A landmark analysis led by the University of Cambridge has uncovered a significant gender imbalance in how gambling advertisements are delivered on Meta platforms in Ireland.
The research, which analyzed 411 unique advertisements from 88 licensed operators between March 2024 and February 2025, found that male accounts were reached more than twice as often as female accounts.
Data and Demographics
Leveraging data made transparent by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), researchers found that the ads reached 12,690,245 male accounts compared to just 5,458,438 female accounts, a ratio of 2.3:1. The study also highlighted a heavy concentration on young adults, with the 25–44 age bracket accounting for nearly 60% of the total reached audience.
One of the most striking findings was the reach of a single Betfair advertisement, which was seen by over 1.3 million unique accounts, representing roughly 26% of Ireland’s entire population. While only 22% of ads explicitly targeted men, Meta’s internal algorithms skewed the delivery strongly toward male users, likely due to the prevalence of sports and football themes.
Expert Warnings on Vulnerability
Dr. Elena Petrovskaya, lead author of the report, expressed concern over the “dizzying” reach of these digital campaigns:
“But even when adverts were set to reach all genders, they still reached that very vulnerable group of young men. It shows that if companies just put ads on social media, they are still reaching young men – the group we know from other research is most at risk of gambling harms.”
The data serves as a baseline for assessing the impact of Ireland’s Gambling Regulation Act 2024, which took effect in March 2025. This new law introduced a 5:30 AM to 9:00 PM broadcast watershed and restricted social media ads to users who already follow licensed operators, a move designed to mitigate the normalization of betting behaviors among at-risk demographics.
