Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Are Daily Fantasy Sports Really Growing?

I've been knee deep in some technology special olympics for the last 10 days. After having intermittent web access for an extended period, I finally got our cable lines replaced here and appear to be back in the 21st century.

I've had to hustle to keep my fantasy rosters filled out, which gave me mixed results. I've been a loser in 5 of the last 7 nights, bringing my June ROI down around +10%. It can move around a lot in the next week, but should end up in the black.

I read Blinders' post RIP GGD and FSEX, where it appears two more sites have bit the dust. Blinders really tries to spin these developments as a natural result of his superior product, but it was more a result of gross mismanagement by his competition.

I will say I played on GDD long before FSL. I never had the site crash on me, nor ever had a cashout issue. But they redesigned the site and never re-launched.

My point here is that the original GDD site was fine. It was just a different style of game than what FSL offers.

What's more interesting is his next post on the economy, where some Matt Maroon fanboy comments about the state of daily fantasy games:

"Also, congratulations on your "dominance" in the weekly fantasy sports market, or rather, being the big fish in a microscopic pond. I'm actually surprised with all your economic and business genius that you haven't figured out that this market isn't "high growth"."


Now, Matt was the superior mind behind Draftmix, which only offered live draft fantasy contests. Most of the daily fantasy players I've talked to didn't like waiting for the drafts to fill/start.

If you remember, this is how Matt feels about the types of contests run by FSL & Snapdraft - the biggest players still kicking. (BTW, Draftmix has been dormant for almost 7 months.)

From my experience, FSL and Snapdraft have been steadily growing, even in this shitty economy. As someone who checks out their offerings daily, I can say they both offer more contests and more opponents each month. Obviously, there are ups and downs as the different team sports seasons begin/end.

Do you really think that NBC Universal would invest in that rotoworld/fanball/instantfantasysports/snapdraft/NCFFB clusterfuck if it wasn't a "growth market"?

The main reason daily fantasy games haven't experienced "skyrocketing" growth... Is that most of the sites are run by techie folks who have failed to market IRL. Nobody is crossing over to market their games in MSM. Not even NBC.

Food for thought: Over 80% of all my affiliate referrals were closed in person, not online.

I hope it grows. I want it to grow. However, casual players need to know it exists, it's LEGAL and cashouts are easy. We've established those folks don't read this blog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you might like the contest options at 365fantasysports.com

Blinders said...

Main Stream Media does not work well for new concepts like Daily Fantasy Sports. It is just too hard to explain the concept and close the sale at the same time. The key metric is cost per conversion (cost per account created). This is lowest by far in online targeted advertising for us. Sure we could sign-up people faster with print ads and such, but it would be at a much, much higher cost per conversion, and may not be profitable. In person sign-ups work well, but I would say 95% of ours have been on-line. MSM is best for branding when the public already understands the product. Ultimately daily could be as big as season long, but it will take some time.