The $1.1 Billion Attention Machine: What DraftKings' Advertising Budget Buys

The number is real. The shortcut is wrong.

DraftKings recorded $1.1248 billion in advertising costs in 2025. That audited number comes from the company's Form 10-K, not an estimate or a marketing-industry projection. It establishes the scale of DraftKings' advertising category. It does not support an NFL-only interpretation.

That distinction is the entire story. Public filings reveal the scale of the attention machine and the categories inside it. They do not reveal how much went to football, television, ESPN, one team, one campaign, or one viewer. What they do reveal, year after year, is how fast the machine grew.

Eight years of advertising, one filing at a time

DraftKings was a heavy advertiser before it ever took a legal sports bet. In the month before September 20, 2015, it aired more than 25,000 television ads nationwide, more than any other brand, according to ad tracker iSpot.tv as reported by The Boston Globe. Those were daily fantasy ads, and no audited total exists for them. The audited series starts in 2018, the year the Supreme Court opened the way for states to legalize sports betting.

Every figure below is the advertising cost DraftKings reported in its annual filings. Scroll through the years; the line draws as you go.

Two things stand out. The first is the surge. Between 2019 and 2021, advertising went from $152.2 million to $831.1 million, more than five times as much in two years, as state after state opened. In its 2021 filing, DraftKings attributed $367.8 million of that year's sales-and-marketing increase to acquiring and retaining players, and most of the remainder to team and league sponsorships.

The second is the flattening. From 2022 onward the line rises by single or low double digits a year, even though 11 more states and Washington, D.C., launched in that time. The 2023 and 2025 filings put the extra advertising at $19.5 million and $75.2 million. The spending did not stop growing. It stopped exploding.

The business outgrew the budget

The chart's last turn is the one that matters most. Advertising costs never fell. What fell was their weight. In 2020, the year DraftKings went public, advertising equaled 70 cents of every revenue dollar. In 2025 it was 19 cents, even though the dollar amount was more than two and a half times higher.

That was the stated plan. In its April 2020 merger proxy, DraftKings told investors it expected sales and marketing spend “to decline as a percentage of revenue,” as each acquired player became worth more in states with several products and as its buying scale improved. Its 2021 filing described a transition “from local to regional to national advertising,” and the 2025 filing says much of its advertising is now bought nationally to save on media costs.

In 2025 DraftKings reported net income of $3.7 million. Its 10-K states the milestone plainly and adds that the company has historically experienced cumulative net losses. Every year from 2020 to 2024 was a loss. A $3.7 million profit sits beside a $1.1248 billion advertising line, and it is the result of every other cost as well, not marketing alone.

None of this shows what each advertising dollar returned. Revenue also grew because far more states allowed online betting, and the filings do not separate the two. What the numbers do show is order: the heaviest spending, relative to revenue, came early, in the years DraftKings was racing into new states. The revenue caught up afterwards, and the advertising line kept climbing anyway.

Advertising is not the whole marketing bill

Advertising is the narrower of two lines in the filings. DraftKings' broader sales-and-marketing expense was $1.37988 billion in 2025. That larger line includes advertising, but also conferences, free-to-play contests, facilities, and sales-and-marketing personnel compensation, including stock-based compensation. Calling all $1.38 billion an advertising budget overstates what the filing actually says.

The definition also moved once. The 2020 filing reported an advertising total without saying what it included. From 2021 the filings define advertising costs as communication with potential customers through media such as internet, radio, print, television, or billboards, and state that they also include strategic league and team partnerships. The earlier years were never restated, so the chart can compare them, but the filings leave open whether those early totals counted partnerships.

What the advertising category buys

Partnerships are the less conventional part of the category. The same filing says paid marketing uses television, radio, social media, search, and influencers, while owned or community channels include email, push notifications, referrals, and Discord.

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The machine is not one giant commercial buy. It is a portfolio of ways to be present when sports have a viewer's attention.

Those disclosures are a map, not a budget breakdown. They show that DraftKings can buy or build attention across many surfaces. They do not say every named channel received advertising dollars, how much any channel received, or how often a person encountered it.

When a partnership becomes part of the product

Some relationships put the brand closer to the sport than an ordinary ad break. A current NFL support page says NFL.com and NFL app widgets display odds, spreads, and totals supplied by FanDuel, Caesars, or DraftKings. Selecting a bet redirects the user to the bookmaker's online sportsbook. The NFL is not taking the wager, but the league-owned product can be part of the route to it.

The historical rights were broader than a logo. In a 2021 partnership announcement, the NFL said DraftKings would collaborate on content and product offerings and that the agreement included NFL Media integrations, with a continued prominent presence in NFL RedZone. That announcement proves what the NFL disclosed in 2021. It does not prove that every contract term or placement remains unchanged in 2026.

DraftKings' current filing also identifies ESPN, NBC, and Amazon as strategic media relationships. It describes DraftKings as ESPN's official sportsbook and odds provider, working with ESPN to promote DraftKings products across Disney properties. Again, the filing confirms a relationship and promotional role—not its price, term, inventory, frequency, or reach.

Why football matters to the machine

DraftKings says sports-product marketing expenditures can be highly seasonal. It also says users tend to be most engaged in the fourth quarter, primarily because the NFL and NBA seasons overlap, and that NFL-season engagement and revenue are generally highest on Sundays.

That is operator evidence about its own business calendar. It shows why Sunday football and the fourth quarter are commercially valuable. It does not show that advertising caused the engagement pattern, and it still does not identify an NFL advertising allocation. Popular inventory and disclosed spending are connected as strategy, not joined by a public accounting schedule.

An independent reality check

A 2026 Washington Post analysis gives one independent observation. The Post selected 50 televised games across several sports, randomly analyzed one hour from each, and found DraftKings promotions in 20 of the 50 games. That shows recurrence across the selected sample; it does not measure national reach, paid impressions, or an NFL-specific appearance rate.

The sample was recorded in Washington, D.C., during December and January. The Post counted a broad range of gambling references using video frames and transcripts, not only paid DraftKings commercials. It also found football less dense in-game than hockey and professional basketball among the games analyzed. That counterevidence matters: cross-channel presence can feel pervasive without every NFL broadcast being saturated or football ranking worst by every measure.

What the public record cannot tell us

The filings and official pages do not disclose DraftKings' NFL budget, ESPN or Disney allocation, partner contract values, channel split, impressions, unique audience, placement frequency, or return on each relationship. The Post's selected-game count cannot fill those gaps. Nor can any of these sources prove that exposure caused a person to bet or experience harm.

So what does $1.1248 billion buy? The honest answer is a company-wide portfolio: conventional advertising, digital acquisition, strategic league and team relationships, and recurring places where a sportsbook brand can meet sports attention. Eight years of filings add the arc: a surge while states opened, a slower climb once they had, and revenue that eventually outgrew the spending without the spending ever shrinking. The number explains the scale. The sources explain the machinery. Neither gives us permission to invent an NFL-only price tag.

For the practical side, from DraftKings' own self-exclusion to the Google and Meta settings that cut down gambling ads, see how to block DraftKings, FanDuel and other sportsbooks.