UK Study Finds 16.6M Gambling Ad Reach Instances Among 18-24s

The researchers identified 1,023 paid adverts from ten gambling operators, including bet365, Paddy Power and William Hill. They collected the ads during the Premier League opening weekend, August 21-24, and retrieved the reach estimates from Meta’s Ad Library on August 24.

Male Accounts Made Up Three-Quarters of Younger Reach

The Bristol report includes a breakdown by age and gender. The figures for the youngest adult group were:

• 16,622,773 instances of reported reach among 18-24-year-olds;
• 12,567,095 attributed to male accounts;
• 3,858,536 attributed to female accounts;
• 197,142 where gender was unspecified.

Men accounted for 75.6% of reach in this group, compared with 66.9% across all ages. That’s 8.7 percentage points higher.

The overall figure of 153.2 million comes from adding together reach estimates for individual adverts. It is not a count of unique users: someone who saw several adverts may appear in several totals. The figures also include reach accumulated before August 21.

When BGC Permits Advertising to 18-24s

Under the industry’s advertising code, bookmakers must generally apply a 25+ age filter to paid campaigns seeking new customers, provided the platform offers that option. Campaigns aimed at customers whose ages operators have already verified are treated differently.

There is also a platform exemption. The BGC may permit 18+ targeting after examining evidence of a platform’s age controls. Its published list currently covers Facebook, Snap, YouTube, Instagram and Spotify.

Bristol’s reach figures do not reveal which adverts were aimed at new customers and which, if any, targeted people already verified by an operator. The age breakdown alone is therefore insufficient to establish a breach of the industry code.

Instagram Was Absent From the May 2026 List

The approved-platform list has expanded over time. In September 2023, law firm CMS reported that Facebook and Snapchat were the two platforms permitted to use 18+ targeting.

Bristol’s researchers checked a later archived BGC page, dated May 27, 2026. It included Facebook, Snap and YouTube, but not Instagram or Spotify.

By September 12, both platforms had been added. That leaves a 108-day interval between the two recorded versions, without a confirmed date for either addition. The researchers also found no public change history or supporting assessments explaining the additions.

The dates matter for the August advertising sample. Since the two available snapshots fall on opposite sides of the Premier League opening weekend, they do not establish whether Instagram’s exemption was already in place when those adverts were collected. That would require the original approval date and campaign targeting settings, neither of which is available in the published findings.