TeamRankings Renews Partnership With FanDuel

August 20, 2015 - by Tom Federico

I’m happy to announce that TeamRankings has renewed its partnership with FanDuel, the industry leader in daily and weekly fantasy sports contests for real money prizes.

As we head into the 2015 NFL season, we’re excited to continue to participate in the rapid growth of the daily fantasy sports market. After working with FanDuel for a year so far, we can say that they are a partner whose integrity, transparency and strategy we respect.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve done so far with FanDuel, and a quick overview of where things are heading in the upcoming weeks and months.

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The Early Days Of Daily Fantasy

It’s fair to say that the daily fantasy (“DFS”) industry, and FanDuel in particular, has taken sports fans and the fantasy sports world by storm over the last several years.

Being a sports analytics and data provider, we’re always excited by the development of a new and popular sports-based market — especially one that involves real money. Early on, though, we adopted a bit of a “wait and see” attitude toward the nascent daily fantasy space.

In short, we initially weren’t sure how sustainable the ongoing growth of the DFS industry was, whether legal challenges would plague the operators, or whether enough investor support existed to propel the customer acquisition efforts of the top companies like FanDuel.

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Initial FanDuel Partnership Last Year

Turns out we were wrong. Certainly not the first time, and it won’t be the last either. (For the record, I also thought the iPad would be a failure when it was first released…d’oh!)

By the summer of 2014, it had become clear that daily fantasy was sustaining momentum, with FanDuel posting impressive user gains and raising funding from big name investors. So we decided it was time to dip our toes in the DFS waters.

Our initial partnership with FanDuel centered around the 2014-15 NFL season, and included both promotional and user engagement efforts:

  • We offered a discount on our premium football packages to customers who signed up for FanDuel for the first time, and made a deposit into their FanDuel account.
  • We ran weekly private tournaments on FanDuel exclusively for TeamRankings users. These tournaments were also “rake-free” (all player entry fees were paid out as prize money to the winners) and had guaranteed prize pools, both of which presented significant value for participants.
  • We supplemented the contest prize pools by staking our own bonus prizes, including Amazon gift cards and free TeamRankings premium subscriptions. We also threw down a “Think you can beat the TR nerds?” challenge, and offered a nice price to the TR user who beat us most frequently in our private tourneys. Congrats again, rxgambler; here’s the final leaderboard for 2014.
  • We started playing in FanDuel NFL contests on our own, tracking our bankroll and doing some blogging about our strategies and experience.

We had no idea what to expect going in, and the results were encouraging. Our beloved TeamRankings users reacted well to the premium content discount offer, our private contests drew several hundred entries each week, and we learned a lot from playing on FanDuel and discussing our experiences.

In fact, by the time he stopped doing it after Week 8 because of competing priorities (if only we could just forget about running the TR site and research DFS all day…), our own David Hess had turned his $250 initial FanDuel bankroll into $524.

That was an 110% return on capital in just 8 weeks.

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Upping The Ante In 2015

Last season was a good start, but it really just served to open our eyes to what’s possible for TeamRankings and FanDuel working together.

This year, fresh off the heels of FanDuel’s $275 million funding round in July, we’re ramping up plans to offer TeamRankings users all sorts of great new stuff.

Here’s a brief teaser of what’s in store:

  • A 10-week private NFL contest with MUCH bigger bonus prizes
  • More strategy content to help you succeed on FanDuel
  • Bigger TeamRankings discount offers for new FanDuel players
  • A brand new March Madness focused private contest
  • New FanDuel-related data and features on TeamRankings.com

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we announce more details. It’s going to be an action-packed NFL season with TeamRankings and FanDuel!

If you have any requests or questions regarding FanDuel, just let us know in the comments below.