DraftKings, FanDuel dip their toes into season-long fantasy sports – Yahoo Finance

In the fight for fantasy sports primacy, DraftKings and FanDuel, the majority market-share leaders in the “daily” variety, resemble each other more and more—but they are also starting to resemble the long-established “season-long” fantasy providers.

DraftKings on Sunday announced a new feature, Leagues, that makes it easier for users to set up private groups with their friends and create recurring contests. The option to create a contest and invite friends existed on the platform before, but as cofounder and COO Paul Liberman acknowledges, “It was buried, and really difficult to use.”

DraftKings users, Liberman tells Yahoo Finance, frequently submitted feedback that the feature was clunky and left a lot to be desired.

A promo video for the new feature teases: “Want to run it all season long? You got it.” It may sound strange, at first, to hear the phrase “season long” in any marketing materials for DraftKings, which made its bones as a daily fantasy sports provider, offering a weekly (or more than weekly) alternative to traditional “season-long” fantasy sports, in which friends conduct a single draft at the beginning of the football season and keep that team for the length of the season.

But make no mistake: This is DraftKings dipping a toe into the season-long market. The structure is still “daily,” but the ability to create a league, and name it (as you would with a season-long league), and invite specific friends (as you would with season-long), and monitor a leaderboard that lasts all season (as happens with season-long), is all part of a foray into the much larger season-long market.

And FanDuel beat them to it, announcing the same kind of feature earlier this month. FanDuel’s is called Friends Mode, it was announced as part of a larger rebrand, and it gives users the ability to play against a single group of friends all season long.

DraftKings Leagues launch on Tuesday, while FanDuel Friend Mode does not launch until the NFL season begins.

FanDuel, in its announcement, did not shy away from the association with season-long fantasy, calling its new feature “a new way to play season-long fantasy.”

DraftKings is being a little more cagey. “I think ultimately we are trying to create a complementary product to season-long,” Liberman says. “I think the functionality and the providers in season-long are kind of ingrained. We want to be something that people also do, in addition to season-long. We want to expand on season-long, make it more fun, more social, but at the end of the day, people have their season-long leagues they’ve been doing for 20 years, they like the draft experience, the snake draft, and they’re going to keep doing that on other platforms. We’re not trying to compete with those.”

DraftKings offers more sports than its rival: 10 of them (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, golf, Nascar, mixed martial arts, soccer, e-sports, and Canadian football, which it added in June) compared to FanDuel’s four (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL). FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles has said FanDuel is “deeper” in the four sports it offers.

The timing of both companies announcing this feature is not accidental: The NFL season is about to start. It is the hottest time of year for new customer acquisition for the companies, which are both privately held “unicorns” valued at over $1 billion.

But as of the time of writing, halfway through the month of August, DraftKings and FanDuel cannot operate paid contests in the state of New York, which last NFL season had more daily fantasy players than any other state. All daily fantasy sports providers got a legal victory this month when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that protects the contests as legal, but they still cannot re-open for business in the state until they obtain licenses. They haven’t yet obtained them.

Yahoo, the distant No. 3 player in daily fantasy sports (DraftKings and FanDuel enjoy a combined 95% market share of the $2 billion business), does not yet have a friend-league feature. But each of these three companies has imitated each other over the course of the last year. For example, each one announced some form of protection for new players, where the service will flag experienced veterans. Yahoo called the new additions “Fair Play” while FanDuel rolled out a “Bill of Rights,” and DraftKings this month launched a Game Integrity & Ethics Team.