Q1 2026 Earnings Season Has a Clear Theme: iGaming Is Winning, and Prediction Markets Are Arriving
Q1 2026 earnings from Caesars, Rush Street Interactive, Sportradar, and Robinhood tell a consistent story: iGaming is outperforming sports betting, and prediction markets are becoming a material revenue line faster than expected.
Four companies filed Q1 2026 earnings reports in the same week, covering a wide range of positions in the gambling and financial technology ecosystem. A sportsbook operator, a pure-play iGaming company, a sports data infrastructure firm, and a retail brokerage that stumbled into prediction markets all reported on the same Tuesday in April.
Reading them together, the trendline is consistent enough to state plainly: sports betting is the product companies feel obligated to offer, iGaming is the product that is actually growing, and prediction markets are the number every analyst asked about.
Caesars Entertainment
Caesars posted consolidated net revenues of $2.9 billion in Q1 2026, up 3% year over year. The headline number was driven almost entirely by its digital division, which set a first-quarter record with net revenue of $374 million, up 11.6% from $335 million a year earlier. Digital EBITDA of $69 million was up 60.5%, with margins expanding to 18.4%.
The split within that digital number is telling. iCasino revenue was up 18% on volume strength and monthly active user growth. Sports hold improved to 8.3%, helped by a higher parlay mix, but overall sports volume was down 1%. Average revenue per monthly player rose 15% to $219, while total monthly unique players grew only 2% to 512,000. Caesars is extracting more from each user, not acquiring dramatically more users, and the extraction is occurring through casino products rather than sports wagering.
CEO Tom Reeg noted on the earnings call that there is “a gigantic opportunity in converting customers in our database that play digitally elsewhere.” That framing is worth noting. Caesars has 65 million loyalty program members and a monthly active digital user base of 512,000. The conversion gap between those two numbers is either the company’s biggest problem or its biggest opportunity, depending on how optimistic you are about the digital roadmap.
Rush Street Interactive
If Caesars’ quarter was solid, Rush Street’s was exceptional. RSI reported record quarterly revenue of $370.4 million, up 41% year over year, the fastest growth rate in four years. Net income of $26.2 million was up 134%. Adjusted EBITDA of $60.2 million was up 81%. The company raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $1.49 billion to $1.54 billion.
RSI’s quarterly record did not come from sports betting. It came from iGaming. Monthly active users reached approximately 839,000 globally, up 51% year over year. In North American online casino markets specifically, MAUs grew 62%, with that acceleration continuing from the prior quarter. The company spent 12.5% of revenue on sales and marketing to achieve that growth, a number that makes its larger competitors look profligate by comparison.
On the earnings call, JPMorgan analyst Daniel Politzer asked directly about prediction markets and their impact on user acquisition costs across the sector. CEO Richard Schwartz responded that prediction markets primarily benefit from sports event contracts, “which is not an area of high priority for us. Our growth is being driven by our casino-first strategy, which caters to a different player profile.” That answer was both strategically coherent and a quiet observation about what is actually happening in the market: prediction markets are cannibalizing sports-betting customers more than iGaming customers, which is precisely why companies with a casino-first orientation are having a better quarter.
Sportradar
Sportradar’s Q1 was the most complicated of the four to read. The company reported revenue of €347 million in constant currency terms, up 11% year over year, but the reported headline number fell significantly short of the analyst consensus due to foreign-currency headwinds. The U.S. dollar’s weakness against the euro created substantial drag, and the company swung to a €6 million loss despite strong operational performance, driven by a €9 million currency loss versus a €28 million currency gain in the same period a year earlier.
Strip out the currency noise, and the underlying business is performing well. Betting Technology and Solutions revenues grew 15%, driven by a 20% increase in Betting and Gaming Content. Free cash flow surged 38% to €44 million. The company also launched Playradar, its new dedicated iGaming brand delivering hybrid sports-casino content, and named prediction markets explicitly in its growth strategy language for the first time. “Maximizing the opportunities our market leadership position and long-standing relationships remain our priority as we also begin to capitalize on new avenues of growth, including prediction markets and iGaming,” CEO Carsten Koerl said.
For a company whose entire business model is built on selling data and technology to sports betting operators, the explicit pivot toward iGaming and prediction markets as growth verticals is a meaningful strategic signal. Sportradar is positioned wherever its operator clients are going. If those clients are going toward iGaming and prediction markets, Sportradar needs to be there first.
Robinhood
Robinhood’s Q1 generated the most industry conversation, for reasons both good and bad. Total net revenues grew 15% year over year to $623 million. The standout line was other transaction revenue of $147 million, up 320%, which primarily consists of event contracts revenue. Event contracts traded reached a record 8.8 billion.
The bad news was crypto. Crypto revenue fell 47% to $134 million, a sharp reversal from a period when crypto had been Robinhood’s primary growth driver. The stock dropped on the miss, despite the overall revenue growth.
The prediction-markets story in the Robinhood report deserves its own reading. CEO Vladimir Tenev noted on the earnings call that Robinhood is now the largest retail brokerage in prediction markets, with over nine billion contracts traded by more than one million customers in the year since launch. “Robinhood is the largest retail brokerage firm in prediction markets, and we’ve been one of the first to adopt a new asset class,” Tenev stated. The company also announced Rothera, a joint venture with Susquehanna International Group that acquired MIAXdx to build an independent CFTC-licensed prediction market exchange.
The April forward guidance was the number analysts seized on: prediction market revenue was expected to reach $3 billion in April volume, potentially making it the company’s second-biggest month ever for that segment. A product that generated less than $100 million in monthly volume in early 2024 is now threatening to become Robinhood’s most important revenue line.
The Overall Trendline
Read together, these four reports make the same argument from different angles. iGaming is outperforming sports betting across every operator, reporting meaningful numbers in both categories. The companies most exposed to pure-play sports betting are the ones feeling the most pressure. The companies with a casino-first orientation, RSI being the clearest example, are putting up their best numbers in years.
Prediction markets are arriving as a material revenue category faster than the industry expected, and they are taking share primarily from sports betting rather than from iGaming. That dynamic explains why Rush Street can post 41% revenue growth while larger sportsbook-oriented operators are grinding out single-digit improvements.
The Q2 reports, when they arrive in late July, will tell us whether this is a quarter or a trend. Based on Robinhood’s April forward guidance and RSI’s accelerating MAU numbers, there is no particular reason to expect the pattern to reverse.
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