According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, there were 41.5 million fantasy sports users in 2014, with the favorite being fantasy football. Recently, we have seen the emergence of daily, or in the case of fantasy Football, weekly fantasy games. Two sites have emerged as the industry leaders for this: DraftKings and FanDuel.
The NHL has announced a partnership with DraftKings, making them the sole provider of Daily Fantasy Sports Games for the league.
Christopher Golier, NHL’s Vice President of Mobile Marketing and Strateg, believes that daily games will help the average fan to watch more games.
“We did have a predictive game for the past few seasons, tied to watching the big screen, and noticed that the average fan who was playing stayed around and watched the game 5-10 minutes longer. We think the daily mechanism really works. The average season-long fantasy fan is 36-50 years old. Daily attracts a much younger digital native.”
As per their agreement, DraftKings now has the exclusive right to NHL owned intellectual property, and will be featured on all of the NHL’s media platforms. Additionally, DraftKings will sponsor daily previews on NHL.com, NHL Mobile, and on some programing on NHL Network.
DraftKings and the NHL’s partnership will see intriguing opportunities for fans as well. Participants in these daily fantasy games will have the opportunity to win trips to some of the NHL’s premier events like the Winter Classic, Heritage Classic, and Stadium Series.
DraftKings has similar partnerships with other organizations, notably MLB. They believe that these partnerships are extremely beneficial for their organization.
“In general, the leagues make sense for us to align ourselves with, because they have the ability to speak to their fans and get them to play daily fantasy. The uniqueness is the money-cant-buy experiences that users can win,” said Jeremy Elbaum, Vice President of Business Development at DraftKings.
We at SportTechie look forward to hearing about the impact this new deal will have on fantasy hockey.