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| SportingNews.com’s deal with foxsports.com puts another player in the fantasy games market. |
FoxSports.com has completed a deal that will put sportingnews.com's enhanced slate of fantasy football games on its Web site for the 2003 NFL season, both parties confirmed last week.
The deal adds another player to the increasingly competitive market of league-management fantasy products.
Per the agreement, foxsports.com and sportingnews.com join SportsLine.com, espn.com and Yahoo! Sports as sites now offering users league-management games, also known as commissioner games. For $100 and up, subscribers can form a league of as many as 20 teams and then customize rules, scoring and other options.
The foxsports.com-sportingnews.com agreement typifies the widespread shift in the way consumers and online content providers view fantasy sports, a nearly $11 million business for publicly traded SportsLine.com Inc. last year, according to company financial statements.
"This is a business with some growth potential that more and more people are playing or thinking about playing," said John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager of espn.com, the top-trafficked sports site that launched its own commissioner game, League Manager, during the NFL draft in April.
Kosner said one quarter of espn.com's roughly 15 million unique visitors monthly visit for fantasy offerings, according to focus group estimates.
Fee-based games typically include large cash prizes and a wealth of related content to assist players.
Executives from foxsports.com and sportingnews.com had not announced their deal as of last Thursday, but the games became available on foxsports.com last week. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but such deals typically involve the sharing of subscription fees from players who sign up through the host site — in this case, foxsports.com.
These deals benefit sites like foxsports.com because the development and maintenance of fantasy products require an enormous time and financial commitment. ESPN.com, for example, spent nearly a year developing League Manager. SportingNews.com, which had rolled out a similar product for baseball for this season and consequently had much of the infrastructure in place, still spent the last three months developing and testing its football product.
SportsLine, which produces nfl.com, late last week expanded its agreement with the NFL whereby it now will offer its Football Commissioner product ($160 per league) on the NFL site. The league-management product and SportsLine's more basic, free game this season will be co-branded. As part of their agreement, the two sites will share certain subscription revenue from sales of the game on both sites.
SportsLine last month also signed a fantasy deal with the licensing arm of the NFL Players Association that guarantees the NFLPA $1 million to $1.5 million in royalties for the right to use players' names and images in their games. This year's game comes with several new features, including a custom home-page Internet address for each league.
Peter Pezaris, who oversees SportsLine's fantasy products, said the increasing number of companies offering fantasy products could help build overall awareness among fans for the games. He added that SportsLine is projecting double-digit growth in its fantasy subscription revenue in 2003.
