Draftkings Season Long Leagues
DraftKings is getting into the season-long fantasy sports business. Kind of.
DraftKings' Jonathan Bales shares his strategies when approaching season-long and one-week fantasy football league contests. As in season-long leagues, consistency is also a major component of. DraftKings is one our top choices as a top daily fantasy site for 2018. DraftKings is poised to pay out over $1 Billion in 2020. That dollar amount is mind-blowing and gives players ample opportunity to win a ton of cash prizes. In the first week of last NFL season, DraftKings made four people millionaires. And 11 days after DraftKings rolled out its friend leagues, Yahoo, on August 23, announced the “Yahoo Cup,” a season-long contest where users can compete for weekly cash prizes all season. DraftKings takes the model of season-long fantasy sports and compresses the time-frame. Rather than choose a team for an entire season, you can create a team based on, say, all the baseball games.
DraftKings ‘Leagues’
The daily fantasy sports operator announced a new feature for its users called “Leagues” that went live on Tuesday, as daily fantasy football gears up in September.
The idea: Allow DraftKings users to get a group of people together to create and play private DFS contests exclusive to the invitees. DraftKings Leagues has a leaderboard function, so you can see how you fare against other players over time.
While you could create private contests with friends or other DraftKings users previously, that functionality was a one-off with no carry-over.
The idea behind Leagues
“We’ve heard a lot of customer feedback, really since we started DraftKings, saying ‘It’s a really cool product, I love daily fantasy, I love what you offer, but it’s really hard to play with friends,’ ” COO and co-founder Paul Liberman told Legal Sports Report. “It took some time to think about how we were going to build it, what does it need. ”
Despite sharing some commonalities with seasonlong fantasy, Liberman says the Leagues product is not meant to compete with its forerunner, but to be complementary to DraftKings’ over-arching product.
“The goal was to create almost a private version of DraftKings, for you and your friends and your colleagues,” Liberman said. “And to make it easier to smack talk amongst a small group.”
Inside DraftKings’ new feature
The Leagues functionality feels a lot like DFS’ seasonlong cousin, giving the league “commissioner” and its players a great deal of freedom in how it works:
- Leagues are not necessarily for single sports, although they can be. You can play and track any of the various sports DraftKings offers in the same league.
- Contests are fully customizable, and can be free or paid entry. The user experience within Leagues is similar to the existing DraftKings lobby, as far as creating and entering contests.
- Anyone within the league can choose to compete in an individual contest or not. Contests are available to enter for anyone who is in the league.
- Recurring contest mode allows a league to run the same contest week after week, without having to set it up again.
- Players can be invited to a DraftKings league via text, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.
You can watch a video here that breaks down Leagues.
The social DFS game
“Leagues” is a far more social iteration of DFS that has not always been the focus of the industry in its run-up over the past several years, as bigger and bigger prize pools were often emphasized.
But between DraftKings Leagues and FanDuel’s plan to roll out an offering called “Friends mode” that will also go live before NFL season, 2016 looks to be much different. (DraftKings also announced the creation of a “Game Integrity Unit” last week)
“It’s a starting point as both a product and as a technology, for us to continue building on those strong social roots [in fantasy sports], as we see daily fantasy sports continue to evolve,” Liberman said.
Obviously, Leagues is not designed to move the needle immediately in terms of revenue for DraftKings. But it is the continuation of an industry pivot that some might argue is overdue: Emphasizing the social nature of fantasy sports that allowed the seasonlong industry to grow organically.
DraftKings will see how successful it can be in porting that concept to the DFS product during the upcoming NFL season.
The Drone Racing League (DRL) has announced its latest partnership with sports betting company DraftKings to bring betting to the world of drone racing. The partnership will see DraftKings become the official sports betting partner of DRL.
The partnership will see fans now getting the chance to place bets on their favorite pilots in hopes of getting a little cash in return if they win.
If you live in Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Tennessee, or West Virginia, you can bet on the Drone Racing League. Work is being done to legalize drone racing betting in other states around the country.
Leading up to the 2020 DRL championship season’s final races, which kicks off January 9, the two companies will host pre-flight shows, where expert sports bettors and elite drone pilots will educate fans on how to participate. This also includes a show beginning tonight at 7 p.m. ET.
DRL president Rachel Jacobson said:
The sky is now the limit for DRL fans to get skin in the game, and we’re thrilled to partner with DraftKings to transform our high-speed race competition into the ultimate sport to bet on. The opportunity for us to elevate our engagement through all forms of gaming and gambling will only increase as mobile betting becomes more adopted across the country.
As a part of the partnership, DraftKings will get exclusive rights to marketing materials. This means its logo can be displayed on race gates, drone stands, and other branded areas you can see during a race. Pre-race wagers and in-race bets will be available for fans wanting to bet on the fast-paced sport.
If you use DraftKings, you might have already seen drone racing introduced onto the platform. This was a free-to-play version to see how fans would react. The 2020 DRL season saw an average of 30% more entries compared to other new sports, totaling 150,000 entries to date.
Ezra Kucharz, chief business officer of DraftKings, followed up with:
DRL is scaling their business as fast as their drone races, and we’re excited to be flying with them given DRL’s thrilling, innovative racing events are perfect for the customized wagering offerings we can create. Our expertise in sports betting combined with DRL’s stats-packed competition will make this a fun and seamless opportunity to engage their avid audience along with tech-savvy, adrenaline-loving sports fans.
Draftkings Season Long Leagues Rankings
Photo: Drone Racing League (DRL)
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links.More.
Draftkings Fantasy League
Subscribe to DroneDJ on YouTube for exclusive videos