By Chris Isidore, Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN

(CNN) — Powerball’s advertised $1.4 billion jackpot for Wednesday’s drawing would be the sixth-largest prize in American lotto history. Expect more big paydays like this: Lottery prizes are predicted to soar even higher.

The next Powerball winner (or winners) will be the 13th to claim a US lottery prize with a stated value of more than $1 billion. The first billion-dollar prize was won in 2016, and there have been 11 prizes worth more than $1 billion since 2021.

That’s because the respective organizers of Powerball and its rival, Mega Millions, have discovered that the way to get Americans rushing to buy tickets is to get the jackpots up above $1 billion. And they’re doing whatever they can to offer those big prizes.

The main way to do that is by selling their tickets in virtually every state, rather than dividing up the country into different competing territories. They also make the prizes increasingly harder to win so that the jackpot rolls over more often. And some states pull in more players with online sales.

And the quiet truth is that for the most part, nobody actually wins a billion dollars – even the “billion-dollar winners.” Those $1 billion-plus prizes on all the ads only pay out that much, in total, if the winner chooses to receive their winnings in the form of a smaller annual payment spread out over decades – which virtually no one does. Almost every winner instead takes a smaller, one-time cash payment, which in Wednesday’s drawing is “only” $634 million.

It wasn’t that long ago that prizes topped out in the tens of millions of dollars. Now a prize of that size barely gets any attention, nor does it sell many tickets.

“The amount of money that gets on the news, that gets people attention, has only gone up over time,” said Jonathan Cohen, a lottery expert and author of the book, “For a Dollar and Dream.”

“In the 1990s, it was $100 million prizes that would get people lined up around the block to buy tickets,” he said. “In the 1980s, it was only $40 million.”

Three months ago, just after the most recent Powerball winner was announced on May 31, the Powerball prize reset to its minimum of a $20 million. But with such a paltry sum on offer, fewer than six million tickets were initially sold.

By August, with the advertised prize up to a healthy $424 million, the number of tickets sold doubled, up to 12.9 million.

But after no one won the top prize on Saturday night, Americans rushed to buy more than 111 million tickets for Monday’s drawing and the advertised prize of $1.1 billion. It remains to be seen how many $2 tickets will be purchased by 11pm ET Wednesday, when the next drawing is held, but it is almost certain to be at least as many again.

“It seems like the word billion needs to be in the sentence to draw people’s attention,” said Jeff Lenard, vice president of the National Association of Convenience Stores, whose members sell an estimated 60% of lottery tickets purchased by Americans.

How the jackpots got so large

The first multi-state lottery was started in 1985 by three small states – Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine – which joined together to better compete with neighboring Massachusetts. Soon more and more states joined together to come up with larger and larger prizes to attract more and more buyers. States felt competitive pressure to join when their neighbors signed up for the lottery, concerned that their residents would cross state lines to buy tickets unless they were offered at home.

But when the precursor to Powerball, dubbed Lotto America, was first introduced in 1987, organizers prohibited jackpots worth more than $80 million.

“There were concerns about what you could do with that money — like buy a small country or something,” Ed Stanek, director of Lotto America, said at the time.

Lotto America initially offered players a chance to choose seven numbers from a field of 40 for a minimum bet of $1.

Players whose numbers matched those selected in a weekly drawing would win a jackpot determined by the total number of tickets sold.

The odds of winning the top prize were about 1 in 19 million. But lottery organizers soon discovered that having the prize rollover without a winner to get bigger jackpots was the way to attract players, and the way to do that was to make it more and more difficult to win.

Today the odds of winning Powerball are about 1 in 292 million. Mega Millions just made its game even harder to win, too, lowering the odds of purchasing a winning ticket from 1 in 290.5 million to 1 in 302.6 million. It also increased the price of a ticket from $2 to $5.

For the first 25 years of multi-state lotteries, Powerball and Mega Millions were also only available in different states, leaving much of the country having to go across state lines to get the other game’s prize when it outpaced their own prize.

Then in 2010, the two games agreed to cross selling, which opened up the prizes in both games to the large majority of the country.

The only states that don’t have Powerball and Mega Millions tickets sold in them are Alabama and Utah, which both have very conservative politics, Alaska and Hawaii, which don’t have to worry about their residents crossing into a neighboring state to buy tickets, and Nevada, where casino interests have blocked the competing form of gambling.

The lottery bigger than Powerball

The $110 billion spent on lottery tickets comes to about $1,000 per American adult a year. And since an estimated half of adults don’t buy lottery tickets, the average for those who do play is about twice that amount.

Despite all the attention that the billion-dollar prizes receive, Powerball and Mega Millions are not the nation’s largest lottery games. About 70% of lotto tickets sold are instant scratch off tickets, said Victor Matheson, professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross.

Matheson said the instant games with much smaller prizes offer better odds at winning some kind of prize, and they typically attract lower income players than Powerball and Mega Millions, which attract higher income players, especially when prizes get so large.

“The way people think about their lives is, ‘I want to do something that fundamentally changes it,’ not just makes it incrementally better,” he said. “So a scratch-off ticket will do that for some people and not for others. But for most people, a $600 million cash prize would be significant money.”

– CNN’s Jordan Valinsky contributed to this report

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