The dynamics of the fantasy football market are pretty interesting. There are a select few 800lb gorillas and hundreds of very small niche players and the bottom line is…..it’s BIG. It’s a multi-billion dollar market. It’s far bigger than online dating and (other) casual gaming combined.
Yet it’s a little understood market. I challenge anyone to find a market of comparable size with less reliable market data. You can’t. I’ve seen wildly divergent estimates and wildly differing definitions of the market.
But I’m quite certain that none of the existing market data takes this into account. I doubt the market data takes this kind of ancillary revenue into account!
Welcome to the Ultimate Football Network’s “Training Camp: Beta” release. Preseason games are under way and everyone’s excited to see the first glimpse of what their favorite team looks like for the 2008 season while the fantasy-addicted among you are checking out the preseason replays on NFL Network looking for that deep sleeper that’s going to make your fantasy season.
The team at UFN has been hard at work making UFN your one-stop shop for NFL news and analysis. We’ve been improving what we already had and adding new features, many of which were suggested by you, our community.
Here are some of the features we’ve added:
Customized player queries: When you add players to your “player list” or import your fantasy rosters from Yahoo and ESPN, UFN will create a customized news feed showing you the hottest NFL content about the players important to you.
Fantasy Roster Importing: Did we mention that you can import your ESPN and Yahoo fantasy rosters? Pretty soon, you’ll not only be able to see a customized news feed, you’ll be able to perform your basic roster management directly from UFN (news and roster changes in the same place?! Yup.)
Blogging- more options to show you know your football: One of our beta users told us “I know so much about football and have no where let it out!” Seriously…he said that. Well we took care of that by adding direct blogging functionality to UFN. Now you can write your own articles, analysis or make predictions via UFN’s blog engine. And as with everything UFN, your fellow fans decide if you know your stuff.
Bookmarklet- geeky stuff: Following on the previous theme, we wanted to make it easier for you to add even more good football content from around the Web, so we’ve added a bookmarklet. For those of you who don’t know what a bookmarklet is, it’s a button you can drag on to your toolbar for one click-access to UFN. So when you are on another site and find some great football content, you can simply click on the bookmarklet on your toolbar and quickly add it directly to UFN’s news feed.
Team/Player Tag List: When you go to the “Teams+Players” page, you’ll now see the tags you are subscribed to. Anytime you import your fantasy roster, those players are automatically added to your player feed, but you can always manually add players from their individual player pages. Find a deep sleeper you want to keep tabs on? Click the green button on his player page and UFN will keep you posted!
Visual Stuff: You’ll also notice some minor housekeeping we felt was necessary. We made article text, tags and comments collapsable and brought comments to the front page. We don’t want you having to go too far to talk smack!
We’re about 3 weeks away from the REAL kick-off of the 2008 season and we couldn’t be more excited for the real bullets to start flying. Please help us at UFN as we’re working to bring you the service you want. Please continue to let us know what you like and, more importantly, what you don’t like and what you’d like to see. We’ll keep improving UFN in an effort to make it your ultimate destination for NFL and fantasy football news!
At the time I’m putting this together, there are 53 responses between the two sources, and as a point of reference, it’s fair to say that anyone using FriendFeed or commenting on a blog is considered an “early adopter“.
Out of the 50+ responses, only 7 referenced sites or technologies that would be considered “social media”. That would be blogs, RSS feeds, news aggregators…basically any method that wasn’t visiting a static publisher.
That’s only a little more than 10% of early adopters that have incorporated social media into their sports routine, so it’s safe to say that the mainstream is way behind. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider the number of sports blogs, message boards, team forums and other sports related social media resources that exist today.
And that certainly tracks with the feedback we’ve been gathering here at the Ultimate Football Network. We’ve had a couple of football fans (who we expected to become quickly addicted to UFN) who simply didn’t understand what UFN was supposed to be. in explaining it, we tried to dumb it down as much as possible and would say, “So far, it’s just like Digg for the NFL”. How surprising to get a good number of those people then ask “What’s Digg?”
So this serves as a great data point for Louis and the team here at UFN. We’re working on making the site more intuitive for new users as well early adopters and developing some cool new features that will really enhance the user experience. That, and some other cool stuff that we’re not talking about yet.
Thanks to Greg Lato of Latoga Labs for the kind words! In his review of StartUpCamp’s Best Startup competition, Greg noted that UFN was a “startup you should watch out for”. Here’s what else he had to say about UFN:
Another great vertical social/mashup service. All the information you need for making your Fantasy Football picks in a single location…or to just catch up on all the latest details of the football world. Based upon the stickiness factor and size of the market they service, this one is a serious contender.
I wanted to take a second to thank Fritz Nelson, who writes the Instigator blog over at Information Week. Fritz was involved with StartUp Camp, a part of the Sun JavaOne conference here in San Francisco this week and had some really nice things to say about UFN.
Here’s the part I really liked:
This [UFN] is aggregated crowd intelligence at its best. You know your company needs to harness this, but these guys are starting life not only with that knowledge, but the ability to execute.
Read the rest of Fritz’s commentary about UFN and the StartUp Camp here.
It’s fitting that just after the Ultimate Football Network’s early beta release went live, HBO’s Costas Live held a special, live panel discussion about the future of sports media. And after spending 90 minutes watching the show, I can assure you that neither Bob Costas nor any of his guests throughout the show had the faintest clue what the future of sports media holds.
No where was this more evident than in the spectacle, errr, panel discussion on “The Internet and the Impact of Bloggers”. While Cleveland Browns WR Braylon Edwards was technically on the panel, the entire segment centered around Pulitzer-Prize winning sports author Buzz Bissinger and his absurd rant against Deadspin’s Will Leitch.
See the trainwreck video here:
Bissinger made a fool of himself, coming off as a luny old man yelling at kids for being on his lawn or lecturing youngsters about how “in his day he had to walk 25 miles to and from school up hill both ways.” (See Leitch’s own reaction here)
But Bissinger’s horribly misplaced anger towards Leitch is a very real metaphor for the frustration being felt by the “old guard” in any and all traditional media outlets. Whether you work in newspaper, magazine, radio and to a large extent television, the Internet is going to kill your business as you know it. And no matter how hard you try to ignore this sea change or dismiss it as amateurish, or yell at those at the forefront like Will Leitch, it’s not going to stop any time soon. It’s only going to keep getting bigger and more complicated.
Many of the uninformed comments from the comparatively ancient Buzzinger and Costas centered around the fact that bloggers had no credentials, a valid criticism. That’s one of the first problems we are trying to solve here at UFN. While we know there are now endless sources of content, we want you, the fans, to decide who the top sources are and what the hottest stories are. We think that’s a significant part of the future of sports media. But we also recognize that this is just the tip of the iceberg. (And thats’ why we want to continue soliciting your feedback on what we can do better to serve fans).
Yet what Bissinger, Costas, and the other resident “old timers” like Michael Wilbon and Al Michaels didn’t seem to understand about the impact of the Internet is that fans are now a part of the media. It’s understandable since their lives are defined by the fact that they rose to the top of their professions, becoming one of the view “voices”, a truly exclusive accomplishment, only to now realize (or stay in denial and go off on rants against bloggers) now that every single fan with an Internet connection has that same “voice”. A successful digital sports media company will embrace and engage those voices and seek to play the role of mediator while making those voices useful and available.
We hope that UFN will allow fans to find the “voices” that give them what they are looking for. And while Bissinger would have you believe that includes nothing lowbrow garbage, UFN believes that there are plenty of fans who want to read both a Pulitzer-prize winning sportswriter as well as an opinionated blogger and are curious to know which one fellow fans prefer.
Welcome to the early beta release of the Ultimate Football Network!
While we are just getting started, we fully intend on making this the ultimate destination on the Web for pro football fans. We know there are a lot of you and we know what you like, but we can’t get there without your help.
We want your feedback. Tell us what you like, and more importantly, what you don’t like. (We’ll keep improving the site if you excuse our dust while we’re “under construction”)
But more importantly, we want you to contribute. We want you to add, rate and comment on the content here at UFN. This site will be as valuable as you, the fans, make it.
So, on behalf of all the people behind UFN, let me be the first to welcome you to the Ultimate Football Network. We hope we’ll be seeing you frequently from now on.
P.S. We’ll keep you posted on developments here at the UFN blog. Thanks for stopping by. JJ
