Fantasy Sports
Can we call this the phenomenon of the century? I think it would be safe to do so. Across the world, the popularity of fantasy sports has gone through the roof. It started with baseball and football, but over the years many more sports have been added. Tennis is one of the most recent ones to be added, which is strange because it’s such a popular sport.
Social media and sports
If you were to ask the experts or any fantasy sports player, they all say the same thing. The reason fantasy sports were able to grow as rapidly as they did, is because of social media. That’s easy to explain by the simple fact that people love talking about sports. Whether that’s at home with family, online or at the office. The interactive and competitive element of fantasy sports has made it an ideal topic of conversation.
DFS
Especially when fantasy sports first started out, and DFS wasn’t a thing yet, it was something that friends compete in. And it still is now. But a lot of the season-long leagues have made a place for DFS. That means ‘Daily fantasy sports’. These games are essentially the same as season-long ones, the obvious difference being that they’re daily. The advantage of that is that it’s fast-paced, you know if you won or not and that makes it more attractive for some people.
FanDuel and DraftKings
To me, it’s kind of strange that something so popular as fantasy sports you can only play at two main sites. Of course, there are some more players in the game, but when we look at the variety and options, these 2 far exceed others. They’ve built something close to a monopoly, but players seem to be satisfied with their return on investment so they keep coming back. A few ways these smart companies have leveraged social media to generate attention is through polls, sharing memes, all of which they know sports fans would love to share on their page. I know that might sound simplistic, but sports is one of the few topics that people can’t stop talking about. Naturally, that makes social media a great alley.
Fantasy tennis
Unlike the popularity of tennis tournaments in real-life, the fantasy tennis version has not been taken off as explosive as expected. We don’t know why. Perhaps the people that watch tennis don’t care so much about fantasy sports. Or maybe the format of fantasy tennis just is quite different than fantasy sports like baseball or football. Both of these are team sports, which make the entire process of the draft and line-up of a completely different nature. However, with the popularity of the Grand Slam tournaments, I’m sure that in the near future the fantasy tennis part of it will gain more traction.