How was football?
It wasn't as good as I hoped, or as bad as I feared.
My optimistic expectation had been to double my baseball sales. But, after a slow start, I became more realistic about reasons why the football market is difficult.
The final revenue numbers:
Unlike baseball, football sales were highly concentrated in the weeks right before the season. I followed the same playbook as for baseball, focusing my money on Google Ads and my time on Reddit.
Besides Stripe's fees (already removed from those revenue totals), my only other expense is Google Ads.
I spent $582 on football ads, compared to $597 for baseball. In both cases, I spent a lot on early draft season ads without much to show for it. (That's December/January for baseball, June/July for football.) However, it's hard to know if the early ads created awareness that eventually led to sales.
My other real expense is my time, and I spent a lot of time on the fantasy football subreddit. I worked hard answering little questions--DraftKick is very handy for quickly coming up with answers to early round strategy or keeper valuation. But it didn't seem to drive me a lot of traffic.
What did work was a roundup of the various draft tools being promoted on the subreddit. I think the timing was pretty perfect (about 2.5 weeks before the season), and it was the sort of post that isn't judged as self-promotional (although I posted it knowing that DraftKick would look strong in side-by-side comparisons).
My first experience with fantasy was baseball, and I've played it pretty continually for the past 20+ years. So that was my obvious starting point for DraftKick.
Even though I'd never been as interested in football as a sport, I had gotten pretty deep into fantasy football 15-20 years ago. At the time, I was already wrestling with issues of VBD and positional baselines. With that background, it was easy to get back up to speed this season for DraftKick Football.
I've never played fantasy basketball.
I've clearly got some learning to do. Here are my initial thoughts on fantasy basketball:
Basketball has the roto element that makes DraftKick more valuable than it is for football. There's also real strategy in balancing (or punting) categories, which DraftKick's Live SGP should be ready to handle. Multi-position players make it hard to intuitively set values, but this is also a Draftkick strength. On top of all of that, there are diverse league settings: roto/points, different points settings on every site, very different roster requirements (2C vs 1C) that cannot be accounted for in a one-size-fits-all ranking list. Basketball seems much closer to baseball than to football in terms of the importance of a draft assistant.
In fact, I think I'll really like fantasy basketball. It's got the category-balance element of fantasy baseball, but half the roster-size and half the season-length.
The fantasy basketball subreddit is over twice the size of the fantasy baseball one. However, I'm guessing that players are younger, which translates to me as cheaper and more numbers-savvy (i.e. more likely to build their own tools).
Despite the size of the subreddit, fantasy basketball certainly seems smaller than baseball elsewhere: Twitter? NFC? Those places seem much quieter for basketball. (Admittedly, I'm in the baseball bubble.)
There are a couple of existing basketball tools that are already popular in the subreddit, and they are also pretty good. DraftKick has some features they don't, so I still sense an opportunity.
The best part is that the existing tools are also paid/premium, which sets an expectation in people's minds of having to pay for products. (That was one problem in football: too many free draft tools.)
I've actually got DraftKick converted over for basketball already. I just need sites to get up their projections for it to be ready.
If you're still tracking your draft with a custom spreadsheet or even just pen and paper, you need to try DraftKick.
It is packed with features to help you succeed on draft day:
It's completely free to try out!
Hi,
I'm Mays. I've been playing fantasy since I was in high school (over two decades ago).
My speciality has always been player valuation—converting player stats into rankings and salary values. VBD for fantasy football? Rotisserie z-scores? We go way back. In 2009, I started Last Player Picked, a site that generated fantasy values customized for your league.
You can find me on Twitter at @MaysCopeland or email me at [email protected].