(For those of you you might have arrived late to the FSB party, here’s another chance to get acquainted with the first business we profiled.)

Company: Advanced Sports Media LLC
Sites: www.draftanalyzer.com and www.playersearch.com
Founder and CEO: Ted Kasten
Launched: 2004
Full time: 2004

Back in 2004, Ted Kasten believed the fantasy football marketplace needed a better draft companion than the “static and outdated rankings provided by magazines,” at least according to the company bio at draftanalyzer.com. To fill the void, he developed Draft Analyzer and launched Draft Dynamix, which now resides under the umbrella of Advanced Sports Media.

The plan that started the whole venture, though, began to form at least two years earlier.

“I began designing the Draft Analyzer prototype as a fun side project on nights and weekends in 2002, when I needed help as a commissioner tracking everyone’s draft picks,” Kasten says.

As those of us who play fantasy sports - or video games, for that matter - well know, it takes folks with such a geek streak to come up the innovations that enhance our games. Kasten’s fun, self-serving side project quickly started to grow.

After beginning with just the draft tracker, he says, he continued to add features that took the platform from merely keeping up with picks to helping him build a better team. Those features include the ability to draw in and combine rankings from various online fantasy-content providers into printable cheat sheets.

The Analyzer also carries a proprietary player-recommendation engine, for which Kasten submitted a federal patent application before launching his business. (Maybe I could explain the algorithmic workings of that tool if I hadn’t skipped out on math classes in college.) Once Kasten had Draft Analyzer build, he headed for the March 2004 Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference, a move he said was crucial to starting and growing his business.

I left the conference with three key partnerships, a better understanding of the fantasy sports market and the confidence that I could be a leader in this critical market niche,” Kasten says. “I became a staple at the FSTA conferences and had a booth showing my software every time. All of my partnerships have come from meeting people at the FSTA conference.

From there, Kasten has licensed his product to five of the top six fantasy football league-hosting sites - including ESPN and CBS Sports - and taken home two industry awards. Draft Analyzer claimed the FSTA’s Best Draft Assistance Tool prize in 2005 and 2007, and the player-recommendation engine was a finalist for best innovation in 2005.

With Draft Analyzer plugging along, Draft Dynamix became Advanced Sports Media in February of this year, the same time that it launched PlayerSearch.

“It took forever to dig through numerous websites to find the latest information on individual players,” Kasten says of his motivation to create a search tool. “There is an enormous amount of great sports content sites, and more and more of them are offering everything for free. We are simply trying to bring all of the great sports content to the surface of the Web, much like Google has for general search.”

PlayerSearch.com does just what it says, gathering news, video, blog posts and the like that relate to a particular athlete and grouping the links in categories national news sources, local video and podcasts.

“We are not trying to create another sports portal. That has been done,” Kasten says. “All of our links take users to the original article or video, so the publisher gets full credit for their work. The ultimate goal of PlayerSearch is to make it quick and easy to access the best sports content on the Web.”

In addition to its free-standing site, PlayerSearch offers a widget that can be picked up by other sites. SportsBuff.com, which is part of the same company that owns this site, is among those that carry the widget.

Tags: advanced sports media, draft analyzer, draft dynamix, fantasy draft, fantasy football, fantasy football draft, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, fantasy sports market, fsta, playersearch, ted kasten

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 7:10 am and is filed under Business Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.