1 in 35 old Product Hunt launches is now a casino

We hold 197,573 Product Hunt launches, from November 2013 to September 2026, each with its domain and upvote count. We drew 400 launches at random from each year from 2014 to 2026 and fetched every homepage in September 2026, to see how many of the products were still there.

We expected the oldest launches to have the highest share of lapsed domains. 2014 has the lowest of any full year, 4.5%. Reading the pages, we kept finding old launch domains that had been bought and turned into casinos and betting sites, so we counted them.

Key findings

1. 69 of the 2,400 sampled launch domains from 2014 to 2019 (2.9%) now serve a casino, slot, lottery or betting site. Weighted by the number of launch domains in each year, that is about 1,230 of 43,622.
2. Launches with 100 or more upvotes turned into gambling sites almost twice as often: 23 of 517 (4.4%), against 46 of 1,883 (2.4%) with fewer.
3. Screely, launched in 2018 with 3,107 upvotes, now serves a Thai football betting site. Y-Productive, 1,016 upvotes, now serves a mirror of the Vavada casino.
4. 118 of the 400 sampled 2023 launches (29.5%) no longer have a registered domain. For 2014 launches it is 18 of 400 (4.5%).
5. 91 of the 400 sampled 2025 launches (22.8%) have already lost their domain.

69 of 2,400 launch domains from 2014 to 2019 now serve gambling sites

We sampled 400 launches from each year from 2014 to 2019, 2,400 in all. 69 of their domains (2.9%) now serve gambling: online casinos, slot sites, Indonesian togel lotteries, sports betting. Source: FundingWatcher, September 2026.

The years differ in size, from 5,202 launch domains in 2014 to 8,957 in 2015, so we scaled each year's share to its own count and added them up. That gives about 1,230 of the 43,622 launch domains from those six years, with a 95% range of 940 to 1,520.

Gambling is not the largest group of new owners. Among the 2,400, the model also flagged 69 content farms and 151 other businesses, but those verdicts are less reliable, so we only report the gambling count.

Launches with 100 or more upvotes became gambling sites at 4.4%, against 2.4% for the rest

23 of the 517 sampled launches with 100 or more upvotes (4.4%) now serve gambling. Of the 1,883 with fewer than 100, 46 do (2.4%). A launch that did well picked up links from its Product Hunt page, from launch roundups and from press, and those links outlive the product. Our guess is that this is what the buyers pay for; we did not measure the links.

The eight biggest launches in the sample that now serve gambling:

29.5% of sampled 2023 launches no longer have a registered domain, against 4.5% of 2014 launches

On 400 launches, a share near 29.5% carries a margin of about 4.5 points. The 2023 figure is above every year before 2021 by more than that.

A lapsed domain that someone buys resolves again and drops out of this column. That probably pulls the older years down, and we have no count of how many old products are still running.

The funnel runs from 197,573 launches to 5,200 homepages

1. 197,573 launches in our Product Hunt copy.
2. 10,351 dropped because the product lived on a shared host such as vercel.app, netlify.app or carrd.co, where DNS says nothing about one product.
3. 280 dropped with no usable domain or no launch date, leaving 186,942.
4. 5,863 repeat launches of a domain already counted dropped, leaving 181,079 distinct domains, each dated by its first launch.
5. 251 first launched in 2013 dropped, leaving 180,828 in 2014 to 2026.
6. 400 drawn at random from each of the 13 years: 5,200 homepages.

The domain is the one Product Hunt linked to when we collected the launches, after redirects. A product that had rebranded by then carries its later domain. One sampled launch, Planely, already pointed to a gambling domain at collection time, and we left it out of the gambling count.

Method

A rotating proxy requested each homepage over HTTPS and fell back to HTTP. When two DNS resolvers both returned no such domain, we recorded the domain as no longer registered. For pages that loaded, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite compared the launch name and tagline with what the page shows now (title, final address, closing text) and returned one of: same product, same company with a new product, different owner, placeholder, unreadable.

For every 2014 to 2019 gambling verdict we read the page title, and where the title looked harmless, the page text. Five sites keep their old name in the title and run gambling posts underneath, and we kept them. We moved Top Documentary Films back to same product.

All fetches ran on 23 September 2026. A site that was down that day counts as down.

Data

The files below are under CC BY 4.0.

• launch_sample.csv, the 5,200 sampled launches with launch year, upvotes, Product Hunt URL, domain, state, the kind of new owner, copyright year and page title
• state_by_launch_year.csv, the state counts per launch year
• README.md and METHOD.md