Fantasy Big Leagues: How Fantasy Sports are Scoring with Users

Between the return of professional football and the MLB playoffs, September was a busy month for sports fans. Sports websites attracted more than 87 million Americans and 36 million smartphone owners tapped into the action using a sports app.

Fantasy sports in particular have become big business since sprouting from a rotisserie, or owner simulation, game decades ago. The growth of this niche industry has also picked up momentum as technological advances in interfaces, devices and statistical data aggregation have allowed players a way to easily check scores, adjust rosters and trash talk from anywhere and on any device—that’s light years from having to hand-tabulate player stats in the years before the digital age.

During the second quarter of 2013, fantasy sports players were most likely to be male and between the ages 25-34 (49% and 72% more likely than the average U.S. internet user, respectively). Compared with the average adult online, fantasy sports players were also 21 percent more likely to be Asian-American, 12 percent more likely to have children and 7 percent more likely to make between $50,000 and $75,000.

So which sports sites and apps do fans draft when they’re looking to build their fantasy teams? Power rankings by Nielsen show that familiar names like ESPN and Yahoo! Sports are top picks among fantasy sports players.

Fantasy To-Go

Fantasy sports players are also taking their teams with them on the road, as more than 10 million Americans accessed fantasy football apps on their smartphones, up 15 percent from a year ago. Looking at the top fantasy football apps, Yahoo! and ESPN each had five million unique users, respectively, during September. Overall, fantasy football app users spent 2 hours 14 minutes per person, on average, using these smartphone apps during September 2013, and they opened them 27 times per person on average—that’s almost once a day.

What Items are in Fantasy Players’ Online Shopping Cart?

Believe it or not, sports aren’t the only thing consuming fantasy players’ time online. Just like any other consumer, they shop online for a variety of products and are more likely than the average adult U.S. internet user to have shopped online for things like movie tickets (84% more likely), credit cards (67% more likely) and beer (49% more likely).