Dave Finocchio
Bleacher Report CEO Dave Finocchio speaks at the GeekWire Sports Tech Summit. (GeekWire photo/Kevin Lisota)

The fantasy football craze is over.

That’s what Bleacher Report CEO Dave Finocchio said at the GeekWire Sports Tech Summit in Seattle on Thursday during a fireside chat about the future of sports media.

“It’s not to say that young people aren’t playing commissioner-style fantasy games at all — it’s just that less of them are,” he said. “NFL fantasy probably peaked three, four, five years ago. It’s slowly dwindling.”

Finocchio, who helped launch the sports media giant more than a decade ago, said it’s tougher now for the younger generation to gather a big group of friends to play fantasy football together. That’s why companies like DraftKings and FanDuel have caught on with sports fans — particularly younger ones.

“One of the appeals of daily fantasy is that it provides more flexibility and more of a short-term experience,” he said.

Finocchio predicts that something will disrupt the fantasy football space, but he’s still unsure of what that might be. Legal sports betting in the U.S. could change the game, he said.

“That’s kind of what we’re all waiting for,” he said of legalized sports betting. “If that happened, then the sky is the limit. You can do all kinds of things.”

We’ll have more from Finocchio’s talk at the Sports Tech Summit, including his thoughts on the changing digital advertising industry, so stay tuned.

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