“This Week In Daily” is LegalSportsReport’s weekly wrap of key facts, happenings and miscellany from the daily fantasy sports industry.
Stories of note
Yahoo had 1.3 million users, and then it didn’t
Yahoo caused a bit of a stir this week when CEO Marissa Mayer said the company had 1.3 million daily fantasy sports users trying its platform, just two weeks after launch.
The only problem? They actually didn’t. That was actually the number of users across Yahoo’s entire fantasy platform, season-long included. Yahoo corrected itself on Thursday.
How many users do they actually have? Yahoo didn’t say, but an educated guess would put it over 10,000 so far.
It wasn’t a great week for Yahoo, as it stirred up some controversy with one of its contests, as well.
FanDuel just buys its own app company
What do you do you when you just completed a $275 million round of funding? Buy the company that developed your app, of course.
On Monday, news broke that FanDuel purchased the mobile development firm Kotikan. It was a natural fit, as the company was also based in Scotland and built FanDuel’s apps for it.
Of the week
Read of the week
“DraftKings and FanDuel Are Battling Over Your Favorite Teams”
This is an interesting read from Re/Code on the sponsorship deals like the ones that DraftKings and FanDuel commonly ink with pro sports teams.
We generally don’t learn a lot about how these deals are structured, publicly, but this story quantified the value of some of them:
As a result, the deals have become a big part of the business. The partnerships, which all tend to fall in the three- to five-year range, typically cost the companies between $500,000 and $1.5 million per year depending on market size and the sport, according to people familiar with the deals.
There are fewer and fewer teams that don’t have DFS deals, which could make the market go up for those franchises that have remained on the sidelines.
Watch of the week
RotoCurve’s Michael Rathburn wonders is golf is the No. 2 DFS sport behind football:
Tweets of the week
Drum roll….. Last 6 days (MLB only for fair comparison) Yahoo 60,000 paid entries Fandue 1.31 million pe Draftkings 1.47 million pe
— Daily Fantasy Lobby (@superlobby) July 23, 2015
We have a tie, congratulations to ‘jrazajr’ and ‘DrCash007’! https://t.co/mWghrtNCrn pic.twitter.com/Gf5FEt8QLv
— DraftKings (@DraftKings) July 20, 2015
Number of the week
$6.25 million
The amount of guaranteed prize pools FanDuel is offering for Week 1 of the NFL season.
In case you missed it
Other news from the world of DFS:
- DFS for golf has another big week at DraftKings.
- DraftKings‘ spend over two years at ESPN will be $250 million, according to a report.
- The company that is suing the NFL for causing the cancellation of its fantasy sports convention lumps FanDuel and DFS in with gambling and casinos.
- Player funds at the DFS site Fantasy Up are apparently in limbo.
- Check out comedian Bill Burr’s podcast and some LOLs at the expense of DraftKings. (26-minute mark; warning, profanity)
