Author: Brant Tedeschi

Who to start is the one question that plagues many fantasy owners on a weekly basis.  Picking the wrong guy can cost you a fantasy victory and potentially, your season.  There are various fantasy experts to ask, fantasy rankings to analyze, tools to purchase, and tv shows to watch.  So what’s the best way to figure out who to start?

As you might imagine, I get many emails asking for fantasy advice and it’s impossible for me to respond to everyone.  Each time I am asked who to start I tend to give the same response:  Do your research.

I am not a huge fan of fantasy experts (eek, that sounds bad).  What I meant to say is that fantasy experts can be wrong too.  Do not focus on fantasy point predictions each week.  After all, who knew A.J. Green would be the leading wide receiver this season with Andy Dalton as a solid fantasy quarterback?  Do your research means to read up on as much news as possible about your players and the team.  If your go-to starting running back or quarterback is in a slump, then perhaps it’s time to pull the trigger and start your backup. Tough start/sit decisions are what makes fantasy football fun.  When Matthew Stafford has a tough match-up, you better have a contingency plan.

There may be those of you who base your start/sit decision on expert rankings, or aggregated rankings, or fantasy tools with start/sit advice.  On the surface those may sound pretty appealing.  However, does learning that Chris Johnson has an average rank of 5.1 or that Matt Forte has an average rank of 4.6 help you?  Do you really want to base your start decision on a fantasy tool instead of your own gut instinct?  I think these options are good for first year players, but seasoned veterans should know better.

The best way to decide who to start is to do your research.  There is a reason why FantasySP collects and organizes news the way it does.  The reason is because that is the key to success.  Reading a fantasy update at ESPN.com or CBS is just one summarized opinion.  I suggest going a step further.  Read up on the news from beat reporters like Susan Slusser, and make sure to read Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback.  These articles have nuggets that you just can’t find anywhere else.   FantasySP helps get you to where you need to go.

Sometimes, even when you do your research and pick the right guy for all the right reasons the other guy has a great week for all the wrong reasons.  You know what I call that?  Fantasy football.  Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

One of the cool things about running FantasySP is the unique fantasy sports data that gets collected.  As you know, our users can sync their fantasy leagues into FantasySP to gain access to tools such as the Fantasy Assistant.  We support the big names: Yahoo!, ESPN, CBSSports, NFL.com, and MLB.com along with a few of the smaller websites.  So let’s find out which websites are the most popular among fantasy football players!

Before we answer that, let’s take a step back and look at the latest available numbers of fantasy players. It is widely known that the fantasy sports industry is still growing. The latest estimate is 32 million players from Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) on June of 2011.

For the sake of keeping things simple, we are going to use 32 million as our base point for the total amount of fantasy football players.  The actual number could be slightly lower (because that 32 million accounts for more than just football) or higher today.

Calculating the Website Breakdowns

To make these calculations I am going to use FantasySP sync data of over 2,000 fantasy football leagues since August 1st 2012 up until now.  I will then figure out a percentage of the pie each fantasy site gets of that 2,000.  Those percentages will then be plugged into the bigger picture of 32 million total players.  As an added bonus I will compare the same time period to 2011 to figure out how the landscape has changed, if at all.

If my data is accurate then we should see very similar numbers from year to year.  First, let’s start with 2011.

2011 Fantasy Football Breakdown

According to the data above: ESPN and Yahoo! dominate the fantasy football game and own 82% of the market.  Again, keep in mind that these numbers are just for fantasy football.  Personally, I am not shocked to see these numbers.   I have been seeing ESPN and Yahoo! league syncing consistently ahead of the other websites for several years now.  Perhaps the most surprising number is how close CBSSports and NFL.com are in terms of total football users.  After all, NFL.com just recently came onto the scene 3 years ago.

Perhaps things will change slightly for 2012?

2012 Fantasy Football Breakdown

In 2012, ESPN continues to dominate and slightly added to their lead.  Yahoo! lost 6% of the market, meanwhile NFL.com gained 4%.  CBSSports remained consistent at 8%.

Two things worth mentioning. 1) Yahoo! offers an API to sync fantasy leagues and authenticate users. Despite that advantage, they still end up in second place.  2) CBSSport’s opened their own app store, which could have impacted their market share.  Especially considering the fact that FantasySP has three apps in the store.

Making Sense of the Numbers

The numbers in this post are my best estimates as to the number of fantasy football players across the major fantasy hosting websites.  I strongly believe that independent analysis of the fantasy sports industry is extremely useful to both insiders and outsiders.  I believe other sites that offer fantasy syncing will show similar numbers to back up my estimates.  (Feel free to contact me and I will update this post to reflect your findings.)

It is safe to assume that ALL websites actually gained fantasy football players year over year because the industry is still growing.  NFL.com is on pace to own a larger portion of the market as each season passes.  This is due to the fact the NFL owns it and because they are putting out a solid product that gets improvements each season.  If you haven’t tried the NFL.com product, then you are truly missing out on something special.

One thing is clear though, the industry is changing and these numbers provide some insights as to what is happening.   Three to five years ago daily fantasy games were not a big part of the industry and NFL.com fantasy games did not even exist.

I wonder where the next three to five years will take us?

Welcome to our new featured section called Fantasy Points.  The idea for this section has been kicked around for awhile, and I am really excited to officially launch this today!  To start things out you’ll see articles by Brant Tedeschi.  Although you may find articles from other writers in the very near future.

As you probably know by now, I created FantasySP roughly four years ago.  The goal back then was to find a better way to stay on top of my player news.  Since then a lot of hard work has been put into FantasySP and it has grown into something bigger than I could have imagined.    The response from the users has been incredible, and I look forward to see where FantasySP goes next.

Just in the past year the Fantasy Assistant and Player Alerts have been released.  Arguably the two best features of the site and two of the best tools in the entire fantasy industry.

Just this past summer, FantasySP entered the CBSSports fantasy app store.  For the first time I am able to offer the Fantasy Assistant, Player Trends+, and our Trade Analyzer to a larger audience.

Needless to say, it’s been a busy year!  Stay tuned because I will go more in depth on these topics and more in the coming weeks.