Author: Brant Tedeschi

The year of 2013 is quickly coming to an end which means its time for another year-end post about the most popular website to host fantasy leagues.  As you may recall from last year, I wrote a blog post that compared 2011 to 2012. Feel free to give it a read if you haven’t already.

For those of you not familiar with FantasySP, we allow our users to sync their fantasy leagues in order to provide them with unique analysis and insight to help manage their teams and stay on top of player news.  Our fantasy tools will alert you of important player news, waiver trends, suggest waiver pickups, analyze trades, chart your teams performance over time, and offer start/sit suggestions.

This year I will be providing much of the same analysis in terms of the most popular fantasy hosts. This year we have over 10,000 fantasy leagues ranging from August 1st up until now and added support for two additional websites: Fleaflicker and MyFantasyLeague.  Also included in this blog post will be charts from the previous seasons of 2011 and 2012 so you can see how the market has changed over time.

Making Sense of the Numbers

CBS’ market share of fantasy football games has continued to erode over the past 3 years and now sits at 4.6%. For the first time since NFL.com fantasy launched, it has actually decreased to 1%.  ESPN continues to dominate the fantasy market and now sits at nearly 50% of the market share.

ESPN is the only fantasy host to gain market share 3 years in a row.  It also seems as though Yahoo may be making a rebound and for the first time has actually gained market share.

• NFL.com has gone from: 9.7% to 13% to 12.1%
• Yahoo has gone from: 37.7% to 32% to 32.5%
• ESPN has gone from: 43.7% to 45% to 49.7%
• CBS has gone from: 7.9% to 8% to 4.6%

Three Major Fantasy Sports Analyzed

For this final section, I think it would be interesting to see what it looks like when three major fantasy sports leagues are analyzed to see current market share.  This includes hockey, basketball, and football.  Unfortunately baseball cannot be accurately calculated since it is the off-season.

Not too surprisingly, things remained very much the same for most of the fantasy websites.  The only noticeable difference is that Yahoo is a popular choice for hockey and basketball players.

Full Disclosure & Wrap Up

FantasySP is not affiliated with any of these websites.  We do offer CBSSports apps to fantasy football leagues, which may skew the data slightly.  However, after adding basketball and hockey leagues into the mix, the numbers suggest the impact is minimal.

The continued popularity of daily fantasy games is something that we cannot factor into market share.  Therefore, this analysis should be considered to cover “traditional fantasy sports” games only.

Feel free to comment or email with any thoughts or concerns.

The next generation of waiver wire trends have arrived at FantasySP.  We have just released Waiver Wire Trends for the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB.  Many of you guys have seen waiver trends listed on several fantasy sites but we have our own unique spin that will give you an edge.

Before we get to ways our waiver wire trends differ, let’s first give a broad overview on what to expect.  As you can see to the right, we list the top 25 Waiver Trends for your favorite sport.  These just so happen to be the NFL.

By default, we list the weekly trends and compare the own percentage from this week to last week.  The player’s with the biggest own increase are listed first.  Nothing super interesting with that so far, and these player’s will mostly likely already be owned in your league.

Where things get interesting is when you sort by “Percent Change”.  This category will show you all players who have a significant weekly or daily jump in ownership.  Often times you will see players with a 2000% percent change.  These player’s will likely be available in the waiver wire and are guys that you should be researching.

A couple examples so far would be Peyton Hillis, Harry Douglas, Marvin Jones, and Kenny Stills.  Notice anything?  All of these players are either fantasy sleepers that came out of nowhere or are injury replacements that are instantly worth picking up.

Many of you probably read waiver wire suggestion columns on various fantasy sites, but our waiver trends page makes things much easier.  We list all player’s worth a possible pickup, and even grab relevant player news from around the web about each guy to let you know what the experts think.  FantasySP just cut waiver wire research time in half.

Our waiver trends are the first that I know of to allow you to sort by daily trends to easily pluck out fantasy sleepers.  This is extremely useful for fantasy football, but even more for hockey, basketball, and baseball.  There is also a graph of ownage history right next to each player so you can see what has been happening the past 30 days.

Finally, notice the Gray icons next to each player name?  Those indicate that those players are available in at least one of my synced fantasy leagues. Any of those links will take me directly to his player page on my hosted fantasy league.

As an added bonus, Yearly Plus members will have the waiver trends shown in place of banner ads on every page.

If you still aren’t impressed by these waiver wire trends, then wait another few weeks when we announce yet another feature.  All I can say is that it involves the Fantasy Assistant and waiver wire trends.