For the first time this NFL season, total spending and participation from consumers on daily fantasy sports sites decreased week-over-week.
SuperLobby, a U.K.-based research firm that tracks spending on daily fantasy sports sites, reported today that both DraftKings and FanDuel “experienced a significant reduction in player numbers and total entry fees in” on Sunday when compared to the week prior for NFL contests.
DraftKings posted 3.76 million guaranteed prize pool entries this past Sunday versus 4.14 million the week prior and saw total entry fees drop from $25.05 million to $22.86 million. FanDuel, meanwhile, had 3.27 million entries this past Sunday versus 3.38 million the week prior, and saw total entry fees drop from $20.58 million to $19.93 million.
“After last week’s astonishing NFL GPP figures, the daily fantasy sports industry experienced a reality check yesterday,” SuperLobby CEO David Copeland said in a statement.
Copeland told GeekWire that his site gets its data from a “combination of scraping and APIs.”
“We focus on the guaranteed prize pool numbers and have been told we are within 0.3 percent by 1 of the leading operators,” he said.
SuperLobby only tracks information related to GPP (guaranteed prize pools) and does not include data from cash games. However, FanDuel told SuperLobby this week that it reeled in $32 million from total overall entry fees, which means that GPP accounts for about 40 percent of its total revenue.
It is worth noting that both sites experienced record participation last week, despite all the attention on a controversy related to allegations of “insider trading” after a DraftKings employee released internal data earlier this month and won $350,000 in a FanDuel contest that same week.
However, it will be interesting to see if participation continues to decrease next week given how more and more regulators are scrutinizing these sites. Last week, the Nevada Gaming Control Board ruled that daily fantasy sports sites are considered gambling and ordered the companies to stop operating until they receive state gambling licenses. But the New York Times reported on Sunday that DraftKings continued to operate in the state.
In addition, The Wall Street Journal reported las week that federal investigators were investigating how DraftKings and FanDuel conduct business and determining whether they should fall into the “gambling” category. The Washington Post noted last month that a ranking member of the Energy and Commerce requested a hearing to discuss “how participation in fantasy sports differs from gambling, as well as the relationship between professional leagues, teams, and players and the fantasy leagues.”
Copeland added that DraftKings, FanDuel, and Yahoo — which, according to SuperLobby data, earned the third-highest revenue of daily fantasy sports sites this past week — have “already chopped the guarantees of their headline contests next weekend.”
DraftKings is also spending less on TV advertising, as the site dropped out of iSpot.tv’s most recent list of top 10 TV ad spenders after ranking No. 1 last month. FanDuel still ranks No. 8, with an estimated $11 million spent on the past seven days.
