The Ultimate Football Network tries to harness the popularity of fantasy football and turn it into a worthwhile business. The only problem is that the company isn’t quite prepared to do that —yet. But it has a gameplan.
As football season kicks into gear, millions of fantasy players from all over the United States are joining leagues and trying to find the right players each week. But as Ultimate Football Network explains, that’s not as easy as those users might think. The company claims that finding up-to-date information about players is becoming increasingly difficult and fantasy players aren’t prepared as they should be each week.
Trying to solve that problem, Ultimate Football Network collects news from the Web and, much like Digg, lets users vote on each story based on the quality of the information contained in the stories. If the information is useful, users can vote it up, while those that are not as useful can be voted down and will sink to the bottom of the page as the votes start piling up.
But perhaps the most useful feature of Ultimate Football Network is that the site lets you import your fantasy football team from Yahoo and ESPN. It also lets you modify your starters and change your lineup of players without needing to access the respective fantasy service.
It’s that feature that Ultimate Football Network claims will make it profitable. Although it’s not available yet, the company said that by next year’s fantasy football season, it will monitor all the users and see how well they manage their teams (it will establish an ad-hoc points system to track that). Based off that information, Ultimate Football Network will establish an IQ system that will show the best fantasy players. It will then anonymously collect all the team adjustments those users make and find the most common moves among them to create expert data that can be purchased for a monthly fee by users that need some help.
So far, there is no pricing information available and the specifics of the model aren’t fully worked out, but the company claims it will be in place by next year’s fantasy football season.
Even though Yammer took the top prize at TechCrunch50, Loren Feldman at 1938 Media has another take: he thinks Ultimate Football Network should have won it all.
The idea is pretty basic and actually already exists.
I am not seeing a profitable business model and how they plan to make money – advertising? The overwhelming majority of fantasy players are in free leagues now and wouldn’t be willing to plunk down money for analytics.
Johnny,
As Don noted, the business model will be more evident next year in the form of premium services and perhaps some other things we are working on. As for the overwhelming majority of users being in free leagues, that’s certainly true but a large percentage do purchase premium content and services related to fantasy football. All those preseason draft guides you see on the magazine racks at bookstores are a good example.
Thanks for your interest.
Jonathan Joseph
Founder and Head Coach, UFN
Jonathan,
I am hoping your venture is going to work out, but I disagree with your example of buying a magazine from the bookstore is the same as paying for “premium content online”. The vast majority of consumers will not pay for online content. That is why they are at their local Barnes and Nobles and only playing for free on sites like CBS, Yahoo (where I play), and ESPN. If you can find a way for me to buy a Fantasy Football draft magazine that has some type of code within it, which will pay for my season’s “premium content”, I definitely would purchase that over another magazine (as long as it was no more than 5 dollars more). I think if you can get a deal with a reputable magazine to help sell you subscriptions that you could really make a dent in this multi-million dollar industry. I guess after you conquer football, then you could move to basketball, and baseball too.
Sounds like a great idea. I know Yahoo always offers up to date information on players but it’s not always the best, and it’s strictly through Yahoo. Getting multiple sources of information can help you choose what is more credible and useful. Do you know if they plan on developing sister companies for other sports?
Craig
http://www.budgetpulse.com
In Argentina the biggest newspaper is doing the same, with 1.5 million registered users. Making lot of money on sponsors and increasing demand for it’s newspaper. Oh, don’t forget about Brand Experience.
The website, in spanish, is this:
http://www.grandt.com.ar
Although I am not into fantasy games and all I tried the Second Life just to see what it is… and honestly it can be addictive !!! With time as the technology advances I see more and more people getting involved in fantasy games and with real or virtual world currency transactions you can buy, sell and do what we all do in real life.
I gotta friend who spend 8-12 hours flying trans-atlantic flights… and no he is not a pilot, he flies in the MS simulator.
This is not your culture, and you do not get it. Period. Stick with execution and save yourself the trouble of trying to understand US consumer trends. Some things require ‘insiders’ and because of the majority of US ignorance, you are, and always will be, an ‘outsider’.
@RahulC
What “angry andy” meant to say is that fantasy football is not at all like a fantasy game like World of Warcraft and he is disgusted with your ignorance of the difference. I am not disgusted, however.
The problem with this site is that a digg-style news would not work in a competitive environment. Fantasy Football players don’t necessarily want to share top news about players. They want to keep that information to themselves in order to beat other players. In addition, a popularity rank is not interesting in the fantasy sports aspect. Fantasy players want breaking news. If a player is injured or a new backup is going to play, people want to be the first to find out that news so they can make that pickup in their league. Waiting for other people to report that news defeats that purpose.
The feature to change your roster from one site vs the competitor sites has a clumsy interface and doesn’t work. In addition, the fantasy sites themselves already have the information on what players other people are starting on their leagues and display that for free. The only thing this would give you is a provider independent grouping of fantasy players (across ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, etc) to rank players. I also don’t see any features that can quantitatively assess an athlete’s performance after the game has completed or quantitatively assess fantasy players to rank them against each other.
Dale,
The point of the Digg-like voting is for the breaking news about injuries or backups to surface quickly. And because we are source agnostic, we include links to fan message boards and individual blogs. Where do you think the news breaks first? On fan message boards or in traditional media?
We’re going to continue to improve our user interface and the feature does work.
Jonathan Joseph
Founder and Head Coach, UFN
Sports news breaks in traditional media. Fans do not have access to locker rooms and coaches the same way the media does in the NFL and all professional sports. Fan message boards only give reactions to the news once it breaks on local newspaper sites or sites like ESPN or Yahoo.
pretty much nailed it
the less your competitors know the better
I wouldn’t know because sports is just some male form of soap opera. But if there is an opportunity, I wish Jonathan and his group all the best!
Johnny Rocks nails it. Been done, not that hard to do, no money in it.
In my experience, the money is in providing live content while the games are on.
UFN needs to do a little more with the site…opensports.com good example of what to do!
This site and concept is amazing! I’m an avid football fan and love this.
On the business end, a lot of valley guys won’t get this because this has HUGE mainstream appeal. This isn’t a dinky web 2.0 app, this is a real business and a real market.
This is a great concept that will be dominant once all the product’s features are built out. There may not be that many fantasy football among the tech elite, but for mainstream America, it’s huge and fans will pay for better content that improves their teams.
head coach,
How is it different than what screaming sports is doing?
It occurs to me that there see two value propositions here propositions here and the one not being discussed is the one with potential. True, offering an aggrgated source of news is a benefit to the casual fan, but isn’t all that novel. The real value in fantasy information comes from the analysis offered by sites that dig in to the stories as they relate to fantaft. The more likely success here lies in a fagnosed where you can monitor all of your leagues. Integrating yahoo, CBS, and my fantasy league in to one place would be a secuce folks might pay for. Particularly if the app had a strong mobile rendering so you could check on your teams while sitting at the bar watching games. Good luck to the founders. (disclaimer: I work for footballguys.com)
Nice…no spell check on their front page! I’ll pass….”find the hottest news about wichever teams”
Jonathan, this is genius. People will pay for any leg up they can get and if you can give them stats that other sites aren’t even thinking about (how/why a move was good vs. bad) and how they stack up against all other FF players (stoke the ego) you’ll be profitable in no time. Love it!
I like the concept. We built a Digg for fantasy football site last year (http://www.ffcollective.com) that differentiates itself by allowing the members to predict player performance each week. So they are trying to take the give us your information up front and we’ll provide value by dissecting it from everybody. It could be the key, or they may struggle to get anybody to take the time to manage their league/players from a 3rd party site.
As a diehard fantasy fan, I’m cheering everybody on because I simply want to see innovation and progress.
John
Fantasy Football Collective
The only reason this post exists is because of Loren from 1938Media.Com it was his pick @ the TechCrunch50.. Mike is a dork!!!
and Mike do explain that photo of you and Loren!!! otherwise Loren is going to explain it and give his spin on it..And we all know that is what you want ..right??
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