Inside Polymarket's paid quote-retweet esports program

Still, many of the posters paid to quote-retweet Polymarket’s content are virtual unknowns, with low four-figure follower counts on X.

Prospective participants in the marketing program are typically contacted via social media or email. If they show interest in continuing the conversation, they’re brought into a Polymarket Discord server. In that server, dedicated channels for individual esport titles ping users about the tweets they should quote-retweet — which generally focus on some ongoing event or storyline, and the corresponding market on which users can bet, which is linked to in the post.

“New tweet is up: Like + QRT. Replies appreciated,” reads a typical message, which includes a link to the tweet. “Text-only quote from your own account. Counts for the next 24 hours only.” These messages used to also include the phrase “+ Paid Partnership tag,” urging users to disclose their participation in the program. That text has not appeared on the Discord prompts since late August, for reasons that were not immediately clear.

Users are concurrently onboarded to a proprietary tool called PolyTrack, a dashboard into which they can input their tax information, crypto wallet address, and eventually, the quote-retweets for which they will be paid. The platform tracks monthly and lifetime earnings, and offers guidance about the kinds of posts that meet the program’s criteria.

While this report is exclusively focused on Polymarket’s promotional efforts on X, PolyTrack also includes the option to input video and streaming platforms.

The amount users are paid is negotiated upon entry into the program, and is based on how many views their tweets generally received before entry. The payout is not determined by engagement metrics on the paid quote-retweets.

“Someone averaging 2,000 views can't ask for $50 per post, and the same logic works the other way,” wrote a Polymarket rep in the Discord last week, when discussing the process of onboarding new posters. “That holds no matter who you are in the scene. The only exception is Tier 1 casters, talent, creators and players, who can get higher rates because of how well known they are.”

Two users who spoke with ReaderGrev showed fees of $45 and $75 per post. Another participant described negotiating a fee in the $200-300 range. One user shared with ReaderGrev a PolyTrack screenshot showing that they made nearly $900 in just one month from approximately a dozen posts.

Two other participants in the program said payouts bottomed out at $10; one of them added that they had heard that $400 was the upper end of the range. Program members are paid in crypto; in a July post in the Discord, a Polymarket rep said the team had phased out an earlier payment method, PayPal, because its accounts kept “getting blocked” due to the high volume of payments.

The program offers users other opportunities to make money. “When you bring someone into the program, you earn 3% of what they make, every month, for as long as they stay in the program,” wrote one Polymarket representative in the Discord.

The program appears to be growing — and fast. At the start of August, one Polymarket representative said on Discord that “300+ creators” were participating in the program. Two months later, a different representative put the tally at “800+.”

Still, the company’s scattershot approach to outreach has on multiple occasions drawn the ire of creators who oppose gambling or betting.

“I don't ever reply to gambling sponsor outreach so I just delete and move on,” said Cloud Sidky, a League of Legends content creator who was approached by Polymarket in September. “I'm personally against sports betting, and even more against prediction markets.”

The exact cost of the program to Polymarket is difficult to estimate. The platform’s four esports accounts on X differ in size, and there are varying numbers of creators in each game’s program. The DotA 2 program has offered just one post for paid promotion in October, one in September, and two in August. The League of Legends, Valorant, and Counter-Strike programs, by contrast, have shared nearly one post per day in the past few weeks, with Valorant activity ramping up around the Champions event that marks the end of the game’s annual competitive circuit. On Wednesday, a Polymarket rep in the Discord server sought to hype up participants in the lead up to Worlds, the year’s capstone League of Legends event, saying they could expect more posts to come up for promotion each day. (He appended a 🤑 emoji to his message, and told users to post “plenty in between so it looks organic if your gonna QRT daily.”)

Polymarket’s total payout to creators per post for the more popular programs likely numbers in the four digits. A conservative estimate — assuming that the bulk of posters are being paid on the lower end of the spectrum — places the payout between $2,000 and $4,000 per post. These estimates are almost certainly an undercount; the figure can swing dramatically based on the number of highly-paid users engaging with any individual post. Just a few creators with a hundred or several-hundred dollar fee can dramatically increase the cost to Polymarket.

Posts linked to the paid quote-retweet program see substantially more engagement — particularly quote retweets — than other posts from the Polymarket branded accounts.

Polymarket’s approach to social media — paying influencers in the space to engage with its content — is a shortcut to reaching an endemic audience without having to build that audience from scratch, said Jake Steinberg, a writer and adjunct professor of social media strategy at Villanova University.

“If I follow 10 esports accounts and all 10 independently appear to be talking about something like Polymarket over the course of a few days or a week, then Polymarket has maybe successfully bought this kind of repeated exposure to me,” Steinberg said. “Even if I don't click anything, that actually does become valuable [to Polymarket], because I am becoming familiar with the name and what the product does, and the idea that Polymarket is relevant in this world that I am interested in.”