Why Daily Fantasy Sports Isn't Fantasy Sports Daily
There’s probably a few people reading this who were hovering over graphing paper with a Bic ball-point pen in the early ’90s crafting the foundation of what has become Fantasy Sports. I’m not talking about the Rotisserie guys and their ESPN television special. I’m talking about what 2011 American society has embraced as Fantasy Sports. You know what I mean; your ‘home’ fantasy league. The one with the draft date set two months in advance. The league consists of playing competitively with your friends and family, easily more competitive than a regular season NBA game between the Celtics and the Spurs, and likely more competitive than the NBA finals will be this week. So this one’s for you: to all two of you graph-paper ground-breakers reading this, thanks for laying the foundation, but what really made the fantasy industry what it is today was the online draft room.
Yahoo! seemed to take the reigns early on, and you all jumped on board. No graph paper needed. No Bic pen with replaceable ink. Just you, your close friends and a few acceptable family members…plus an over-abundance of confidence and smack-talk. Who cares where it started? The bottom line is that (and I’ll bet my home season tickets to Florida Gators football on this) that everyone reading this lousy column has played in an online season long fantasy draft or league. We have Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS, FOX Sports, etc. to thank for growing Daily Fantasy to the $4 Billion industry it’s become. Daily Fantasy is just smart enough to be riding their coat tails.
But Daily Fantasy is better, right? You can play when you want, how you want, with the rules you want, and the whole time you don’t have to deal with an upset victory from Aunt Judy’s auto-draft lineup in Week 3 of NFL season. I’m sold! Charlie Sheen is winning! Even if we didn’t get Osama, all is well in the world!
Most of us reading this know Daily Fantasy is a great product, and we know there are Daily Fantasy sites out there getting millions (say it the Austin Powers, Dr. Evil way for effect) in funding. This industry has to become huge right? Maybe. We know the product is good, but ask yourself how easy/hard is it to explain this concept to your buddies in your home league? It’s not an instant sell.
It’s up to the daily sites to create the right product for the players who actually make up this billion dollar industry right now, and then for them to market it to them. You want to know why Daily Fantasy hasn’t taken over Fantasy Fantasy yet? It’s not actually Daily Fantasy in the sense we have all grown to love and know, it’s a completely different game.
I’ll bet you every Daily Fantasy site that created a business plan, cited and pitched the massive $4 Billion potential of the Fantasy Industry to their investors. There’s no fibbing there, that exists. The issue is, is that the casual players making up that multi-billion dollar industry, are playing a completely different game. Think about it.
In your home league, the vast majority of leagues are what we Daily Grinders currently refer to as ‘Sit and Drafts’. The same format where you join a league, enter a draft room, then take turns choosing who you think is the best available player for your team. There is no salary cap. Then, from week one through week seventeen (NFL) you hold onto your core group of players and fight on the waiver wire for the second-tier players. It’s an amazing product that has proliferated our society, but it’s not Daily Fantasy. No, in Daily Fantasy there are no high-school buddies, no cheesy co-workers, and no family. There’s your brain, the salary cap, and the lobby. You pick a team within a salary cap, then you pit it against a random stranger’s. There’s no house parties, no one to share in the draft process but yourself, and it definitely isn’t the $4 Billion industry that fantasy has become.
Let me be clear, I’m not trying to say Daily Fantasy is worse, or anything bad about it on any level. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it were the future for fantasy fanatics. But I do think we’re still in the early stages of the industry, and that all of the sites will appear markedly different within just one years time. What I am asking the fanatics reading this and the Daily Fantasy sites marketing to new players right now is this: What are you marketing to them?
I’m all for salary cap games, they’re great. But I did not understand the concept overnight…it actually took me a while. Crap, KCearnal has more wins than me still, so I have to still be learning something. Enough about me though; I’m shocked at how reluctant even the most hardcore of my season-long friends are to join when I share the concept. To the sites who put put a bullet-point by ‘$4 Billion Dollar Industry’ in their business plan, there is no online internet banner or email newsletter that can clearly convey the experience of a Daily Fantasy Salary Cap game to someone who has only used the ESPN Draft Lobby.
I’m not saying the answer is clear. But if it were me, what would I do? I would start by cloning something the $4 billion industry of fantasy players actually understands…a live draft room that you can join on a regular basis with 8-16 other competitors. Market that to the ‘newbs’. This could stick as a long-term product for even the most hardcore of grinders. If it doesn’t, view it as a marketing tool to help the Fantasy Sports industry understand ours. In my eyes, the industry will continue to grow no matter what, but once live drafts are made feasible on a daily basis, then Daily Fantasy Sports can start becoming Fantasy Sports on a daily basis.
RotoGrinders: Opinion Sunday – May 29th, 2011
Cameron MacMillan
RotoGrinders.com Fantasy Content Manager