Fantasy prizes shrink as controversy grows
Is the fantasy sports bubble leaking? Player numbers and prize money were down on Sunday versus the prior week, says SportsLobby, a fantasy sports contests search engine.
“According to the data, it looks as if the sites are slightly reducing the size of the guaranteed prize pools,” SportsLobby boss David Copeland told The Post.
DraftKings prizes totaled $21.2 million on Sunday, versus $22.4 million on Oct. 11. Entries for its Sunday contest totaled 353,673, versus 395,742 for Oct. 11.
At rival FanDuel, prizes paid were cut in the past three weeks, says SportsLobby. This past Sunday’s prize money was $16.9 million, versus $17.1 million the week earlier and $17.9 million on Oct. 4. Yahoo’s fantasy sports games also saw a 10 percent decline in entries, SportLobby found.
The fantasy sports sites’ ads have exploded on mainstream TV this fall alongside the NFL season. As a category, fantasy sports has outstripped beer as the biggest sports advertiser, with the two main rivals spending more than $100 million in September and blanketing sports media.
But an inevitable backlash came in late September, when a tsunami of issues prompted probes by the Justice Department and the FTC and also by attorneys general in New York and in Massachusetts.
The State of Nevada has also said fantasy sports companies need a license to continue operating.
Meanwhile, the law firm hired by top industry player DraftKings to investigate allegations about whether employees had access to nonpublic information to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, exonerated its client on Monday.
“We are very pleased that the independent investigation by Greenberg Traurig has confirmed the findings of our internal review of this matter and our conclusion that there was no improper use of information by our employee,” Jason Robins, CEO of DraftKings, said in the statement.
“In fact, as the investigation also concluded, it was not even possible for nonpublic information to have been used improperly,” Robins added.