NewsFutures

» see newsfutures.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A prediction market is a betting exchange where the thing being bet on is a fact about the future, and the price of a contract is read as the crowd's probability. The usual objection is that it only works if people have money at risk. NewsFutures existed mainly to find out whether that objection is true.

It was founded in May 2000 by Emile Servan-Schreiber, a son of the French journalist and politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, along with Maurice Balick. The public market opened that September. Players got fake currency for free, traded contracts on elections and football games, and competed on leaderboards for small prizes instead of winnings. Over its nine years it listed contracts on more than 120,000 separate events.

The unusual part was the languages. NewsFutures ran markets in French and in Hungarian as well as English, so an American player and a European one could trade against each other on the same event while reading it in different words. Its early French life is visible mostly in what the Internet Archive kept of the server: co-branded image directories named for Libération and for the reality show Loft Story sit in the file list alongside the American ones.

None of this was mine. In 2003 I was an engineering student on a Turkish dial-up account and the notion of trading contracts on tomorrow's newspaper would have looked like a category error. Prediction markets only became a thing I read about at all around the 2016 American election cycle, seven years after this particular one had stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the study that justified it ~

Through the 2003 to 2004 National Football League season, the play-money predictions coming out of NewsFutures were compared game by game against the real-money predictions on TradeSports, which later became Intrade. The paper was written by Servan-Schreiber with Justin Wolfers, David Pennock and Brian Galebach, and it asked in its title whether money matters. The answer was that the two were just as accurate as each other.

That result did more for the company than any amount of traffic. If fake money forecasts as well as real money, then an insurance company or an air force can run an internal market among its own staff without running an illegal betting operation. Almost every corporate prediction market built afterward leans on that finding, whether or not anyone involved has read the paper.

~ the press years ~

From November 2001 to January 2004, USA Today co-branded the NewsFutures sports and money markets, which put a play-money exchange in front of a mainstream American newspaper audience. James Surowiecki wrote about it in the New Yorker in 2003 and put the point bluntly: the traders were doing what op-ed writers and presidential advisers do every day, except that the market was far more likely to be right. In The Wisdom of Crowds he named it one of the two most important online trading sites, the other being Intrade.

Servan-Schreiber's own argument was that a prediction market is a quasi-journalistic operation, that the number on the screen is news in the same way a poll is news. That framing explains the newspaper partnerships better than any business plan does, and it is also why the free public game mattered to the company at all.

~ Bet2Give ~

In 2007 NewsFutures launched Bet2Give, which put real money back on the table with one change: the winner did not keep it. All profits went to a charity of the winner's choosing. It got a segment on CNBC in December 2007 and a write-up in the Seattle Times about wagering on when the Boeing 787 would actually arrive. As a way around American betting law it was clever. As a business it was small.

~ what it became ~

The public market closed in October 2009. The company that ran it turned into Lumenogic, which spent from 2010 to 2019 building internal forecasting systems for large organizations, including the US Air Force. In 2019 Lumenogic became Hypermind, which is still running. Servan-Schreiber is still making the same argument in public, most recently in a July 2026 column making the case the 2004 paper had already settled.

newsfutures.com now serves a Norwegian consumer-loan site. The domain outlived the market by seventeen years and is currently selling refinancing.

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