Everyday millions of Americans flock to fantasy sports websites like Fanduel, DraftKings, CBS Sports and Yahoo! Sports to draft their fantasy teams just because they want to beat their friends or perhaps to win some hard-core cash. There has been a great debate that daily fantasy sport business is dead. Or is it? Well, if you look at the perpetual swarm of users on Fanduel and DraftKings websites, the word is, daily fantasy sport is far from heading to the grave. Instead, there are still new daily fantasy sport sites popping-up every now and then to reap a piece of the pie of this lucrative multi-billion dollar industry, thanks to new fantasy startups and fantasy sport business consultants that offer white label fantasy sports software on web and apps.
FanDuel and DraftKings were thriving (and maybe still are) from 2012 to 2015 until some smart-ass employees of the latter went to outsmart the industry by taking the data they have access to from DraftKings website and won almost $6 million on FanDuel’s system. There’s nothing wrong with winning the money, since fantasy sport is clearly a game of skill like what this scandal proves, but the problem is they created an unfair advantage (somewhat like insider trading) for the rest of FanDuel’s customers who also played on the site and did not win.
This infographics shows in a nutshell how the daily fantasy sport industry looks like. Whether it’s daily fantasy or traditional fantasy (the one that you don’t put your money on to play), this business that started in the 1970s is set to stay for the longest time ever, due to the advancement of technologies such as smartphones. More players are playing on their iOS or Android smartphones instead of going to their desktops. These mobility technologies also create a more compelling user experience where fans can sit on their comfy couch and watch the game live on TV while playing DFS on-the-fly on their mobile devices.
Maybe one day, once the legal debate is over, the world can see that sport is worth fantasizing about.