Yahoo! Daily Fantasy to Surpass $1 Million in Overlay for December
With six days to spare, Yahoo Daily Fantasy will cross the unprecedented $1 million mark for guaranteed overlays for one month. Pushing it over the top in December is the recently-announced $250,000 in guaranteed overlay for its $1M Baller NBA Christmas Day tournament.
Last week, Yahoo! DFS ran an NFL Million Dollar Baller contest where it gave away $1,000,000 in prize money, including a $250,000 guaranteed overlay. Heading into the holidays for NFL Week 16, Yahoo! is running back its NFL Million Dollar Baller contest with another $250,000 in guaranteed overlay.
Yahoo! DFS has also been running an NBA $100K Baller contest all week long. It awarded $10,000 to first place and a guaranteed $25,000 overlay on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Add it all up, carry the six, and combine with the $250,000 overlay on Christmas Day and Yahoo! DFS will eclipse $1 million overlay for the month. (Note: Overlay is the difference between the total guaranteed prize-pool by a DFS site and the actual number of paid entries. It’s money the site has to put in to the prize pool themselves rather than being added by other DFS players.)
What’s the idea? Well, by offering contests with high guaranteed overlay, Yahoo! will attract more serious DFS players to its games. Yahoo! also has an eye toward 2019 and offering higher overlays is one way to build up the customer base heading into the new year.
“We are not just insane or crazy. We are really looking forward to next year,” Alex Healy, Yahoo’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, said. “Fantasy is obviously a big part of Yahoo! Sports and we’re going to continue our investment with not only season-long products but our daily fantasy product. I know a lot of people have been waiting around for this since 2015 when we launched. The timing was just thinking ahead to next year.”
What else has changed since 2015? In May, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on full-fledged sports betting outside Nevada. Since then, DFS leaders DraftKings and FanDuel have pushed all-in on sports betting, and the early returns have been handsome. We anticipate Yahoo! DFS is redoubling its efforts with an eye toward sports betting, too.
It’s not just the big fish Yahoo! Is trying to attract. Offering high guaranteed overlays is a way to get more first-time players involved with Yahoo!, as well as enticing former Yahoo! DFS players to come back and try the product again.
“We saw a good response from the promotion last week (NFL Million Dollar Baller),” said Daniel Haight, Head of Yahoo! DFS. “We saw a ton of new users come in. We were able to re-engage users that started with us in 2015 and engage with the users that have been with us along the way.”