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\n The Single-Market Strategy: Why Prediction Aggregators Should Start Small and Go Deep\n

\n A contrarian approach to building the next great prediction market platform\n

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The Two Audiences Problem

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\n Prediction markets are on the rise, but there are actually two distinct demographics that can make use of them: those who bet on them, and the much larger percentage of people who might consume them for information. Think of it like the distinction between journalists and news consumers – a small circle of creators serving a much larger circle of consumers.\n

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Bettors/Traders

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Information

Consumers

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\n Currently, prediction market platforms serve bettors, which makes sense and is needed for the markets to be useful at all. But these platforms are dizzying to the average person and look nothing like how they normally consume news. We've made progress on the first challenge – attracting traders and liquidity – but what doesn't seem to be on the horizon is translating that generated data into something consumable by the average informed citizen.\n

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\n Prediction markets won't become mainstream until they're folded into news and packaged in a way that appeals to folks who are unlikely to consider betting on them. We need to solve not just the liquidity problem, but the accessibility problem.\n

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\n Everyone's trying to build the \"Bloomberg Terminal for prediction markets\" – sprawling dashboards that aggregate thousands of markets across dozens of topics. But what if we're thinking about this all wrong?\n

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\n My instinct about how this could potentially be cracked has to do with focus. Instead of starting out trying to aggregate many predictions about many events, see if we can get one really good page going for one single topic, or even one single important market, and then expand from there.\n

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The Deep Dive Approach

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\n Picture this: the best page on the internet for understanding \"When will the war in Ukraine end?\" – assuming we have a market for that. Every time the market moves, AI does the heavy lifting of researching why it might have moved, building a digestible narrative and timeline from that movement.\n

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\n This isn't just market data; it's market intelligence. When the odds shift from 15% to 23% for \"war ends by December 2024,\" readers don't just see numbers – they get context. What news broke? Which analysts are talking? What historical parallels might apply?\n

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Timeline Mockup:

[Screenshot of Russian ceasefire timeline mockup will go here]

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\n (This would probably work brilliantly as a newsletter format too – imagine getting a weekly digest that not only tells you how the market moved, but why it moved and what that means.)\n

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From Prototype to Proof of Concept

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\n I've been experimenting with this approach myself. As a US Soccer nut, I built a single-page treatment for my prediction market about the USA World Cup roster. Instead of trying to cover every sport or every tournament, I went deep on one specific question that I (and hopefully other soccer fans) genuinely care about.\n

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\n The result? A focused, rich experience that actually helps users understand not just what the market thinks, but why it thinks it. Users can see the narrative unfold in real-time as new information changes the odds.\n

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\n USA World Cup Roster Prediction Market\n \n

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Why This Might Actually Work

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\n The traditional aggregator approach faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem: you need lots of markets to be useful, but you need users to make markets liquid. By starting with one exceptional page, you can:\n

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Perfect the format without getting overwhelmed by scale
Build genuine expertise in your chosen domain
Create something people actually want to bookmark and return to
Prove the concept before expanding horizontally

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\n Think about how Nate Silver built FiveThirtyEight – not by covering every possible statistical topic, but by becoming the place for election forecasting, then expanding from that foundation of trust and expertise.\n

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The Expansion Strategy

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\n Once you've nailed one market, the playbook becomes clearer. You're not just adding more markets – you're adding more expertly curated markets. Each new topic gets the same deep-dive treatment that made your first page indispensable.\n

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\n Maybe you start with Ukraine, then add the 2024 election, then climate targets, then Fed rate decisions. Each page becomes a destination in its own right, not just another row in a spreadsheet.\n

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Tools for Building Bespoke Market Pages

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\n In terms of tools for constructing these bespoke pages, embedding is possible from most prediction market sites. I've actually made a site where you can change the URLs – you can add the URLs of either a Manifold or Polymarket market, or a list of URLs, and then it creates a dashboard that shows them all nicely formatted.\n

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\n The Rundown - Market Dashboard Maker\n \n

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\n At the moment it's just one site editable by anyone, but if you go to the source you can remix it and make it your own. Of course, we must admit that this is still just an aggregator, but it's the idea of being able to add editorialization to prediction markets – grouping them, putting a human touch on them that makes them feel more useful than a bunch of arbitrary percentages.\n

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\n I've also been experimenting with other ways to make prediction market data more accessible. For instance, I built a bot (@manifoldmaven) that tweets whenever a Manifold market moves by more than 35%. It's another small experiment in translating market movements into digestible information for people who might not otherwise engage with prediction markets directly.\n

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What's Next?

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\n Building tools so anyone can easily build a dashboard of markets they think are important and can editorialize them. The goal is to democratize the creation of these focused, narrative-driven market pages – letting domain experts and passionate communities create their own \"best page on the internet\" for the topics they care about most.\n

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Others Working on This Problem

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\n There are a number of folks working on making prediction markets more accessible and consumable. If you're working on this problem, you can add yourself to this list!\n

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How to Add Yourself:

Remix this project at val.town/x/dcm31/marketnewsblogpost
Edit the contributors.json file to add your entry
Submit a pull request with your changes

\n Format: Include your name, project name, URL, and a brief description of what you're building.\n

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\n Loading contributors...\n

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The Bigger Picture

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\n This approach acknowledges something important about how people actually consume information: we don't want to be overwhelmed with data, we want to be informed by intelligence. The difference between showing someone a market price and helping them understand what that price means is the difference between a tool and a service.\n

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\n In a world where everyone's building horizontal platforms, there might be real value in going vertical first. Start with one market, make it exceptional, then expand from a position of strength rather than trying to boil the ocean from day one.\n

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\n Sometimes the best way to aggregate everything is to start by perfecting something.\n

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\n What do you think? Are there specific markets or topics where this deep-dive approach could work particularly well? I'd love to hear from other folks pursuing interesting ideas in this space.\n

dcm31

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