Netflix has made its first dedicated hire for real-money gaming (RMG) advertising, recruiting Ian Hunter from Snap Inc to lead its relationships with betting and gaming advertisers. Hunter is based at the company’s London office.
The appointment gives the streaming company a named point of contact for an advertiser category it has previously handled through general sales teams. It arrives as Netflix pushes advertising from a side project into a revenue line it expects to reach roughly $3bn in 2026.
From The Stars Group to Snap
Hunter spent more than eight years at Snap, moving through account management, client partnerships and sales leadership roles across several consumer categories. Before that, between 2017 and 2019, he was Global Digital Marketing Manager at The Stars Group, running digital campaigns for the PokerStars owner in the years before its 2020 merger with Flutter Entertainment.
That combination matters for the brief. Gambling advertising is one of the few categories where the media buyer, the compliance officer and the regulator all sit in the same conversation, and where creative approval depends on jurisdiction-specific rules rather than a single global policy.
Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Hunter said:
From my first conversation with the team here at Netflix, I was instantly engaged by the opportunity to join such an exciting business. With the growth of live events, award-winning content and a massively engaged audience, there is huge ambition across the team. If anyone wants to hear more about the Netflix Ads solutions, I’d love to connect.
Advertising is the fastest-growing line
Netflix reported revenue of $45.2bn for FY2025, up 16% on 2024, with around $42bn of that coming from memberships. Advertising contributed more than $1.5bn, an increase of over 150% year on year from a low base. Paid memberships stood at 327.3 million at the end of the fourth quarter.
For 2026 the company has guided to revenue of between $50.7bn and $51.7bn, and told investors it expects advertising revenue to roughly double again. Co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters have tied that projection to premium content, live entertainment and sports programming.
The ad-supported tier launched in late 2022 and Netflix has since brought ad serving in-house. Betting and gaming brands are among the highest-spending advertisers in sport-adjacent inventory, which makes them an obvious target for a platform that has spent two years buying live rights.
Live sport is the pitch
Netflix has a partnership with Major League Baseball, holds the rights to Christmas Day NFL games in the United States, and will broadcast the 2027 and 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cups for North American audiences. Live sport delivers the appointment viewing and in-play adjacency that sportsbooks pay for, and it is the part of the schedule where gambling creative is most likely to clear brand-safety checks.
The catch is geography. Netflix’s live sports rights are concentrated in North America, while Hunter is based in London, where most of the industry’s largest operators run their marketing. Selling European gambling budgets against predominantly US inventory is a harder sell than selling US budgets against it.
Regulation sets the ceiling
The commercial logic runs into national advertising rules that have tightened across Europe. Italy has banned gambling advertising and sponsorship outright since the 2018 Dignity Decree. The Netherlands prohibits untargeted gambling advertising and has phased out sports sponsorship. Belgium introduced a broad ban in 2023. Denmark is weighing further advertising restrictions of its own.
Platform-level obligations add a second layer. Enforcement of the EU Digital Services Act has intensified through 2026, with regulators pressing large platforms on the targeting and placement of gambling advertising and on their handling of illegal gambling promotions. A streaming service selling gambling inventory in Europe takes on that compliance burden directly, not through the advertiser.
Netflix is already in a dispute connected to the wider betting category. Prediction market operator Kalshi sent the company a cease-and-desist letter over the trailer for its documentary Instadocs: The Prediction Games, calling it defamatory and disputing footage of a trade shown on screen. Kalshi and Polymarket are already blocked in Spain over licensing, and the classification fight over event contracts is unresolved across most of Europe.
What Hunter’s team sells first will show how far Netflix intends to go. A cautious version limits gambling creative to regulated US states and a handful of permissive European markets around live sport. A more aggressive version treats RMG as a full advertiser vertical with its own targeting and measurement products, which would put Netflix in the same regulatory conversation as Meta and Google. The hire suggests the second is at least being priced.
Source: Netflix
