The best public window into the growth – and general financial contour – of the daily fantasy sports industry appears to have closed.
That’s after market leader FanDuel removed key historical data regarding revenue and number of paid active players from their “Investors” page.
The data remains available (along with some extended interpretation) here. The information was last updated for 4Q14.
When asked for the motivation behind the change, FanDuel Director of Communications Justine Sacco told me that the company was updating their site and that the investors page was the first change.
The last major update to the page was in early May, when FanDuel removed a claim of holding 80% market share in the DFS space.
Any more data to come?
As for the if and when of releasing data going forward, Sacco would only say that “we’ve always been a transparent company and will continue to give insight on our business growth.”
FanDuel’s willingness to release such data publicly always marked them as an outlier in the DFS industry.
Primary rival DraftKings has released select data to various media outlets, but never offered the comprehensive picture FanDuel provided.
The vast majority of other DFS operators tend to offer little or nothing in the way of player and revenue data.
Review the historical data here.
Status of the growth story
The story of consistent triple-digit annual growth is the fuel powering the DFS boom. And FanDuel – at least through 2014 – could claim far and away the most impressive expression of that growth in both relative and absolute terms.
So it seems odd for the company to suddenly stop telling said story without a compelling reason.
There may be such reasons that have nothing to do with growth slowing:
@OPReport prepping for IPO. Nothing to do with slowing growth.
— Jeremy Levine (@JerLevine) May 24, 2015
@JerLevine @OPReport yup. Prepping their definition of Non-GAAP “Adjusted EBITDA”
— Jamie (@postervegas) May 24, 2015
But it’s tough to completely discount the explanation that FanDuel stopped telling the story because they didn’t like where the narrative was heading.
