June 5th, 2010

FSB Daily 6/5: Del Pilar, Yahoo!, Scott White, Fantasy Factor, Fantazzle

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

- KFFL’s William Del Pilar says he’s regularly disappointed with the analysis that fills fantasy football preview magazines.

- Excited about the upcoming World Cup but wondering what kind of coverage you’ll have available while you’re in Malaysia? Worry no more. Yahoo! Sports has rolled out a Malaysia-dedicated site.

- Scott White’s alma mater, the University of Georgia, recently featured the CBS Sports fantasy analyst for winning the 2010 FSWA baseball writer of the year award.

- If you’re a programmer with experience building a fantasy football website but without the desire to make much money, these folks would like you to build a slight variation on the Yahoo! fantasy platform for $750 or less.

- FantasyFactor.com has partnered with the World Championship of Fantasy Football to attract players of the former to the latter. Starting Friday, those who play in the Fantasy Factor daily baseball games will get “WCOFF dollars” that can be put toward the buy-in for the main event.

- Fantasy gaming site Fantazzle.com has rolled out a slick bracket-style game for the upcoming World Cup.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to [email protected]. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

Share/Save/Bookmark

MFL Continues to Grow User Base Via Acquisitions

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

On Wednesday, MyFantasyLeague.com announced the acquisition of fantasy football league-management site HomeGrownSports.com, a move that MFL owner Mike Hall said is part of a plan to add about 500 leagues to his site’s universe this year.

It was the latest in a series of purchases over the past couple of years that has sought to grow the customer base amid what Hall sees as a shrinking market of hosts.

“We’ve seen a lot of consolidation in the league management space, and we anticipate even more in the near future, so we hope to continue to be an active part of that,” he told FSB.com. “We’ve been actively pursuing other fantasy football league management companies for acquisition over the past couple of years. We’ll continue to seek out other smaller league management companies where possible.”

Home Grown Sports lived for 12 years, and Hall expects that about 90 percent of its existing leagues will be transitioned to the MFL platform. This conversion rate would be in line with what followed the 2008 acquisition of StatsWorld, which joined deals with MyFantasyFootball.com and RotoWire to deliver 1,500 leagues to MFL that year.

“It definitely adds to our customer base, which is admittedly our main goal with these acquisitions,” Hall said. “But we also feel strongly that we are filling a void for these customers that were otherwise going to have to find their own replacement service.”

Hall said his company had been working with Home Grown since March to transition the leagues. Visitors to the HomeGrownSports.com domain are now redirected to a MyFantasyLeague page with an open letter from Home Grown owner John Garber. In it, he explains that converted users will be able to renew their leagues in 2010 for $45 — the same price as their old site, $25 less than MFL’s earliest rate and half the price of the latest annual signup level. After 2010, leagues will presumably move to the regular MyFantasyLeague rates.

The biggest benefit for users who make the switch figures to be the transfer of full league history, an aspect that would generate some concern for folks who have been with a particular site for many years. Hall said this tends to be a key part of each acquisition and transition.

“Some customers have been with HomeGrownSports.com for 10 years, and we were able to keep their historical records for all of those past seasons since our system allows customers to track their complete league history all the way back to 1990,” he said

No financial terms have been released from what Hall said was a private transaction.

Share/Save/Bookmark