Darren Herman

Every so often, I like to write posts on this blog that list potential new business opportunities.  Some of these opportunities in the the past have included mobile phone wipes, virtual world real-estate agents, virtual good trading platforms, amongst others.

I was first exposed to fantasy sports back in the 90s with the online Small World games with buddies from highschool (one of them finished 53rd in the world out of 500,000+ players).  From there, it progressed to SIM Hockey (played in a league for 4 years and NEVER met the people I actually played with) and recently, to the ESPN and Yahoo! hosted fantasy games (NFL).

It’s amazing to see how much time and effort people put into fantasy sports.  Using myself as an example, I spent $39.99 on Draft Analyzer, $14.99 on RotoWorld subscription, and $7.99 on a fantasy football magazine prior to the season starting.  The reason why I spent $62.97 on all of this is because I want to see just how much help the addition of in-depth stats and analysis help in this sport.

I believe there is an opportunity to have a beautifully designed hardcore fantasy football league outside of ESPN and Yahoo!.  In any industry, there are different tiers of competition and I believe that ESPN/Yahoo! in their current form are very mainstream.  If someone was to come out with a league platform that was beautifully designed and geared for extremely hardcore fans (instead of locking up rosters for the week, change them quarterly for example), they could potentially capture a piece of the market.  While the market that they may capture isn’t as large as the mainstream, it may be extremely lucrative based on expenditures of the participants.

There is also a great opportunity around statistics – most notably, visual statistics.

I’m interested in watching how this market plays out and would love to have some sideline conversations.