Fantasy sports betting startup PicksPal has taken $3 million Series C in a round that included previous investors Bay Partners and Canaan Partners.
PicksPal is a free sports site where people bet on upcoming games, but without the use of real money. Sports covered include boxing, NFL football, pro football, bass fishing, ultimate fighting, basketball and baseball with the site making money via advertising. PicksPal launched a related site “PicksPop” in January that offers fantasy betting on celebrity news and also offers a paid “Genius Picks” service that provides betting tips based on the top 30 users of PicksPal.
PicksPal is based in Silicon Valley and had previously raised $6 million.
(via PEHub)
In other news, sputnick’s start-up, which gets more traffic than PicksPal (or at least used to get more traffic than PicksPal before this post on TechCrunch), has received $0.00 in funding today, which is exactly the same as it received yesterday, and the day before that.
However, sputnick acknowledges that the 10 Commandments say “Thow shalt not covet thy neighbors angel round, nor his VC, nor his exposure on exposure on TechCrunch” and after posting this comment sputnick will go back to work as if nothing has happened.
This is interesting news, as it hints at the fact that gaming of this nature strikes a popular chord among common Internet users.
The thing that gets me, though, is that the Pickspal interface and the depth of their gaming is decidedly poor. Their NFL picks game (and associated Facebook application), for instance, doesn’t even involve the use of spreads, something that has been common on sites like Yahoo! Sports and cbs.sportsline.com for years.
I believe there’s a lot of wiggle room in this market, and it’s only a matter of time until someone with the appropriate resources teams up with an agile development team and blows Pickspal out of the water.
Of course, maybe Pickspal can put that $3M to good use by overhauling what they’ve got and creating a truly remarkable gaming platform.
They spent $6MM developing that garbage?!? Wow.
The VC’s understand the value of eyeballs. Providing this type of sports team picking service has a lot of entertainment value, and sports fans are addicts to boot.
[offers a paid “Genius Picks” service that provides betting tips based on the top 30 users of PicksPal.]
i tried that site out not too long ago… it seemed like it was filled with a bunch of kids so i wonder who’s buying their picks.
[The thing that gets me, though, is that the Pickspal interface and the depth of their gaming is decidedly poor. Their NFL picks game (and associated Facebook. application), for instance, doesn’t even involve the use of spreads,]
agreed. the overall lack of authenticity is what probably turned me off the most. i just registered at nbx.com, a similar site, at the beginning of the NFL season and have been having a blast competing against some of my buddies that are hardcore sports fans.
bottom line is the fact that pickspal could raise $9M tells you that someone out there believes that the concept of fantasy sports betting is gonna take off one day.
That’s a good amount of VC funding, what will be the form of monetization? Ads? As for the rest, it’s like fantasy football except extended to a varied set of popular sports… This is a great idea but how much traffic is the goal and how will the site be making money? AdSense, ads from ValueClick, etc.? affiliate programs? lead generation? merchandise sales based on the user behavior?
Good idea on this and I do enjoy the interface of PicksPal…nice and clean
All you have to do to get a few million is think up some cutsey name!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Guys,
Check out the recently launched OddsBreakers.com a true social network for sports enthusiasts which offer a number of contests with REAL prizes that people can win. They offer a plethora of matchup tools and the interface is very easy to use. They do implement various spreads on all of their games and in their groups area all users can share their picks. I like this site because of it’s nice interface and easy navigation.
Another site worth checking out is http://www.tvbigboard.com
They take a slightly different angle = putting betting odds on tvshows. The navigation is pretty clean and easy, and they just launched a league play area that seems like a lot of fun. This site has been around for awhile now, but it doesn’t look like they have any significant funding.
Neither Pickpals, or either of sites #8 & #9 mentioned are applications. They are simply a bunch of crap thrown on a page with content and functionality jumbled together. Could any of you imagine trying to use a desktop application that had a similar flow to this garbage? I’m embarrassed for all three of those sites–and especially Pickpals given they have raised $9M already and still have a crappy product.
Hey “Who Cares,” who mentioned anything about “applications”? We are talking about consumer games based on betting “for free.” There’s apparently a large market for this idea, but PicksPal just doesn’t seem to have a sustainable format – will likely have to be something that is advertiser-supported – not sure if there’s a strong enough market for a paid-for product, the only real revenue generator for PP.
Hey “Someone must be frustrated about not receiving funding” in case you didn’t get the memo the future of the web is real applications, regardless of the vertical.