FanDuel Launches Friends Mode
With this week’s arrival of Friends Mode on FanDuel, three of the leading sites in daily fantasy sports have now added an element of season-long leagues.
Both Yahoo and DraftKings also recently added iterations of their daily contests that draw on the continuity of traditional fantasy, though like Friends Mode, the contests themselves remain more closely aligned with DFS than the snake drafts and weekly one-on-one matchups typically associated with the season-long game.
FanDuel first announced its foray earlier this month before officially launching Friends Mode on Thursday. At its essence, it’s a modification of an existing feature—private games—that augments the older version by creating recurring invitation-only contests.
The idea, FanDuel says, is to make it easier for users to create their own experience on the site.
“Our business is growing, we’re expanding into new areas and we’re going to be competing directly against ESPN, Yahoo! and other fantasy providers,” FanDuel co-founder and CEO Nigel Eccles said. “Friends Mode is going to transform fantasy sports the same way FanDuel did when we launched back in 2009.”
Any FanDuel user can become a “commissioner” by creating and naming a league and sending invitations to friends and/or fellow FanDuel users. Commissioners can customize the size of the league, the buy-in fee, and the payout structure from a set of predetermined options. The league will then recur weekly, but can be modified at any time. Each league will include a leaderboard that keeps track of results throughout the year.
Commissioners will also earn $10 from FanDuel if their league includes five or more players in NFL Week 1 or 2 at a $5 buy-in or higher.
DraftKings launched a similar product earlier this month. DK Leagues also gives users the ability to create recurring, customizable contests in a private lobby accessible only by invitation.
Yahoo, meanwhile, is in a different situation. Its reputation in the fantasy community was built on its popular season-long platform and it’s a relative newcomer DFS after launching its daily product in July 2015. Dubbed the Yahoo Cup, its season-long/daily hybrid is essentially a series of freeroll tournaments that will run in Weeks 1-16 of the NFL season. Weekly prizes will be awarded, and the player with the most cumulative points at the conclusion will win a $50,000 jackpot.