I started writing about the possibility of developing a fantasy league site. Somehow, I ended up mapping out the entire history of internet fantasy sports.
I got started with fantasy early in the early days of the WWW era. I think I first signed up for a Yahoo fantasy baseball league around the year 2001. I was in high school, I didn't know that much about baseball, and I didn't really manage my team during the season.
The World Series that fall featured the Diamondbacks taking out the Yankees in dramatic fashion. It was the first baseball playoffs that I watched all the way through, and it sparked my interest in both baseball and in fantasy.
I joined fantasy baseball and fantasy football leagues with friends the following year, and fantasy sports became perhaps my deepest interest over the next two decades and beyond.
All of that to say: I've been around for most of the era of internet fantasy sports. However, I'm sure someone who has been at the center could give a better accounting of things. My facts are mostly coming from the Internet Archive rather than any personal experience within the industry itself.
So, let's fire up the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to the early days of online fantasy sports.
The Internet Archive takes me back as far as 1996. But, even then, there were fantasy leagues online.
Often, these sites were part of the transition from mail/phone/fax fantasy baseball. Compared to those options, the internet offered a brand new and better experience for tracking stats and standings. Online drafts and public leagues would come later. For now, you still needed to form your league and hold your draft all offline.
RealTime Sports was an option for fantasy football as early as 1996, for $90 per league. They are still around today, but with minimal adoption.
Allstar Stats was also around in 1996. They were considerably more expensive: $55 per team for a mixed league, plus $50 for the league as a whole. (I'm guessing that prices had already been mostly set by the phone/fax services, including Allstar Stats. It goes to show you that tracking rotisserie baseball is a lot more work than tracking football.) Allstar Stats shut down after 2012 and recommended their customers go to CBS.
USAStats was another early league site that started as a offline service. They were $39 per team, but were eventually acquired by AllStar Stats in 2006.
I don't fully know the story of the various combinations of Allstar Stats, Rotoworld, and NBC. I think AllStar Stats acquired Rotoworld around 2001. Maybe NBC acquired them both a bit later? (With CBS having SportsLine fantasy leagues, and ABC having ESPN leagues, it seems like NBC really missed out on the fantasy market.)
Anyway, the basic story of this era: Fantasy leagues started moving online, and the scoring services that already had leagues as customers took advantage of this new technology. Prices were expensive and (by today's standards) the services weren't that good.
That first group of sites were mostly about providing a stats service for existing groups of friends. The internet provided a more efficient way to do that than previous options.
Just a little bit after that first wave, another group of sites begin leveraging the Internet for something else: its connecting power. Instead of being a game for 10-12 pre-existing friends, fantasy sports could have leagues of hundred or thousands of people. Get enough people together, and you could start pooling entries for some big grand prizes.
One of those was CDM, which at least as far back as 1999 was offering games with prizes of up to $25,000. Their baseball game was a season-long salary cap game. They eventually ended up as part of Fanball in 2006.
Speaking of Fanball: They also fall into this category. It seems that their games started around 2002, often weekly contests rather than season long.
The salary cap format was a key idea in getting big pools of entries. That, plus the short contest lengths, were elements that eventually found their way into the world of daily fantasy sports.
SportsHub gobbled up both Fanball and CDM (as well as NFC), which pretty well wrapped up this segment of the market. Today, this audience is served mostly by DFS and best ball leagues.
All of those early sites were eventually pushed to the margins by the rise of free fantasy leagues, subsidized by big media companies: Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS.
I can trace CBS's offering with some certainty to the 2000 NFL season (as commissioner.com). They started off free, but eventually narrowed in on paid leagues.
Yahoo goes back a little further, at least to the 1999 football season. They have always had a free product, but in later years have added prize leagues and premium content.
ESPN appeared to have had fantasy baseball leagues in 1999.
Interestingly, I did not realize that ESPN started as $30/team paid fantasy leagues, and continued that way through 2006. I'm guessing Yahoo's free option forced them to the free route as well, which is what they offer to this day.
In each case, you have a major media company trying to get their hands in a bit of everything on the early web. They already had access to sports stats, so fantasy was an easier add-on for them than for new startups. Due to their size, they could eat the cost of hosting free leagues (which, being ad-supported, already fit in their business model).
Who else has come along in season-long fantasy since the era of the Big Three?
Several of these have tried to mark out a clear niche, rather than trying to overthrow the earlier sites: NFC did high-stakes. Ottoneu targeted baseball analytics. Underdog focused on lower stakes, casual best ball. Sleeper has (so far) only offered points formats: football and points-league basketball; the former has done well while the latter hasn't.
Fantrax is the one that has tried to do it all, although they've been plagued by (IMO) technology debt that hinders them from being anyone's favorite provider.
That leads me to try to think of some lessons learned: What path leads to a successful league site?
New entries to the market have only taken on significant mindshare by doing something new and/or by marketing their new site.
Yahoo produced a radical improvement on the other options of the time. Not only did it have a better UI, it was free. Even bigger, their public leagues opened up fantasy for the first time to people who didn't have 11 friends nearby.
Sleeper has taken the fantasy UI forward another step, and taken a good segment of the fantasy football market. Ottoneu is doing something new for analytic=minded baseball fans.
But, it's not all about implementing new ideas. The more successful companies have also invested in marketing. I've heard podcast ads for Fantrax, Ottoneu, and Underdog, at least. (And, I'm not even going to get to the marketing barrage from FanDuel and DraftKings.)
Who hasn't done these two things? I don't think FleaFlicker brought any new ideas, and I haven't felt any of their marketing if they've done it. They are, unsurprisingly, sitting in the margins of the game today.
Fantrax hasn't really done much new. (Free best ball?) But they've definitely been marketing.
It's hard to tease out which of the two factors (innovation and marketing) have led to success. But I think at least one of them is required, and usually both.
Throughout history, sites that focused on prize players and those catering to fun players have always coexisted.
Today, I think the prize league segment gets a lot of attention, especially as DFS and sports betting become more mainstream.
However, there's still good money being spent on fun leagues, maybe enough to make it a better market. Remember, Allstar Stats was pulling in $600 a league, and they didn't have to pay out a penny in prizes! Ottoneu makes more per league than the NFC (which aims to only keep around 20% per league).
That's encouraging for someone like me, who has never spent a dollar on DFS or gambling.
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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].