grew 30.1%, pulling the marketing-to-revenue ratio down from roughly 33% to roughly 27% even as GAAP advertising costs still topped $1 billion.
- Flutter Entertainment disclosed $3.68 billion in global sales and marketing spend for fiscal 2025 and has told investors that new-customer acquisition still pays back in under 18 months.
- AGA-commissioned research found total sports betting advertising spend fell 5% year-over-year in 2025 and sits 27% below its 2021 peak, even as handle and revenue keep climbing.
- New Jersey’s online sports betting tax rose from 13% to 19.75% on July 1, 2025, shrinking the margin available to fund acquisition without lengthening payback periods.
- Eilers & Krejcik Gaming reports prediction-market platforms acquiring customers through affiliates for roughly $200 versus about $250 for a traditional sportsbook customer, a new downward pressure point on acquisition pricing.
Table of contents
What customer acquisition cost actually measures
Customer acquisition cost (CAC), sometimes called player acquisition cost or cost-per-first-time-depositor, is nothing more exotic than total acquisition spend divided by the number of new depositing players a campaign or period produces. The complication for anyone trying to benchmark it across the industry is that no regulator or public company reports this figure directly. What operators disclose instead is an aggregate “sales and marketing” expense line that blends brand advertising, affiliate commissions, bonus costs and retention spend together, set against a player count (DraftKings calls theirs “Monthly Unique Payers”) that mixes new and returning customers. That means any number you see floating around describing a precise dollar figure “per FTD” is almost always a composite estimate from a marketing vendor or affiliate network rather than an audited disclosure — useful directionally, but not verifiable the way a 10-K line item is.
What is verifiable is the trend in the inputs: how much operators spend in aggregate, how that spend moves relative to revenue, and how regulators are changing the tax and promotional-credit rules that determine how much of a marketing dollar actually reaches a new player’s account. That is the lens this article uses. For the revenue side of the same unit economics, see our breakdown of where the money goes in a casino’s gross gaming revenue.
Inside the filings: DraftKings and Flutter
DraftKings’ 10-K for fiscal 2024 shows
revenue increased $1,102.3 million, or 30.1%, to $4,767.7 million in 2024, from $3,665.4 million in 2023
. Sales and marketing expense moved far more slowly:
sales and marketing rose from $1,200.7 million in 2023 to $1,264.9 million in 2024, a 5.3% increase
. Within that total, the company separately discloses its GAAP-defined advertising line:
during the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022, advertising costs calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP were $1,049.6 million, $984.4 million and $964.9 million, respectively
. Over the same period,
average monthly unique payers (MUPs) rose to 3.7 million in 2024, up from 2.7 million in 2023
.
That spending pattern has not stayed flat into 2026. By the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025,
DraftKings reported $442.6 million in “sales and marketing” costs for the quarter, up about 20% from the same quarter in 2024 ($368.6 million) and 52% from the same quarter in 2023 ($290.7 million)
. The company frames this spending internally around a payback discipline rather than a flat budget: in its Q1 2024 release, management said it was
investing in promotions and marketing in accordance with our LTV to CAC targets
while also managing toward a 50%-plus Adjusted EBITDA flow-through rate. The 2024 Jackpocket acquisition was explicitly pitched as a way to lower blended CAC through cross-selling, with DraftKings stating the deal would help by
improving our overall marketing efficiency similar to how our daily fantasy sports database created an advantage for DraftKings in OSB and iGaming
.
Flutter Entertainment, owner of FanDuel, shows a similar scale but a different trajectory.
Flutter Entertainment reported strong full-year 2025 results with revenue up 17% to $16,383 million and average monthly players increasing 14% to 15,911
(figures in thousands). Against that revenue base,
the company spent $3,678 million in sales and marketing globally in fiscal 2025 to ensure high levels of brand visibility throughout the year
— roughly 22% of group revenue. Flutter has also been explicit about payback timing: in guidance covering 2024 trends, the company described a
healthy customer acquisition opportunity with payback periods of less than 18 months
.
| Operator | Fiscal year | Revenue | Sales & marketing expense | Spend as share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DraftKings | 2023 | $3,665.4M | $1,200.7M | ~32.8% |
| DraftKings | 2024 | $4,767.7M | $1,264.9M | ~26.5% |
| Flutter Entertainment | 2025 | $16,383M | $3,678M | ~22.4% |
Ratios are calculated from the revenue and sales-and-marketing figures disclosed above.
The marketing-to-revenue ratio is shrinking faster than CAC itself
The headline trend in both companies’ disclosures is that marketing spend as a share of revenue is falling even while absolute dollar spend keeps climbing. That is consistent with a maturing market: a growing base of existing, already-acquired players generates more revenue without requiring proportionally more acquisition spend, so the blended ratio improves even if the true cost of landing a brand-new depositor in a newly legalized or heavily contested state stays flat or rises. This is the mechanism an analyst flagged years before the current tax changes, describing DraftKings as following a
disciplined marketing approach based on “permissible CAC” and continuing to acquire users at levels below the 2-3 year payback period that the company has talked about
, and predicting that
marketing costs should naturally subside as states mature, given the cost of promos for existing users is significantly lower than for new sign-ups
. The 2024–2025 filings show that dynamic playing out at the group level, even as quarter-specific spikes (like DraftKings’ Q4 2025 jump) show it is far from a smooth decline. For how this shift interacts with channel mix, see our analysis of why mobile devices captured over 53% of 2025 revenue and the counterpoint on why desktop still produces 45% of market revenue — different channels carry meaningfully different acquisition economics.
Taxes and promotional-credit rules are squeezing the acquisition budget
Acquisition economics do not exist in a vacuum from tax policy. New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement confirms that
effective July 1, 2025, the online sports wagering gross revenue tax rate increased from 13% to 19.75%
. Every incremental tax point on gross gaming revenue directly reduces the pool of money an operator can allocate to the bonus credits, affiliate commissions and media buys that make up acquisition spend, without changing what a new customer is worth. New Jersey remains one of the largest and most mature US markets:
for all of 2025, total gross gaming revenue was $6.98 billion, up 10.8% over 2024, with iCasino at $2.911 billion and sports at $1.177 billion
. A market of that size absorbing a near-7-point tax increase has an obvious incentive to tighten acquisition economics rather than simply pay more for the same player.
Promotional gaming credits — the free-bet and deposit-match mechanics that make up a large share of effective acquisition spend — are separately tracked and reported to the DGE on a monthly basis, underscoring how closely regulators now monitor the bonus side of the acquisition equation rather than treating it as an opaque marketing line. For context on how these deductions interact with the headline revenue figures operators report publicly, see our breakdown of gross gaming revenue.
Why a new state launch costs more than defending a mature one
Flutter’s quarterly disclosures give one of the cleanest public illustrations of how market age changes acquisition cost. Comparing early-2025 results to the prior year, the company reported
a year-over-year improvement in promotional spend of 50 basis points to 4.4% of handle as it lapped the impact of state launch investment in North Carolina in the prior year
. The pattern repeated at the end of 2025: Flutter’s Q4 results flagged
promotional spend of 5.8%, which was 180 basis points higher year-over-year, driven by its launch in Missouri and increased investment referenced at its Q3 earnings
. In both cases, a single new-state launch moved the group-wide promotional ratio by more than a full percentage point of handle — a proxy for the fact that acquiring a first cohort of players in a newly legalized state costs meaningfully more than retaining players in a market an operator has served for years. Our separate look at the global online gambling growth trajectory through 2035 covers how many more of these launch-driven spending cycles operators should expect as new jurisdictions come online.
Industry-wide: advertising volume is falling, not rising
At the market level, the American Gaming Association’s tracking shows the opposite of runaway ad spending.
U.S. commercial gaming industry revenue hit a record high of $78.72 billion in 2025, up 9.2% from the previous year
, and within that,
total revenue from commercial sports betting operations across the United States was $16.89 billion, an increase of 22.6% compared to the previous year
, on
total handle of $166.9 billion, up 11%, producing $3.7 billion in taxes, up 32.4% year-over-year
. Yet an AGA-commissioned study found
that despite increased betting activity, overall sportsbook advertising volume has continued its multi-year decline, with total sports betting advertising spend falling 5% year-over-year
. More specifically,
sports betting ad volume across all channels declined 1% year-over-year and sits 27% lower than the 2021 peak, while TV advertising volume declined 9% in 2025 and has fallen 50% since 2021
. For scale,
sports betting accounted for just 0.9% of TV advertising spend in 2025, compared with 1.5% for alcohol advertising
.
Part of that decline reflects a redirection rather than a reduction:
digital ad impressions for online sportsbooks declined nearly 14% in 2025, while impressions tied to prediction market advertising surged dramatically
. Prediction-market platforms are competing directly for the same new-depositor budget line, and according to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming’s September 2026 market monitor,
prediction markets are increasingly pressuring sportsbook acquisition economics even where direct cannibalization remains limited, with affiliate checks suggesting a CPA of roughly $200 for a prediction-market customer versus about $250 for a traditional sportsbook customer
. That gap gives affiliates and paid-media buyers a direct financial reason to route traffic toward the newer, cheaper-to-acquire category — a dynamic likely to keep compressing blended CAC for sportsbook-only brands over the next several quarters.
| Metric | 2025 figure |
|---|---|
| Total sports betting ad spend, year-over-year change | -5% |
| Ad volume across all channels vs. 2021 peak | -27% |
| TV ad volume, year-over-year change | -9% |
| TV ad volume vs. 2021 | -50% |
| Share of total US TV ad spend | 0.9% |
Frequently asked questions
What is the average customer acquisition cost in online gambling?
No regulator or public operator discloses an audited “average CAC” figure, because marketing spend is reported in aggregate and blends new and returning players. What is verifiable is that DraftKings’ total sales and marketing expense was $1.26 billion in 2024 against 3.7 million monthly unique payers, and Flutter spent $3.68 billion globally against 15.9 million average monthly players in 2025 — ratios that mix acquisition and retention spend together.
Why do acquisition costs rise even when overall ad spend falls?
Industry-wide ad volume has fallen for several years, per AGA-commissioned research, but spend is increasingly concentrated in bonus credits, affiliate commissions and new-state launch promotions rather than brand television. New Jersey’s 2025 tax increase from 13% to 19.75% on online sports betting revenue also reduces the margin available to fund acquisition without extending payback periods.
Why does acquiring a player in a newly legalized state cost more?
Flutter’s own disclosures show promotional spend as a share of handle rising by more than a percentage point in quarters immediately following launches in North Carolina and Missouri. A new state has no existing retained-player base to cross-sell into, so a higher share of every acquired player is a genuinely new, full-price customer.
Are prediction markets cheaper to acquire customers for than sportsbooks?
Early 2026 data from Eilers & Krejcik Gaming put affiliate-channel acquisition cost for a prediction-market customer at roughly $200, versus about $250 for a traditional sportsbook customer. That gap is pulling affiliate and paid-media budgets toward prediction-market platforms, adding a new competitive pressure on sportsbook acquisition pricing.
Methodology
GamblScout’s algorithm does not estimate a dollar CAC figure, since no reliable, audited per-player data exists across the industry. Instead, our scoring draws on the public signals outlined above — SEC filings’ sales-and-marketing and advertising expense lines, operator-disclosed payer counts, state regulator tax and revenue reports, and trade-body advertising trackers — to assess how an operator’s acquisition and retention spend trends relative to revenue growth. See our scoring system and algorithmic weights and data scraping methodology pages for more detail on how these signals are collected and weighted, and visit the macro economics of iGaming hub for related coverage.
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