State of the Industry
With NFL Football wrapped up after a historic daily fantasy sports season, it seems to be an appropriate time to pause and reflect on where we are at as a daily fantasy sports industry.
NFL Season
In the past 5 months of NFL daily fantasy sports action there was unprecedented growth across the industry. Not only were the tournament payments on average a whopping 7 times bigger than last year, the amount of new players we saw flood the industry was unprecedented and unanticipated. It seems like almost everyone wants to try daily fantasy sports after experiencing the joys and pains of playing a season long league. This type of attitude is something we hope continues well into the future.
4 Main Sites
There is cause for some concern as the sites that seem to be leading the charge to grow the industry appear to be heading in polar opposite directions however. FanDuel, the site with the largest player base, has done nothing noteworthy in the last 6 to 9 months to improve the overall player experience. Draftkings, a site that has received close to 24 million dollars in venture capitalist, appears to be making changes on an almost daily basis. The innovative and fresh way that they are providing daily fantasy sports action is something that all sites should strive for. The sites as a whole have a very strong influence on the overall industry. DraftStreet and Draftday are the two other sites worth mentioning in the top 4. They both have unique and innovative ways to improve the overall player experience. This is not the same for FanDuel as the only reason people continue to play on the site is for all the new and easy fish that they bring into the industry.
New Sites
One thing that could help continue to grow the industry at this alarming rate is if one of the big season long NFL fantasy football providers decides to enter into the daily fantasy sports scene. If a site like yahoo, espn or even NFL.com offer some sort of daily fantasy sports game it would be historic for the industry. Yahoo appears to be the closest by offering real money season long leagues that you can enter through PayPal. It appears to only be a matter of time before they enter into the daily fantasy sports scene as well. This would be revolutionary for the industry as the amount of players these sites have access to would greatly swell the player population. If even a quarter of the people who played some sort of season long league on these sites was converted to playing part time daily fantasy sports the amount of action that would be present on these sites is not even something that FanDuel could come close to matching. Converting these players to other sites that could provide a better user experience would happen very quickly. It will be interesting to see what current sites are successful at doing this and what ones fail to capitalize on this. There will be lots of winners and losers if this situation arises and we would all be wise to plan ahead and position ourselves in the best place to take advantage when and if this conversion process occurs.
