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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Sports Brands and the Social Media Cash Cow  comes to making that fantasy a reality on the social networks, it is a different ball game. Startup Watercooler Inc. has been dominating fantasy league sports on Facebook all year, culminating with an app around March Madness that had over 1.7 million users. The company is set to reprise that win with the release of two football fantasy league titles this month. FanSection Fantasy Football 2009 is already on the Facebook app platform with a prominent sponsorship from Coors Light. The company’s standing in the social media world was great enough to convince former rival CBS Sports to partner in on the new football apps and provide the news and updates to the FanSection app. “The big sports media brands have not made much of a splash on Facebook,” says vp of marketing for Watercooler, Bryan Bennett. And yet the Facebook gaming field quickly became a huge platform where companies like Bennett’s now devote much of their business. And like the fantasy sports models on other Web platforms, the social media application model is one type of digital content that clearly makes money. According to Bennett, Facebook has become the de facto Internet platform for many users who are younger than the demographic that favors other fantasy leagues on other sites. A Facebook iteration of fantasy contests isn’t even in direct competition with the sports games offered by media brands like ESPN and SportingNews. “We don’t have to replace existing games. The average number of fantasy leagues played per player is 2.5 to 3. They are willing to play in multiple games, so we don’t have to be the primary choice. It is a hurdle to get someone to stop playing on ESPN if they have been there for 10 years, but we can be their second league.” The social graph adds unique qualities to fantasy sports like players “talking smack” to one another in public and in view of all their other contacts. Fantasy sports is all about bragging rights, and social networks let players announce their smart moves and key wins more effectively than any other platform. Facebook doesn’t just offer another platform for content, but it offers a platform with a different format. Social media also adds some interesting new revenue models. The football league is free for standard use and an extra $4.95 a month for special features that include live scoring that lets the players see the impact of the current Sunday’s games on his players’ stats. In the upcoming second football title, players will use the virtual currency model that is increasingly popular in social networking. Users pay real money up front for virtual coinage that they can spend in the game world. Players can also earn these coins by participating in surveys and other market research. Facebook has created a massive economy that a host of new entrepreneurs (but few traditional media companies) have learned to exploit. While the rest of the industry wrings its hands over making consumers pay for their content, an entire eco-system has evolved under their noses where people pay eagerly to use the content they really care about. And this is content that sponsors are willing to pay for as well. Clients are spending "in the hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands," for the kinds of integrated sponsorship Coors Light has in the current FanSection football app. But this time next year, Bennett expects that the virtual goods model could easily eclipse the ad revenues. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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