Tuesday October 21,2014 : PUTTING THE FANTASY SPORTS PHENOMENON INTO PERSPECTIVE
An interesting look at the daily fantasy sports boom, and how it relates to online gambling in New Jersey.
The recent upsurge in fantasy sports news coverage – mainly focused on the burgeoning daily fantasy sports phenomenon – has prompted the information site Online Poker Report to carry out some research….with interesting results.
Like most of us, OPR expected the research to show that daily fantasy sports is outpacing online gambling revenues, particularly when compared with so far disappointing results from jurisdictions like New Jersey.
The information site points out that the daily fantasy sports sector is accepted by the major sports leagues; is heavily marketed; has good payment structures that include PayPal; is a subset of traditional fantasy sports betting; and is legal in over 40 US states, giving it a major advantage over intrastate online gambling in New Jersey.
However, the statistics indicate the contrary, with New Jersey online gambling daily stats well ahead of those from fantasy sports daily action…almost double, in fact.
That's remarkable, considering that the daily fantasy sports stats are for that entire industry.
To arrive at its conclusions, OPR took into account actual revenue reported by NJ online casinos and poker sites through September this year, balanced by publicly available revenue information from FanDuel through September and projections from Eilers Research and OPR.
Whilst accepting that it may be comparing apples with oranges and is open to correction, the OPR assessment nevertheless makes for interesting reading, suggesting that daily revenues from New Jersey online poker and casino combined are around $130,000, compared with daily fantasy sports revenues a little short of $80,000.